Drink Wine Day
Feb 18
Other Scottish Country Dances for this Day
Today's Musings, History & Folklore
“Penicillin cures, but wine makes people happy."
~ Alexander Fleming (1881-1955)
Do you enjoy a glass of wine? Do you recognize and are able to distinguish the many flavour compounds in a glass? Might you be a supertaster? Scientists have been studying supertasters for decades, and estimate that roughly 25 percent of the population falls into this category. Most of the research on supertasters has focused on bitterness—in part because of an accidental discovery that some people can taste certain bitter chemicals while others can’t detect these same chemicals at all. (More on this in a moment.) Folks who can detect these bitter chemicals often dislike cruciferous vegetables, black coffee, dark chocolate, hot peppers and the sting of alcohol. In wine, supertasters are thought to prefer something sweet, and some research supports this idea. One large study of 1,010 American wine drinkers found that supertasters, broadly speaking, preferred sweet and fortified wines over dry table wines. Cin cin! 🍇🍷
A Flute of Mad Wine
Today, Drink Wine Day, is a day to celebrate this most ancient and prized of beverages.
The earliest archaeological evidence of chemically attested grape wine was discovered at Hajji Firuz in the northwestern Zagros Mountains, ca. 5400 BC. Both archaeological and genetic evidence suggest that the earliest production of wine may slightly predate this, with the earliest wine-making likely having taken place in Trans-Caucasia (including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia), through the region between Eastern Turkey, and Northwest Iran.
Dionysus is the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness, fertility, theatre, and religious ecstasy in Greek mythology, from his Roman counterpart, Bacchus, we get the word bacchanlia, a drunken revelry.
The Dionysian Mysteries were a ritual of ancient Greece and Rome which used intoxicants and other trance-inducing techniques (like dance and music) to remove inhibitions and social constraints, liberating the individual to return to a natural state.
For more on the Dionysian Mysteries, the wine glasses below.
And for more Scottish Dances devoted to wine, click here.
