This severity of judgment and readiness to dismiss make Saintsbury sound like the most tremendous snob about drink. In fact he was quite the reverse. He appreciated common drinks with the same gusto as he did great burgundy or claret. "There is no beverage which I have liked ‘to live with' more than Beer", he claimed. And it was cider, rather than any grander drink, that inspired his most ingenious and precisely-angled argument against the sanctimoniousness of the Prohibitionists:

. . . cider-apples furnish one of the most cogent arguments to prove that Providence had the production of alcoholic liquors directly in its eye. They are good for nothing else whatever, and they are excellent good for that.

Saintsbury's motivation was pleasure, and he linked his love of wine to the other things he loved. An admirer of the female sex, Saintsbury frequently associated wine with women, and one senses that he preferred to drink in their company rather than that of men. He was a voracious reader, and so naturally his prose when writing about wine was saturated, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility, with allusions. Take, for instance, his dense commentary on absinthe: "the supposed wickedest of all the tribe — the ‘Green Muse' — the Water of the Star Wormwood, whereof many men have died — the absinthia tetra, which are deemed to deserve the adjective in a worse sense than that which the greatest of Roman poets meant." Which other writer on wine has managed to bring the twin summits of Parnassus so close to one another?