‘I Drink Therefore I Am’: Why Wine Matters
A review of ‘I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine’, by Sir Roger Scruton; Continuum, 2011.
Roger Scruton was the New Statesman’s wine critic for nine years, which is partly why the 2019 hit piece that the magazine ran on him — later shown by Douglas Murray and others to be full of falsehoods – was so egregious. That the journalist in question was suspended did not save Scruton from losing his role as chair of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, whose aim was to solve our housing shortage by building in traditional ways. (Per Scruton: ‘Nobody would object to building the city of Bath again.’) I suspect the whole New Statesman saga gave a rather bitter aftertaste to what had, by all accounts, been a perfectly good relationship between Scruton and the magazine. Oh well. Such is the life of the right-wing intellectual.
The good news is you can still find some of Scruton’s articles and essays for the Statesman, and like almost everything Scruton wrote, they are rather good, whether you agree with what he says or not. In I Drink Therefore I Am, his clear love for wine and respect for its traditions — which come to the fore in essays like ‘Put a Cork in It!’ (in which he argued against screw-tops) and ‘Bottled Inspiration’ (in which he called wine ‘a distillation of weather, climate, geology and beauty’)—are on full display. His book is a guide to wine, an exploration of it, and, in the end, a love-letter to it.
In I Drink Therefore I Am, his clear love for wine and respect for its traditions are on full display.
For Scruton, wine, and the the act of drinking wine, has a metaphysical and moral dimension. Wine, on Scruton’s view, is not just something we consume, but a way to understand the nature of human enjoyment and civilisation. Wine is by necessity bound up with place, or, for the French, terroir; and its cultivation is unavoidably linked with the culture of that place, its history and people. This naturally appealed to Scruton because, as a conservative, he was chiefly concerned with those collective forms of self that were rooted in a particular territory. Elsewhere he discusses what he calls oikophilia and oikaphobia: respectively, the love – or hatred – of home.
But wine is not only mixed up with, say, a town or county or country, says Scruton. It is connected with civilisation itself – or at least, ours. For wine is a central feature of the Western world, being part of religious ritual – the Eucharist – social customs, such as birth, marriage and death rites; and artistic expression. Scruton says that to place wine at the core of social life is also to teach ethics. To drink wine is to learn moderation, and so build ethical knowledge, for we cannot appreciate the subtle flavours of wine for long if we drink to get drunk. To behave well is, after all, to control ourselves. Scruton’s title, then, is not just a play on words, a nod to his vocation as a philosopher, an attempt to be self-effacing. The connection between drinking wine and thinking well is, for Scruton, close.
Scruton argues that to place wine at the heart of social life is also to teach ethics.
He writes beautifully, as always; though there is a palpable change in tone at about the middle of the book that is jarring. Part One, ‘I Drink’, deals with Scruton’s early experiences of France and how he was charmed by the countryside, by la France profonde. In Part Two, he stresses the philosophical. And though both are fascinating, together the two parts feel at odds: if not incoherent then tonally discordant. And this is the hurdle that he fails to overcome. The wine buff and intellectual explorer are not necessarily the same. I would go so far as to say they are rarely the same. It is often the person who is practical, tough-minded and careerist who turns to wine after making his or her fortune or at least after reaching such a level that their financial safety is settled. The thinker is, like the artist, sensitive in her way; but sensitive chiefly to ideas, not to textures or flavours.
I rather like wine, as I have probably implied elsewhere (or made plain through the ill discipline of my writing); and in fact find it very boring that so many, in the name of health (very narrowly understood) are forgoing wine and other alcohol. For wine smoothes the rough edges of social life, helps us to forget ourselves and open up to others, and dignifies our social customs and traditions, as well as, not too often but sometimes, allows us to drown our sorrows or quiet our minds after a stressful day—to, as it were, press ‘reset’. I cannot claim to be an expert on wine; but years of drinking far too much of the stuff has, by means of osmosis, taught me a thing or two, or so I like to think; and so I am rather receptive to Scruton’s view that wine, unlike beer (which I am also far too fond of) is something quite central to our experience, at least in this little corner of the world. So I will end with a quotation from a letter sent to the Abbé Morellet in about 1779 by Benjamin Franklin. He wrote: ‘Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.’
