When I first wrote about this book, I placed these notes in a chapter called “Wine in Art,” although Mythologies (1957) is not a work of art. The category was loose. Barthes himself described the pieces collected here as reflections, written between 1954 and 1956, on the myths of everyday French life. Their material could be an article, a photograph, a film, a performance or an exhibition. The subject, he admitted, was simply his own present.
One of those reflections concerns wine. “Wine and Milk” runs to barely four pages, but Barthes finds more in the glass than most longer books on the subject. Wine is a “totem-drink,” a “mythical substance,” and something through which France recognises itself. His chosen opposite is not water but milk.
The distinction is wonderfully physical. Wine cuts, unsettles and transforms. Milk binds, covers and restores. Its whiteness belongs to childhood, innocence and a calm kind of strength. Milk, however, remains exotic in the French imagination. Wine is national.
Seventy years later, a text so deliberately tied to its moment will inevitably show its age. Some of its observations now feel less secure, or at least less exclusively French. Yet Barthes was already unwilling to let the beauty of wine conceal the conditions of its production. If wine was a fine and good substance, he wrote, it also carried considerable weight within French capitalism.
The sentence has not aged badly. Wine in the twenty-first century can be an agricultural product, a luxury object, an investment, a lifestyle and a piece of content, sometimes all at once. It is difficult not to wonder what Barthes would have made of our own version of the industry, or of the ease with which commerce now borrows the language of nature, authenticity and resistance.
Still, the essay is most enjoyable when Barthes concentrates on what wine supposedly does to us. Red or white (champagne is a conspicuous absence in a text about France), wine is a substance of conversion. It can turn situations and states inside out, drawing the opposite from what is already there. The weak man becomes courageous; the silent one starts talking. Wine retains an old alchemical inheritance, a power of transmutation and of creation ex nihilo.
This is the tremendous liquid repeated in folklore, proverbs, conversation and literature. The important thing is not whether wine really performs every transformation attributed to it. Myth does not need that kind of proof. It becomes effective through repetition, until drinking wine feels less like one choice among others and more like the natural continuation of work, food, courage, sociability or celebration.
Barthes makes another distinction that is harder to accept without qualification. In France, he argues, wine is not consumed in order to become drunk in the way that whisky might be. Drunkenness is a possible, perhaps probable, consequence, but never the purpose. Whether or not the claim survives scrutiny, it says something revealing about the image France wished to keep of its own drinking. Wine could transform the drinker while remaining part of ordinary life. Intoxication was incidental to the ritual, not its stated end.
That is why the definition Barthes offers midway through the essay remains the one I like best. For all the mythology, national identity, capitalism and transmutation gathered around it, wine can also be something much simpler: “the prolongation of a pleasure.”
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957). Portuguese edition: Mitologias, translated and prefaced by José Augusto Seabra (Lisbon: Edições 70, 1997).