Just A Taste
Transubstantiation is the process by which the bread and wine offered at Mass is changed into the literal body and blood of Jesus, though to all outward appearances they remain the same. It lets the recipient eat his God. It is an old idea, the ritual consumption of the deity as religious practice. It is also a stunningly beautiful compression of our human desire for communion with our animalistic need to consume. Joseph Campbell said life consumes life in order to sustain itself, and that by ingesting the god we become part of that whole, we are sustained.
This change from bread to body, wine to blood is completed in Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, Part 2, 29
Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let y our presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face
grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.
In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.
And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.
(Translation: Stephen Mitchell)
This is wine’s central mystery: the change from one thing into another. What starts out as a fruit becomes a juice and in the process of fermentation becomes wine. I’ve often told customers that wine is the art of controlled decay, that wine - even the humblest - is a living thing, with a rough life span and a moment when it is at its peak.
Just like you and me.
It is wine’s capacity to hold our metaphors that make it so central to our religious observances, to our daily rituals. This is the work of transubstantiation: if drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.
Consume the god.
Change yourself.
Now I’m not suggesting that I think of all this when I have a glass of wine, when I share a glass with those I love, but it is there in the glass waiting for you to fix your gaze on it. It is easy to get drawn into the linguistic gymnastics of wine writing, trying to describe a sensory experience so that another might understand what it tastes like. My work compels the same from me, but of greater interest to me is trying to tell you what wine might mean - not as a specific sensory experience, but as a metaphor for our very human desires.
This is just a taste.