Tuesday 27 October 2015

Vino Sacrificio




Abusing wine is unchristian, for it is meant to be sacrosanct.
It is the symbolic blood of Christ.
Wine was refined to the giddy heights found in the great vintages
by celibate men in holy orders.

It is wines which underpin, validate and justify the prices
commanded by any great restaurant, it gives them the 
required air of mystique.
 
But to look at those great pagans, the Greeks -
for one to get well-imbibed, or drunk, one must
recognise it as is a gateway to the gods; the sacramental
element is all implicit in the Eluesian mysteries as in the Eucharist. There is more etiquette in the Dionysian realm than there is in normal life.  Yet many have seen the image of unrestrained
celebrants in Dionysian rites equal to an avenue to publicly de-burden themselves by way of negative catharsis.

To reduce this to a mere drinking session, or some
blunt way to digress from the norm, is a diminishment,
but also a grave transgression, an ultimate crime against 
culture, because it is against our shared inheritance.   
A selfish act because it disregards that common inheritance,
or communion.





“A great wine is a cultural achievement, not available to Protestants, atheists or believers in progress, since it depends on the survival of local gods. One of the greatest goods bestowed on France by the Catholic Church is to have offered asylum to the battered gods of antiquity, to have fitted them out with the clothes of saints and martyrs, and to have cheered them with the drink that they once brought down from heaven to us all. That, in a nutshell, is why French wines are the best.” - 
 Roger Scruton


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