Wine intoxicates; but we should distinguish intoxication from drunkenness. The first is a state of consciousness, whereas the second is a state of unconsciousness — or which tends towards unconsciousness. Although the one leads in time to the other, the connection between them is no more transparent than the connection between the first kiss and the final divorce. Just as the erotic kiss is neither a tame version nor a premonition of the bitter parting to which it finally leads, so is the intoxicating taste of the wine neither a tame version nor a premonition of drunkenness: they are simply not the "same kind of thing", even if at some level of scientific theory they are discovered to have the same kind of cause. 

It is also questionable to speak of the intoxication that we experience through wine as "induced by" the wine. For this implies a separation between the object tasted and the intoxication felt, of the kind that exists between drowsiness and the sleeping pill that causes it. When we speak of an intoxicating line of poetry, we are not referring to an effect in the person who reads or remembers it, comparable to the effect of an energy pill. We are referring to a quality in the line itself. The intoxication of Mallarmé's abolit bibelot d'inanité sonore lies there on the page, not here in my nervous system. 

Likewise, the intoxicating quality that we taste in wine is a quality that we taste in it and not in ourselves. True, we are raised by it to a higher state of exhilaration, and this is a widely observed and very important fact. But this exhilaration is an effect, not a quality bound into the very taste of the stuff, as the intoxication seems to be. At the same time, there is a connection between the taste and the intoxicating effect, just as there is a connection between the exciting quality of a football game and the excitement that is produced by it. The intoxication that I feel is not just caused by the wine: it is, to some extent, directed at the wine, and has a quality of "relishing", which makes it impossible to describe in the abstract, as though some other stuff might have produced it. The wine lives in my intoxication, as the game lives in the excitement of the fan: I have not swallowed the wine as I would a tasteless drug; I have taken it into myself, so that its flavour and my mood are inextricably bound up with each other.