Wine and Friendship

"One reason why I don't drink is because I wish to know when I'm having a good time." - Nancy Astor

Few activities promise us as much happiness as love. If love is the anchor of our happiness, it is because it renders our trivial individual existence unique and allows our life to take on a certain value. Though there are many kinds of love, many seem only to cling obsessively to one specific species of love, namely, romantic love. Undoubtedly, romantic love is of supreme importance in our everyday life. It helps to connect the private spheres of our heart to the ones who could articulate the same feelings in the same degree of sophistication. It encourages a sort of intimacy that may render other forms of love incomparable. However important ideals of a good life romantic love may seek to inspire, does that mean we could reduce other forms of love to a status of inferiority?

Aside from romantic love, friendship may be easily seen as an equivalent of romantic love. Friendship, like romantic love, is based on a contract of mutual equality, rather than evaluating the importance of our friends according to the pyramid of social hierarchy, it conspires to strike a balance between what is good and what is bad within us- that neither any of us is better or worse than the other. Moreover, what puts friendship on the common ground with romantic love is that it conspires to impute similarities rather than differences though it is essentially a mixture of both. Whatever the differences we discover through the process of getting to know each other, a loving relationship is more founded on things which we find agreement on that would seem too churlish to deny that we are not made to understand each other.

Unfortunately, however important friendship may be, few of us conduct deep thoughts on it in the same manner, let alone the questions why we need it and how we should enjoy it and the likes. Speaking of friendship, what Nancy Astor says perhaps deserves our attention and invites us to reflect on the relationship between wine and friendship.

The precise nature of friendship might be hard to pin down, but perhaps the most difficult part of a deep friendship is not about whether one can open up his intimate self to other, but rather, how one might enforce the necessary atmosphere for others to submit the secrets about themselves to our scrutiny. If there is such intrinsic fear of transparency, that is, the fear of our secrets being known, it is because we are not courageous enough to venture alone into the assumption that we might no longer be loved after the secrets have been revealed. But behind this fear of transparency, there lies a more deep-seated fear- that is the judgement on our secrets that will follow, that we are no longer the masters of our own disclosure, that we are ignorant of our own selves. Little wonder why most of us are reluctant to pay a visit to psychologists.

However, to allow our friends to rationally examine our characters is not to take pride on our own inability to fathom ourselves. The idea that we may know ourselves better than others may fool us into generating egoistic and self-centred assumptions about ourselves. But what could inspire us to open up the private spheres in our hearts?

If there is something that may prompt us to risk exposing our unlovable elements to others, then perhaps we should not undermine what the role of wine has to play in a deep friendship. Though at one level, as Nancy Astor remarked, drinking wine may prevent us from having a good time, but at another level it also suggests that we could relax ourselves with the liberty to express what holds true in our hearts. To get drunk is to disregard social etiquette. Social etiquette is founded on the assumption that we must only reveal what is best within us, requiring us to live up to the expectations of others. If getting drunk runs counter to social convention, it is perhaps because its unaesthetic quality stems not from offering what is best within us, but rather, our whole selves, among them our good and bad qualities altogether. It is also precisely because of this unaesthetic quality that may require the charity of others to be generous towards what is usually cordoned off as private. It is premised on the assumption that others always suffer from the rigid inability to integrate the good with the bad.

But perhaps Nancy Astor has forgotten how to get drunk moderately. Oscar Wilde once said, "A true friend stabs you in the front." If friendship is about opening up our intimate selves, then wine might be the essential catalyst to deepen such friendship. It urges us to break free from the bondage of social convention, so we can be stripped of defences and follow what our hearts say. It takes off the jacket of our consciousness and liberates what lies deep in our unconsciousness.

But one might wonder, "Why specifically wine?" Because to use the word "wine" is to exclude other alcoholic beverages including cocktails, shooters, and beer. If wine is the catalyst rather than other alcoholic beverages, it is because these drinks have no patience for deep talks. They fail to enforce the required atmosphere for deep friendship to develop and deprive us of the ability to command our minds with fluidity to articulate what is intimate. Cocktail and the likes only assure us that we have a good time, but are unable to provoke the question why and how we should have a good time. It sides with relativism- that how we should enjoy friendship is of no significance because all methods to enjoy it are equally valid. Wine, on the contrary, endeavours to make friendship better and offers us the time for slow thought. It allows us to express who we are in precision, delicacy and sophistication under the rigours of rational examination. It gives weight to our feelings rather than emptying our soul to ensure us a sense of lightness.

Aristotle once told us to eat salt together, meaning we should cultivate our friendship in a face to face conversation. But what is better is perhaps we should drink wine together. The deeper implication of drinking wine is that while one may not have to devote all his passion to study the history of wine, one should acquire a basic knowledge of wine in order for a deep friendship to flower. If an education of friendship is deemed necessary as the ancient Greeks suggested, wine studies should be included in the curriculum.

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