Wine and religion - a strange subject, perhaps. But for me they have become two major interests, although as a student examining the world's religions I had no idea that the gospel of the vine would grab me. My father, the model of restraint, would drink never more than a glass of his favourite Cape Riesling and it was left to the writings of Ernest Hemingway and his wine drinking exploits to inspire me. My field of religious study was mysticism, and I have found that, in a way, mysticism and wine are linked, as colourful, almost irrational passions.

Religion is not only about the misty peaks of mystical communion, however, but also about ethics. As alcohol can affect human behaviour, the question of wine-drinking must be important to religion. In fact, religion has made an (often contradictory) array of responses to it - from prohibition to celebration.

My own Jewish background makes me particularly aware that wine plays a strong symbolic and ceremonial role in Judaism. This is not surprising, as the vine is after all a Middle-Eastern plant. Wine became in the Old Testament a symbol of prosperity more persistent than that of milk and honey, and the vine is mentioned more often in the Bible than any other plant.
Noah was not only the first person in the Bible to make wine, he is also the first example of drunkenness. This early association did not, however, prevent Judaism from celebrating the vine. The two most common blessings in Jewish practice are over bread and wine. At mealtimes, on the Sabbath, and during festivals and festivities, the following is said over wine: 'Blessed are you our God, King of the Universe, who creates the fruit of the vine.' During the ceremony celebrating the festival of Passover (marking the exodus from Egypt) it is customary to drink four cups of wine. Showing wine's accepted place in Jewish celebrations, the first miracle performed by Jesus was turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana.

The constant use of wine in Judaism for religious purposes has meant that there are strict laws regarding its production. Judaism is the only religion making such stipulations - not only because of original fears that this special substance might be used in worship of idols, but also because of strict dietary laws that must deem a wine to be 'kosher' or correct. Kosher winemaking must follow a host of requirements, including using only permitted substances, and the wine is frequently pasteurised. This heating process was originally used to make it unpalatable to non-Jews, discouraging them from using sacramental wine in their religious rites!
 

Censure and poetry
Despite Judaism being stricter regarding production than consumption of wine, it is far from advocating drunken abandon (although among certain circles, it is considered a blessing to get drunk on the Sabbath - with whisky seeming to be the favourite tipple, however, rather than wine). Judaism and Christianity both argue for physical restraint, so that wine remains (rather paradoxically) both a part of celebration and the subject of censure. But it is within Islam, of course, that religious censure is felt most strongly. Of the four verses in the Koran referring to wine, three are negative in tone. Wine consumption is seen in Islam as interfering with the purity of prayer (as well as promoting unruly behaviour) and the Koran enjoins its followers: 'Believers, do not approach your prayers when drunk….'

Ironically, pre-Islamic Arabia spawned a rich tradition of Bacchic poetry celebrating wine, and the tradition of such poetry continued under Islam. The metaphor of wine-drinking in Arabic poetry ranged from the erotic to the religious symbolism of the mystical branch of Islam, the Sufis. For the Sufis the drunken state represented divine intoxication. (A common thread running through numerous religious traditions is for the ecstasy of the drunken state to be likened to religious ecstasy.) Arabic poetry continued under Islam to have its hedonists and rebels. One notorious example was the caliph Al-Walid ibn Yazid who wrote: 'Give wine to drink … for I know there is no hell-fire!' Perhaps the greatest wine poet under Islam was the ribald Abu Nuwas (who died in 814), who also strove to reconcile in his poetry the tension between hedonism and Islamic censure.
Indulgence and mysticism

The classical cultures of Greece and Rome spawned strong wine-drinking cults. A number of Greek philosophic schools subscribed to hedonism. Among them, in the fourth century BC, the Cyreniacs held that the pleasure of the senses represented the supreme good (a philosophy that many modern wine drinkers seem to aspire to!). At a more popular level, Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, was first celebrated in the three-day feast of the Anthesteria, a festival which took its name from the spring month, Anthesterion, and celebrated the wine of the most recent vintage and kept until each spring. Dionysus was not only the god of viticultural celebration, he was also a god of madness and disorder - perhaps pointing towards the effects of alcohol. Under the Romans, Dionysus became Bacchus, the cheerful god of wine whose presence brought relief and joy to the sorrows of life. The ritual drunkenness found at the seasonal feasts of Dionysus and at the Roman festival of Bacchus (the Bacchanalia) have helped to paint a picture of wine drinking as promoting a life of unrestrained indulgence, although Dionysian rituals often contained mystic elements easily ignored in the popular image of them as orgies of drunken abandon.

The Christian contribution
Granted the ceremonial role of wine within Judaism and its celebration in the Greek and Roman cults - the religion that has contributed most to the actual production of quality wine is without doubt Christianity. Some attribute this to the need for a steady supply of wine for the sacramental ritual of the Eucharist (thanksgiving) where the blood of Christ is signified by consuming consecrated wine: 'This is my blood, which was given for you....'

Over many centuries, Christian mon-astic orders played a vital role in the development of viticulture and winemaking in Western Europe, particularly due to their accumulated wealth and the ability to build up substantial vineyard holdings. Their education and the time available for careful viticulture also played a role. But a spiritual motivation must not be underestimated: it was man's responsibility to take pride in and manage the natural world and this would include the vine. The growing of vines and the making of wine, already rich with Biblical significance, thus took on further spiritual overtones.

Clive Coates writes in The Wines of France that 'One of the greatest achievements of the early Christian church was the maintenance of organized agriculture, of which the traditions of viticulture and viniculture were a vital part, throughout the Dark Ages.' During the Middle Ages, Christian monastic orders came to own many of the great vineyards in Europe. The Benedictines had extensive vineyards in Burgundy, and also holdings in the Loire, Champagne, Rhône and Bordeaux. The Cistercians owned vineyards throughout Europe, including the prestigious one of the Kloster Eberbach on the Rhein, and are reputed to have been the first to plant Chardonnay in Chablis.

The carrying of the vine to the Americas was also the result of the colonists' need of wine for religious purposes - as well as more secular ones, presumably. Both Chile's and Argentina's wine industries date from sixteenth century vine plantings at mission stations on either side of the Andes. Later, it is telling that the original grape variety which was carried by Franciscans to Mexico and then California, and there planted, was called 'Mission' - it remained of major importance until the spread of phylloxera in California in the 1880s. In New Zealand, too, it was missionaries who brought vine cuttings, to allow for production of sacramental wine.

Christianity's huge involvement with wine has also meant that it is the religion with the greatest range of responses to it - not only positive ones. For some it is simply alcohol, and the subject of condemnation - especially by Protestants. The movement to outlaw the consumption of alcohol entirely was most famously triumphant in the United States from 1920 to 1933, when the infamous 18th Amendment prohibited the 'manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors'. This period of prohibition wrecked for some time the American wine industry and even after its repeal left a legacy of heavy taxation of alcoholic beverages, obstructive legislation, and widespread teetotalism.

Prohibition in America cannot be attributed purely to religion, but the temperance movement, rooted in the belief that alcohol was a destructive social and economic force, had the vital support of many fundamentalist churches. Protest-antism helped provide a religious set of values for the prohibitionists. Andrew Barr, in Drink: A Social History suggests that 1920s prohibitionists in the USA wanted 'to assert the primacy of the principles of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant nuclear family. Neo-prohibitionist sentiment continues in the USA today. Barr points out that Protestant fundamentalists have not abandoned the attitudes that led to prohibition in the past, and 'that 35 per cent of Americans are teetotal and that, of these, 51 per cent abstain for religious reasons'.

Archbishop Tutu once commented that 'comparative religion was for the comparatively religious', but comparison usefully highlights the diversity of the religious response to wine. Like wine itself, the religious attitude to wine ranges from the austere to the opulent. One even finds (as within Christianity) a lack of uniformity within specific tradition - which is why it was always such an embarrassment for nineteenth-century (and later) anti-alcohol campaigners to have to deal with the positive part played by liquor, particularly wine, in the Bible.

Specifically Jewish sources also have their contradictions. In the mystical Book of Splendour it is written (as in the passage quoted earlier from the Koran): 'A man who is drunk should not pray.' But an earlier passage has it that ' the Holy One, blessed be He, is sanctified above all by wine'. Perhaps the lesson to be drawn from such apparent contradictions is that wine is a blessing, as long as it is handled in a sensitive manner. A sentiment with which most wine lovers would surely agree.