An Occasional Tipple: Philosophy, poetry and maybe some wine next week...
Why do we love to drink wine? As we’re slap-bang in the middle of Lent, it occurs to me that rather than tempt you (should you be trying to abstain) by extolling the virtues of any particular drop, it makes more sense to investigate the actual point of wine itself with the help of a few minds even greater than my own.
Hard to believe, tipplers, but Schopenhauer himself came close to conceding that such minds may exist.
"Wine is bottled poetry," according to Robert Louis Stevenson, a thought echoed by Luis Fernando Olivetti who described wine as "the only artwork you can drink".
And it's true, it's true, but sometimes we get so caught up in the aesthetics of wine that we perhaps forget the crucial underlying truth of all forms of beauty.
Greek playwright Euripides did not fall into this trap and recognised that "where there is wine, there is love".
Truth is beauty and beauty is love, to paraphrase Keats.
While the human connection is paramount, Galileo (the astronomer, not the horse), took things a step further, pushing the debate into the cosmic sphere by declaring that "wine is sunlight held together by water".
You see, wine lives both within and beyond science, human relationships, art and everything else.
Anyone who has spent a slow evening in the company of a good wine and thought as deeply about life as the noble grape encourages us to will relate to the assessment of Louis Pasteur who noted that "a good bottle of wine contains more philosophy than all the books in the world".
The key word, tipplers, is more- more, not better. In a similar vein, his compatriot Alexander Dumas observed that "wines are the intellectual part of a meal, meats merely the material part".
But let's not kid ourselves, we're not going to solve the mysteries of life or, better still, become great poets by sitting at home and sinking a few bottles.
No, the best we can hope for is that unlike Ernest Hemingway, we don't conclude thusly: "my only regret in life is that I didn't drink enough wine".
Can one even begin to imagine a more awful fate? Might we not rather hope to see, as our national poet W.B. Yeats did, that the point of wine is love- that the two are, to coin a phrase, inextricably interlinked: "Wine comes in at the mouth, love comes in at the eye is all we shall know for truth before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you and I sigh"?
Oh, we're all sighing now but before despairing entirely we should think of the inspiring words of Belfast poet, Derek Mahon: "there will be dying, there will be dying but there is no need to go into that...the sun rises in spite of everything, the far cities are beautiful and bright...I lie here in a riot of sunlight...Everything is going to be all right".
I can certainly raise a glass to that. Now you know why we drink wine, I'll shortly resume instructing you on exactly what wine to drink. Raymond knows best, hey?
Till next week, tipplers, sante!