Prohibition and Permission

Prohibition and Permission are the twin sisters of the wine business.

Stopping people from drinking may be the second oldest profession in the world. It’s not as easy to see, but prohibition sleeps next to permission in the vineyards. Since you can’t prohibit people from drinking unless they were drinking in the first place, permission goes back as long as prohibition.

Permission

Fear of losing control gives birth to Prohibition. The whole point of drinking wine is losing control. At least at selected wine venues dedicated to that purpose.

The Minoan wine cult of Dionysios on prehistoric Crete, circa 1500-2500 B.C., is arguably the oldest religious organization in recorded history. Dionysios (Bacchus, if you’re Italian) is said to have brought the first vine cuttings to the Greeks and taught them how to make wine.

The point of having a god like Dionysios is to lose control. Apollo was the god of accountants. There was no losing control in the temple of Apollo. But Dionysios didn’t even have a temple. He lived in the woods.

His main thing was driving women sexually, ecstatically so crazy they left their homes and followed him while shouting, singing and dancing naked through the forest. It was quite a sight, I’m sure. And it probably scared the cows.

When Dionysios did get out of the forest and go into town, he came down all wrapped up in a fawn skin, riding on a chariot pulled by several large growling panthers. I don’t mind telling you that the whole panther thing got city people nervous right off.

He was followed by dozens of drunken satyrs (half goat, half man), his teacher who was a centaur (half horse, half man) and hundreds of women screaming, beating on tambourines and using their bare hands to tear the flesh off of any man they met on the road.

This proved troublesome to the neighbors. Not to mention random men on the road. As you might imagine there were quite a number of social issues connected to the wine god.

First of all, pretty much only women were allowed to be members of his cult. Not every single husband in ancient Greece was on board with this plan. Their wives and daughters would disappear from their homes and go out running naked in the woods

Second, the women did this at night. This was because, of all the gods, only Dionysios had no temple; his people got together in the woods—preferably under a full moon. I suppose the night forest put a point on the whole wild and out of control thing. For some reason naked women dancing under a full moon at night make men jumpy.

Third, the whole point of a wine cult is to lose control. Now I ask you, if you go and ask the first 50 men you meet in the frozen meat section at Safeway if they think their teenage daughter needs to lose control more often, what do you think they would say?

See what I mean? Social tension arises.

The wine God has been watered down a lot over the last 5,000 years. Some people don’t even believe in centaurs anymore. Although if you’ve been to a singles bar lately it might occur to you that all those half men, half goats may have just moved indoors.

Carrie Nation and her famous hatchet. from Smithsonian Magazine smithsonianmag.com

Prohibition

Whenever there is even a promise of wine and it’s inherent wildness, there are people who dedicate their lives to making sure the promise is never kept. A religious institution is often involved.

In the United States, there was the actual Prohibition of wine and other alcohol products for thirteen years from 1920-1933 of course.

The effect on the wine business was catastrophic and turned family wineries into illegal operations. It made criminals of families who were just doing what their families had done for generations.

“Men are nicotine soaked, beer besmirched, whiskey greased, red-eyed devils.” —Carrie Nation

But I think in the long term, the most effective and long lasting prohibition against drinking wine in the U.S. was from an Englishman, Thomas Welch, born in Glastonbury on the auspicious date of December 31, 1825—long before Carrie Nation took to walking into Kansas saloons and chopping up bottles of liquor with her hatchet (1881).

And even longer before the Temperance Unions forced the adoption of the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution which banned sales of alcohol in 1920.

Thomas Bramwell Welch, Dentist, Minister and the creator of Welch’s Grape Juice

Thomas Welch was a Methodist Minister who in 1856 left God to become a Dentist. Doesn’t everyone? (The Methodist Ministry has always been a rich source of Dentistry excellence.)

He proceeded—as a god-fearing dentist—to dedicate his life to finding a way to control wine (and therefore wine drinkers) by stopping natural fermentation, thus creating a non-alcoholic wine. I know about this stuff, as you know by now, because I was President of Ariel Vineyards where we actually did create a non alcoholic wine without boiling it or stopping fermentation either one.

Believe me when I tell you, it isn’t easy and it isn’t cheap. Tom had his work cut out for him trying that trick in the 19th century.

The Reverend Dr. Welch then founded the “Welch’s Dental Supply Company” in Philadelphia and published a dentistry journal. He joined with his son Charles who lived in the impossibly ironically named town of Vineland, New Jersey. Together they began promoting grape juice as a wine substitute in the Church.

It worked. He and Charles sold his fine Welch’s Grape Juice to churches with admirable enthusiasm. Just for a start, every Methodist Church in the country bought the stuff. This is in fact, the very stuff I drank as a child at communion in the Bellaire Methodist Church back in Bellaire, Texas.

Doctor Welch was no slouch as a marketer either. He convinced people that God wanted them to drink Welch’s grape juice instead of wine. That’s what is known in the marketing business as a unique selling proposition. I for one, wish I had thought of it.

Tom didn’t win Prohibition but he won the marketing war.

He sold more grape juice than all the wine Jesus made at the Wedding of Cana. As good a prohibitionist as Thomas Welch was, he was hardly the first. Welch was part of a tradition that stretches back at least 3,700 years.

“Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the Bible says love your enemy.” – Frank Sinatra.

My favorite prohibitionist is the sixth King of the First Babylonian Dynasty, Hammurabi who ruled from 1792 BC to 1750 BC. As King he issued the famous Code of Hammurabi (1772 BC) which he said he received from none other than God. In this case, Shamash, the God of Justice. Hammurabi’s prohibition was a little different. He made paying money for beer illegal.

In English it reads, “If a beer seller does not receive barley as the price for beer, but if she receives money or makes the beer a measure smaller than the barley measure received, they shall throw her into the water.”

“The water” would be the Euphrates River. One of the four rivers that was said to flow out from the Garden of Eden.

The idea that paying money for beer should be illegal would be a big hit these days I suspect. Especially if you could toss people in the river for breaking the law. In New York City the East River alone would be a floating mass of errant beer salesmen. Or women, since the Hammurabi Code does specifically cite a woman as the recalcitrant merchant.

Controlling the uncontrollable

It will surprise you to learn that social tension between men and women still exists today. Permission and prohibition have not settled their differences yet. Men’s issues with trying to control women haven’t resolved themselves either. And for some reason a lot of women just don’t want to be controlled by men even if they are not dancing naked in the street.

Dionysios would be proud.