The practice of buying rounds in the pub is one of the great cultural achievements of the English. It enables people with little money of their own to make generous gestures, without the risk of being ruined by them. It enables each person to distinguish himself from his neighbours and to portray his individuality in his choice of drink, and it causes affection progressively to mount in the circle of drinkers, by giving each in turn the character of a warm and hospitable friend. In a way it is a moral improvement on the Greek symposium, where the host alone appeared in the character of the giver, and also on the common room and the country house. The round of drinks enables even the speechless and the downtrodden briefly to receive the thanks, the appreciation and the honour of their neighbours. It is a paradigm case of "social inclusion", to use the jargon of our rulers, and it is hardly surprising that everything is now being done to ensure that the practice dies out. Our Government's current campaigns against binge drinking and public smoking are designed to destroy the normal forms of relaxation among simple people, and to cause them to stay at home with a bottle, where they can watch politically correct television in silence, absorbing the images of social decay.

The transformation of the soul under the influence of wine is merely the continuation of another transformation that began maybe fifty years earlier when the grape was first plucked from the vine. (That is one reason why the Greeks described fermentation as the work of a god. Dionysus enters the grape and transforms it; and this process of transformation is then transferred to us as we drink.) When we raise a glass of wine to our lips, therefore, we are savouring an ongoing process: the wine is a living thing, the last result of other living things, and the progenitor of life in us. It is almost as though it were another human presence in any social gathering, as much a focus of interest and in the same way as the other people there.

The ancient proverb tells us that there is truth in wine. The truth lies not in what the drinker perceives but in what, with loosened tongue and easier manners, he reveals. It is "truth for others", not "truth for self". This accounts for both the social virtues of wine and its epistemological innocence. Wine does not deceive you, as cannabis deceives you, with the idea that you enter another and higher realm, that you see through the veil of Maya to the transcendental object or the thing-in-itself. Hence it is quite unlike even the mildest of the mind-altering drugs, all of which convey some vestige, however vulgarised, of the experience associated with mescalin and LSD, and recorded by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception. These drugs — cannabis not excepted — are epistemologically culpable. They tell lies about another world, a transcendental reality beside which the world of ordinary phenomena pales into insignificance or at any rate into less significance than it has. Wine, by contrast, paints the world before us as the true one, and reminds us that if we have failed previously to know it then this is because we have failed in truth to belong to it, a defect that it is the singular virtue of wine to overcome. Something similar might be said of beer and English proverbs testify to the honourable place of ale in popular thinking, as a source of insight into human society.