Hence drinking in company induces an opening out of the self to the other, a conscious step towards asking and offering forgiveness: not for acts or omissions, but for the impertinence of existing. This suggests another reason for the centrality of wine in the communion ceremony, which is that it both illustrates and in a small measure enacts the moral posture that distinguishes Christianity from its early rivals, and which is summarised in the prayer to "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us". That remarkable prayer, which tells the Christian that he can obtain forgiveness only if he offers it, is one that we all understand in our cups, and this understanding of the critical role of forgiveness in forming durable human societies intrudes too into Islam, in the poetry of Hafiz, Rumi and Omar Khayyam, winos to a man. It is a sign of the extremism of Islam, in the versions that seem so threatening today, that it emphasises the Koranic interdiction of wine, and forgets that the rivers of paradise, according to the Holy Book, are actually made of the stuff. 

This returns me to the point about intoxication. The pronounced mental effects of wine are, so to speak, read back into their cause, so that the wine itself has the taste of them. Just as you savour the intoxicating flavour of the wine, so do you savour its reconciling power: it presents you with the taste of forgiveness. That is one way of understanding the Christian doctrine of trans-substantiation, itself a survival of the Greek belief that Dionysus is actually in the wine and not just the cause of it. The communicant does not taste the wine with a view to experiencing reconciliation and forgiveness as a subsequent effect. He savours forgiveness in the very act of drinking. This is what reconciliation, mercy and forgiveness taste like:

Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,

Which my God feels as blood, but I as wine.

So George Herbert expressed the point (in The Agonie). And in those great (and alas far too short) periods of Islamic civilisation in which the spirit of forgiveness prevailed, their poets would also, in their own way, sing praises to

The grape that can with logic absolute

The two-and-seventy jarring sects confute

as Omar Khayyam puts it, in Fitzgerald's version.