Wine and Society

Dionysos: God of wine
Marble head and torso
Roman copy after Praxitelean work of the 4th Century B.C.

His appearance matches descriptions in classical literature:

"A magical enchanter..., his bond hair smelling of perfume
his cheeks flushed with charms of Aphrodite in his eyes"
Euripedes, Bacchae 192-194

[The above description is from the information plaque beneath the sculpture at the Royal Ontario Musuem, in Toronto]
[Photo by Kidist P. Asrat]

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It looks like I've beaten the great Camille Paglia to the punch regarding oenology matters. I'm sure Paglia has written about wine before, but I haven't read her exclusive treatise on the beverage. Here is how I associated wine, culture and society in a couple of posts I did last year: Nectar for a Goddess and The God of Wine. In a third post, Dionysus' Fury, I discuss the lost culture of wine where Dionysus raises his fury through me at the ignorance of culture-bereft waitresses. Also in The God of Wine, I discuss the wine and the Eucharist.

I also write about beer, a beverage assumed to be less sophisticated than wine, but I raise its status to The Nectar for the Gods.

Below are some excerpts from Paglia's April 23, 2014 Time Magazine article: The Drinking Age is Past its Prime.

- On the refined cultures of France and Germany, who teach their children how to drink beer and wine, where Paglia associates "learning how to drink" with "growing up":

Learning how to drink responsibly is a basic lesson in growing up - as it is in wine-drinking France or in Germany, with its family-oriented beer gardens and festivals. Wine was built into my own Italian-American upbringing, where children were given sips of my grandfather’s homemade wine. This civilized practice descends from antiquity.

- On the "truth" that wine was associated with in ancient Greece and Rome, which is a precursor to the truth of the Eucharist in Christianity:

...wine was identified with the life force in Greece and Rome: In vino veritas (In wine, truth).. Wine as a sacred symbol of unity and regeneration remains in the Christian Communion service. Virginia Woolf wrote that wine with a fine meal lights a “subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.”

- About Dionysus:

Exhilaration, ecstasy and communal vision are the gifts of Dionysus, god of wine.

The article has the usual gems of Paglian Wisdom, but then we also get the erratic jumps of ideas and beliefs that make her works readable and entertaining, i.e. not to be taken seriously all of the time.

E.g.:

As a libertarian, I support the decriminalization of marijuana, but there are many problems with pot. From my observation, pot may be great for jazz musicians and Beat poets, but it saps energy and willpower and can produce physiological feminization in men.

Yes, Camille. And how about the pot-head on the road, in pursuit of that Kerouacian line of poetry?

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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