Prevent a Bacchanal with a WineWizard
A Rabbi, an art historian, and a philosopher all agree. Don't knock wine gadgets. They stop us from descending into a Bacchanalian dystopia.
Several hats off to Michael Pritchard, a British inventor, who has launched the Winewizard. This gadget is a £50 canister that ages young wines by up to ten years by adding a puff of air through tiny microbubbles.
A lot of people are asking “but does it work?” Not least my old Berry Bros & Rudd colleague, Will Lyons of The Sunday Times. His view is that it seems to. The evidence from a six month trial at Plumpton College, the UK’s leading wine school and research centre, concurs.
But I’m more interested in another question. Why we love wine gadgets? Is there more to wine gadgets than cupboard clutter for the “hard to shop for”, wine-loving, father-in-law.
A Rabbi, an art historian, and a philosopher have an answer.
While filming the first series of The Wine Show there was a gap of about five minutes in the running order. The series producer had an idea to put in a wine gadget feature. It wasn’t hard to fill. Even over three series. The world is filled with wine gadgets. There are things like the Winewizard that put gas into wine. The iFavine is another. And things to take it out like the Coravin, VacuVin, and a bizarre device that looked like a penile pump. As well as decanters, pourers, special glasses, and all manner of things that turned wine drinking into a ritual. Which is turns out… is not accidental.
I started to realise why on a trip to Tel Aviv, where we interviewed an ultra-Orthodox Rabbi about wine’s role in Shabbat (Series 1, Episode 6). He explained that wine had two sides. Wine brings joy and conviviality in moderation. But it has the capacity to bring anguish and division if you drink too much. The ritual of wine in Shabbat is an allegory for moderate consumption. We should enjoy wine, but not too much. The rituals of Shabbat put up some guardrails.
The devices we played with on the show do the same sort of thing. It’s hard to get battered on Burgundy if you’re waiting ten minutes for an iFavine to bubble medical grade oxygen through it. You’re less likely to descend into dribbling incoherence if you have to decant Port first, and then remember to pass it to the left (“Port to port” as they say in the Royal Navy). If you spend ten minutes worrying about whether to use Riedel’s Chianti glass versus the Bordeaux glass, you’re less likely to descend into debauchery.
Apollo vs Dionysus
The ancients knew this too. In her book Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia contrasts the reason, clarity, and structured form of the Greek god Apollo, with the wine god Dionysus, the embodiment of chaos, irrationality, emotional excess, and formlessness:
“Dionysus is nature’s raw sex and violence. He is drugs, drink, dance—the dance of death. My generation of the Sixties may be the first since antiquity to have had so direct an experience of Dionysus.”
The dangers of Dionysus are write large in Euripides’ play, The Bacchae. As she says of her generation in the Sixties:
“The Bacchae is our story, a panorama of intoxication, delusion, and self-destruction”
It’s no accident that the great pushback against wine "ritual” (cf “snobbery”) began in the 1960’s. With Camille Paglia’s generation. It was Dionysus ripping the decanter from the hands of Apollo. Or at least uptight 1950’s types who loved wine’s rituals.
If you’ve not read it, it’s worth looking up The Bacchae. There is a sort of animal appeal to the wine-soaked excesses. As Paglia says:
“The Bacchae’s messenger speeches are crammed with grotesque and miraculous detail. Wild Maenads, girt with writhing snakes, give suck to wolves and gazelles. Water, wine, and milk pour from the soil. Women tear cattle to bits with bare hands. Snakes lick splattered blood from cheeks. Dismembering Pentheus, the Maenads play ball with his arms, feet, and ribs. Agave, foaming at the mouth, impales his head on her wand.”
It’s like Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday night. Although with the addition of people hitting each other with large, comedic leather phalluses. On Sauchiehall Street they’ve been replaced by plastic inflatable ones on hen nights. But if you’ve ever woken up in Glasgow on a Sunday morning you’ll also know there is a downside to all this. I never woke up to the head of Pentheus impaled on a wall. But I did once come round wearing a red tailcoat in a block of high rise flats while two men had sex in the bed next to me. After breakfast I was “invited” to donate money to the IRA by a man who looked like he’d play ball with my arms, feet, and ribs.
Wine - unbound - is Dionysus. A descent into the chthonian swamp. (Or an ascent to the 18th floor of the Red Road flats.) Wine gadgets, and ritual, and… I’ll say it… wine snobbery, are our gift from Apollo to prevent the madness.
Paglia explored Western art, literature, and culture through the lens of that Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy. Drawing heavily on the ideas of Nietzsche. She argued that Western civilization is characterized by a fundamental tension between these two forces.
There’s that same tension between Dionysian chaos and Apollonian order in wine. A “smashable natty banger” drunk wherever and however you please out of Duralex goblets tends to the Dionysian. A bottle of 2018 Claret served in a decanter or subjected to the Winewizard that’s been dipped into your Riedel Vinum Series Bordeaux glass tends to the Apollonian. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the world of wine is “characterized by a fundamental tension between these two forces”. And that the naturalistas and claret fans don’t always get on. They come from opposing sides of the Dionysian and Apollonian “dichotomy”.
Chesterton’s Fence
"Before you remove a fence, you should first understand why it was put there in the first place."
Wine rituals - and even canisters of air that puff gas into your wine in tiny micro-bubbles - are an example of (G. K.) Chesterton’s Fence. When encountering a rule, tradition, or established practice that may seem outdated or unnecessary, one should resist the impulse to immediately discard it without comprehending its original purpose and function.
I’ve written about Chesterton’s Fence before. And how before we remove the fences of ritual, tradition, and habit in wine we should understand why they were put there in the first place. Like the Rabbi in Tel Aviv, Chesterton was a fan of everything in moderation:
“No animal ever invented anything as bad as drunkenness—or so good as drink.”
Chesterton’s Fence is the reason I’m not a fan of demands we “demystify” wine. Or insist that all tradition or ritual is “snobbery”. Before we strip away the mystique about wine we have to understand why it was put there in the first place.
The rituals of wine serve as a guardrail against frantic excess.
Even if it’s puffing air into it.