Now, it seems to me that the act of settling, which is the origin of civilisation, involves both a radical transition in our relation to the earth — the transition known in other terms as that from hunter-gatherer to farmer — and also a new sense of belonging. The settled people do not belong only to each other: they belong to a place, and out of that sense of shared roots there grow the farm, the village and the city. Vegetation cults are the oldest and most deeply rooted in the unconscious, since they are the cults that drive out the totemism of the hunter-gatherer and celebrate the earth itself, as the willing accomplice in our bid to stay put. 

The new farming economy, and the city that grows from it, generate in us a sense of the holiness of the planted crop, and in particular of the staple food — which is grass, usually in the form of corn or rice — and the vine that wraps the trees above it. The fruit of the vine can be fermented and so stored in a sterilised form. It provides a place and the things that grow there with a memory. 

At some level, I venture to suggest, the experience of wine is a recuperation of that original cult whereby the land was settled and the city built. And what we taste in the wine is not just the fruit and its ferment, but also the peculiar flavour of a landscape to which the gods have been invited and where they have found a home. Grain, too, can be fermented, and in its way will provide a similar tribute to the place and our way of settling it. Aficionados of real ale and malt whisky are aware of this, and know that they are tasting the rains and the soils of the places that they visit in the glass and making contact across the centuries with the people who put down roots there. Such experiences are especially valuable to us, now that the world is accelerating to inhuman speed. The need to sit quietly and be at peace with the dead is one of the greatest requirements of a civilised life. And to do this in company, conversing all evening with a glass in your hand is to be reconciled to life in a way that few people now — in the age of the screen and the scream — achieve.