The Journal of Aesthetic Education

For sensible men I prepare only three kraters: one for health (which they drink first), the second for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the third one is drained, wise men go home. The fourth krater is not mine any more—it belongs to bad behaviour; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness.

—Attributed to Dionysos, in a surviving fragment of the lost play by Euboulos

The collection Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine, edited by Barry Smith, originated at a conference at London University in 2004.¹ Smith writes that “it was the first ever conference on the philosophy of wine” (i). As Smith claims, wine has not been the subject of serious philosophical appreciation in the modern context until very recently, even although it has had an intimate association with philosophy since its institutionalization in classical Greece under Socrates and Plato. Smith briefly alludes to this ancient history but does not reflect on it. In fact, one aspect of this collection is the way in which the philosophy of wine is configured as a question of taste based on analytical approaches to epistemology, objectivity, and aesthetics rather than the critical history of wine as philosophy and its relationship with the institutionalization of philosophy and wine. Before undertaking this review, let me say a little more about what I mean.²

The exact translation of the Greek symposion word is “to drink together.” In classical Greece, the symposion was an occasion when a group of men and male youths ate and drank together, according to strict nutritional, religious, and cultural rules, while they entertained, talked, and discussed philosophical issues. The symposion was one of four main forms of ritualized consumption where men ate and drank together as equals, and therefore it reinforced a set of community values. There was, in addition, the religious festival, the military common meal, the public meal granted as an honor by the polis, and the symposion for pleasure. The Greeks also established a distinction [End Page 114] between eating and drinking, according the latter, the consumption of wine, a privileged place above eating.

Wine in the Greek context is inseparable from the symposium, and the dramatic form becomes the classical dialogue that animates so much Greek philosophy, especially as written by Plato. Yet its early prehistory is thought to date back to the Neolithic period and the collection and eventual domestication of the wild grape, Vitis vinifera, common around the coasts of Asia Minor. It is also often assumed that winemaking came to Greece through Cretan trade with the Phoenicians. Archaeological evidence points to the fact that winemaking was common to Greece by the end of the Minoan civilization around 1500 BC and certainly well established by the time of the establishment of the Greek city states in 750–550 BC.

The complicated genealogy of wine and its hidden or subterranean network of religio-moral concepts is connected to ancient Greece and the wine gods Dionysus and Bacchus. The archeology of wine stretches back even further. Briefly, Dionysus is the Thracian god of wine and Bacchus is the Lydian name for Dionysus. While there is some dispute about the origin of the name Dionysus, some commentators suggest that the cult arrived from Anatolia (present-day Turkey) or Libya, Ethiopia, or Arabia; Dionysus’s name is found on ancient syllabary tablets in Mycenean Linear B script, which predated the Greek alphabet by several hundreds of years. Károly Kerényi, the Hungarian historian of myth and collaborator of Jung, traces Dionysus to Minoan Crete, a Bronze Age culture c. 2700 to 1450 BC, which became dominant on Crete.³ Albert Henrichs suggests that Dionysus, the wine-god, appears first on Sophilos’s vase and in the poetry of Solon, both times as the wine-god. His connection with the grapevine...