In praise of drunks
If an alien beamed down tomorrow and read Decanter magazine, it would never guess that the subject being written about was not only meant to be fun but was, in fact, an intoxicant. I’m not singling out Decanter for special criticism; almost all wine writing, no matter how vivid and evocative, is written from the point of view of absolute sobriety. I can think of no other activity where the literature on the subject is so far removed from most people’s everyday experience. We enjoy wine because it is alcoholic. None of the culture built up around wine would exist if it weren’t intoxicating. As much as we might like to think that wine tastings are, in the words of Dr Frasier Crane, ‘just about wine and clear constitutional procedures for enjoying it’, we should be honest that the reason most people attend them is at least partly to get...
I’m afraid this isn’t one of our four free articles available in full, which are set out in the first two rows of the ‘Magazine’ page.
Please click here to find them.
To buy a digital version of this issue for just £2.99, click here
