The cava bottle: an unexpected friend
Once, a friend confessed to me that “I accidentally threw it away”. I lifted her pants: she was shaved. “With a bottle of cava,” he added, and we both laughed. **Where there is no wine, there can be no love** said Euripides. I wonder how many marriages are held together by the shared bottle of wine on Saturdays. You don’t have to answer, if your love becomes an empty vessel, but full of emotions. “With wine, love is fire” said Ovid. There is an Italian saying that says: “non puoi avere la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca” (that you cannot have a full bottle and a drunk woman). The octaves were an erotic game of Magna Graecia that consisted of drinking as many glasses of wine as there were letters in the name of the beloved (because in that democracy women did not enter). With the nine letters of my name I would have knocked everyone over!
Wine: a drink with two faces
I will do like the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, without judging with paternalisms or sentimentalisms. There are heteros with puntazos. In other words, once drunk, that is, when you are not at 100% of your faculties, there is a fluid license to be able to experiment with your same sex. Could we say we are vi-sexual instead of bisexual?
Dionysus is a twice-born god. The first, from the womb of his mother Semele and the second, from the thigh of his father Zeus. For this reason, wine also has two faces: culture and drugs. I like to differentiate between fermented and distilled drinks. Remember that a beer has approximately 5 degrees; wine, about 13, and distilled spirits, 43. Everything is approximate, because the 13% of wine, with climate change, in some areas has even gone up a degree. Pure physics: more insolation, more sugars, which – with fermentation – increase the alcoholic strength. You can go hot or hot, but the beer must be very cold!
Wine and alcohol: between shamelessness and contradiction
On party nights at the Sutton, alcohol makes people shameless. **In vino veritas**, said Pliny the Elder, but **in vodka di piú** some young people think, until they reach an alcoholic coma. And we’re not talking about the magnum bottles in the reserved ones. Napoleon Bonaparte said: “Champagne! In victory, you deserve it; in defeat, you need it.” Also Lilly Bollinger said that bubbles made women more beautiful. Maybe they simply saw them as double. My favorite, realistically, is by Honoré de Balzac “All relationships begin with champagne and end with an infusion.”
Wine: a passion with two sides
Wine has two sides: the culture and the drug. To talk about wine and love, the master is Omar Khayyam and his Robaiat quartets. Sufi mysticism is a great blend of cultures where the most romantic, hedonistic and spiritual part of wine is taken. The poet of wine and roses, they called him. In the Book of Good Love by the Archpriest of Hita, he already explained to us how Venus and Bacchus were inseparable. “We are all mortal, until the first kiss and the second glass of wine,” sums up Eduardo Galeano.
Wine: a temptation with consequences
Alcohol has killed many people behind the wheel, or killed others, which is even worse. That’s why I’m concerned that, for all that the Alves case means, alcohol is the mitigating factor for non-consensual sex (ie, rape) when it’s not for a car accident. Or it is the excuse to commit an infidelity and it would not be, however inadmissible, for a case of pederasty. Can you be savior and executioner at the same time?
Wine: a passion with risks
Wine has given me everything. My passion, my work, my friends… We could even say that my children (since thanks to the fact that I tasted the wine that their father made at a fair, they have come into existence!). But I am aware that alcohol could also take everything from me. My partner is an ex-alcoholic (yes, refrain from the easy jokes) and although he hasn’t had a drink in five years, a relapse could be fatal. He can’t even drink a 0.0% beer or a sauce with port in it, so as not to wake the monster. Everyone asks why he can’t even toast, and we never ask if those who drink will use public transport later. It’s the world upside down.
Wine: a drink with multiple dimensions
We want (and defend) wine to match gastronomy, life situations and art. Alcohol is pure contradiction. It calms you down and encourages you. It makes you talk to others and helps you with internal dialogue. A bit like tobacco, which wakes you up, puts you to sleep, makes you hungry and takes it away at the same time. And it has the super power to make you straighter and gayer! Will we continue to give him prominence in our lives until we end up as secondary characters? So we can always say, to be forgiven, that we were a little drunk, but not a lot.