Much maligned, but still a bit too useful to do away with altogether, Sigmund Freud, above, taught us that the best analogy for the mental life of the individual isn’t that of a single-family residence, but something more like a two-decker, each floor having its own bedrooms, kitchens, furnishings and householders. Occupying the lower level is the Id family, a rambunctious and unpredictable bunch, much given to impulsive behavior and often behind in the rent.
Above, dwells the Ego fam: tidy, shoulder-to-the-wheel types who never neglect to floss, monitor their screen time and know better than to buy a lottery ticket. Each household considers its own way best, but their mutual, even intimate, proximity means neither can help observing its neighbor’s behavior. They share a dwelling, after all.
This being the case, it would be surprising if our split-level psyches failed to project their mutual discontents into the greater world we’ve created for ourselves. This is strikingly obvious in the way we think about, use and practice wine, it seems to me. On the one hand, treating it as a vehicle of simple everyday pleasure, offering relaxation, social lubricity and comfortable rituals all submerged in subjective experience. On the other, seeing in it a more serious subject, worthy of study in its scientific, historical, technological, physiological and economic aspects. On this floor of the house, objectivity rules – or fancies it does.
But this isn’t to suggest that either our collective history or personal experience of wine is reducible to one or the other in a binary set. Proof of this can be found in the character and achievements of wine’s mythic embodiment and primordial influencer: the boy god Bacchus (Dionysos, if you prefer).
Routinely depicted as crowned with vine leaves, and often seen astride a leopard, Bacchus appears to project pure id. He mostly avoided Mt Olympus (where senior divinities could have kept him under close surveillance), preferring shady mountain glades and secluded pools where he hobnobbed with nymphs and satyrs and served as impresario for episodes of frantic revelry and even, when feeling peevish, murderous frenzy.
But this sort of unbridled behavior is only one side of this mysterious character’s personality. It was Bacchus, it is said, who first taught his devotees to temper their consumption of wine by mixing it with water in specific proportions, introducing an element of pace, order and rationality to the classical drinking party. It’s for this reason that to this day a number of European cities honor him with public statuary. Florence, Dresden, Vienna, Albi (even Vatican City) have memorialized him in this way — a kind of Mr. Model Citizen who made real and lasting contributions to civic order and social responsibility.
What accounts for wine’s long, illustrious history? In part, the answer must lie in its ability to stimulate, absorb, and satisfy the needs and desires of the complicated, multilevel, ceaselessly renovating dwelling place that is the internally-experienced human habitation.
Chapeau, Bacchus, you old puzzler, wherever you are.