One of the most important missions at Dos Cuerpos is to understand the background of all our products, from who crafts them, why and how, but also the historical, social, and artistic aspects that our products have had. That's why we want to share works from different arts that allude to the products we handle. On this occasion, to explain the presence of wine in the arts, we are sharing an essay titled "Wine and Milk" by Roland Barthes, which goes as follows:
"The French nation regards wine as something of its own, much like its three hundred and sixty varieties of cheese and its culture. It is a totemic beverage, akin to the milk of the Dutch cow or the ceremoniously consumed tea of the English royal family. Bachelard has already presented the substantial psychoanalysis of this liquid at the end of his essay on the reveries of willpower, showing that wine is the juice of sun and soil, that its nature is not wet but dry, and that, in this sense, its mythical opposite substance is water.
Like any vivacious totem, wine bears a varied mythology that remains unperturbed by contradictions. For instance, this galvanic substance is always seen as the most effective of elements to quench thirst, or at least thirst serves as the first alibi for consuming it ('I'm thirsty'). Under its red form, it has a very ancient hypostasis in blood, in dense and vital liquid. Indeed, its humoral form doesn't matter much; above all, it's a substance of conversion, capable of changing situations and states, of drawing opposites from objects, of making a weak person strong, a quiet person talkative; hence its old alchemical inheritance, its philosophical power to transmute or create ex nihilo.
As it is fundamentally a function with changeable terms, wine possesses seemingly plastic powers: it can serve as an alibi for both dream and reality, depending on the users of the myth. For the worker, it becomes training, a demiurgic ease for tasks ('soul at work'). For the intellectual, it takes on the inverse role: the writer's 'Beaujolais' will serve to distinguish him from the overly natural world of cocktails and expensive drinks (the only ones that snobbery permits him to offer); wine will free him from myths, remove him from his intellectualism, equal him with the proletariat; through wine, the intellectual approximates a natural virility and imagines escaping the curse that a century and a half of romanticism continues to cast on pure cerebral activity.
But the peculiarity of France lies in the fact that here, the conversion power of wine is never openly considered as an end: in other countries, people drink to get drunk, and everyone says so; in France, drunkenness is a consequence but never a goal; the beverage is felt as a display of pleasure, not as the necessary cause of a sought-after effect: wine is not just a filter, it is also the lasting act of drinking; the gesture holds decorative value here, and the power of wine is never separated from its modes of existence (unlike, for example, whisky, which is consumed because its drunkenness is 'more pleasant, with less painful aftereffects,' to be downed, repeated, and reduced to an act-cause).
All this is known; it's said a thousand times in folklore, proverbs, conversations, and literature. But this same universality implies conformity: believing in wine is an act of collective compulsion: a French person who distances themselves from the myth would expose themselves to problems not grave but precise in terms of integration; the first of which would be, precisely, having to explain. In this, the principle of universality is fully manifested, in the sense that society designates anyone who doesn't believe in wine as sick, defective, or deviant: they don't understand it (in both the spatial and intellectual senses of the term). Conversely, those who practice wine drinking earn a diploma of good integration: knowing how to drink is a national technique that qualifies the French person, simultaneously demonstrating their power of action, control, and sociability. Thus, wine establishes a collective morality wherein everything is redeemed: excesses, misfortunes, crimes are undoubtedly possible with wine, but by no means evil, perfidy, or ugliness; the evil it might engender falls within the realm of fate and thus eludes punishment; it constitutes theatrical evil, not temperamental evil.
Wine is socialized because it not only establishes a morality but also a backdrop; it adorns the small rituals of everyday French life, from a morsel (thick red wine and Camembert) to feasts, from café conversations to banquet speeches. It enhances any type of climate: in cold weather, it associates with all myths of warmth; and in the heat, with all images of shade, coolness, and excitement. There is no situation of physical difficulty (temperature, hunger, boredom, servitude, estrangement) that doesn't evoke dreams of wine. Combining as a base substance with other food figures, it can cover all spaces and all times of the French person. When it becomes a detail of daily life, the absence of wine is as exotic as it is affecting: at the beginning of his seven-year term, Coty allowed himself to be photographed at an intimate table where a bottle of Dumesnil seemed to replace the liter of red wine; the entire nation convulsed. It was as intolerable as a single king. Among us, wine is part of the reasoning of the State.
Without a doubt, Bachelard was correct in placing water as the opposite of wine: mythically, it's true; sociologically, at least today, not as much; economic or historical circumstances have assigned that role to milk. Milk is now the true antivine: and not only as a result of Mendès-France's initiatives (with a deliberately mythological aspect: milk drunk at the podium like Popeye's spinach), but also because in the broad morphology of substances, milk stands opposed to fire due to its molecular density, due to the creamy nature of its surface; wine is mutilating, surgical: it transmutes and generates; milk is cosmetic: it binds, coats, restores. Furthermore, its purity, associated with childhood innocence, demonstrates strength, a non-revulsive, non-congestive force, but a calm, white, lucid force entirely equal to reality. Some American films where the hard and ascetic hero felt no repugnance for a glass of milk before drawing his righteous revolver paved the way for the formation of the new Parsifalian myth: even today, among tough and handsome circles, a strange grenadine milk from North America is imbibed in Paris. But milk remains an exotic substance; wine is what's national.
The mythology of wine can, on the other hand, help us understand the ambiguity of our everyday life. Because it's true that wine is a beautiful and good substance, but it's equally true that its production solidly contributes to French capitalism, whether that of winegrowers or that of large Algerian landowners who impose upon the Muslim, who has no bread to eat, a foreign culture on the very land from which they've been dispossessed. In this way, there exist very sympathetic but not so innocent myths. And the characteristic of our present alienation is that wine, precisely, cannot be an entirely happy substance unless one, improperly, forgets that it too is a product."
We hope this has been to your liking, and if you have any suggestions or comments, we are attentive.
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