Is Byron’s claret light and Madeira strong ‘bottled poetry’ as Robert Louis Stevenson described wine? Not perhaps if you scan the deathless prose of your average wine tasting note (my own among them). Auberon Waugh was idiosyncratic, once describing a Languedoc red as ‘hairy and longbottomed’, Kingsley Amis curmudgeonly: ‘when I hear someone talking about an austere unforgiving wine, I turn a bit austere and unforgiving myself’.

Virginia Woolf thought ‘language is wine upon the lips’. In The Waves, she writes: ‘instinctively my palate now requires and anticipates sweetness and lightness, something sugared and evanescent; and cool wine, fitting glove-like over those finer nerves that seem to tremble from the roof of my mouth and make it spread (as I drink) into a domed cavern, green with vine leaves, musk-scented, purple with grapes’.

‘Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors’, requested John Keats. Sponsored by The Independent, The Woodstock Literary Festival is in full swing today and I will be there to introduce a tasting of Castillo Perelada by Charlie Croft, who I’m expecting to be somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Kingsley Amis.

I don’t suppose anyone will mention Wine Drinking for Inspired Thinking by Michael J. Gelb (Running Press, £11.99, 20 September). But this provocatively creative guide cites Leonardo da Vinci, Socrates and Einstein as supporters of the view that wine is capable of inspiring creative thinking. According to Gelb, they believed that ‘relaxation opens the gate to the vast potential of the mind that is beyond the ordinary IQ’, in other words, to creative thinking. Da Vinci went further: ‘write drunk, revise sober’.

‘Wine makes men happy and sociable’ said Baudelaire; ‘a great giver of happiness, well-being and delight’ in Hemingway’s view. The power of wine to help us lose our inhibitions was recognized by Aristophanes. ‘Quick, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever’. Rather grandly, Clifton Fadiman saw this gateway as an opportunity ‘to savor a droplet of the river of human history’.

Gargantua’s first cry at birth was ‘Drink! Drink! Drink!’, but, on reaching the Temple of the Bottle, he sees inscribed above the door: ‘In wine lies truth’. Rabelais’ message is that wine makes us receptive to ideas and truths. Heraclitus would disagree: ‘Hide our ignorance as we will, an evening of wine soon reveals it’. Is ‘one of the disadvantages of wine… that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts’, as Samuel Johnson suggested?

Goethe felt that ‘wine rejoices the heart of man, and joy is the mother of all virtue’. Though we look askance at conspicuous consumption today, much common sense praise of wine has often come with a health warning. ‘ Use a little wine for the sake of thy stomach’, said Paul to Timothy. Socrates advised that ‘if we drink temperately, and small draughts at a time, the wine distils into our lungs like the sweetest morning dew.’

For John Milton ‘wine, one sip will bathe the drooping spirit in delight beyond the bliss of dreams. Be wise and taste’. Indeed, but we mustn’t be allowed to forget that pleasure comes with a price tag. ‘I like best the wine drunk at the cost of others’, said Diogenes, while Horace was keen to remind us ‘come taste my wine but ere thou try it, remember friend, that thou must buy it’.

Something For the Weekend 18 September 2010

Under a Fiver

2009 Domaine des Trois Pierres, Costières de Nîmes

Vivid and blackberry-scented, this exuberant Rhône blend is full of the joys of mellow autumnal fruit with a rustic chunkiness that cries out for grills and pasta. £4.99, down from £6.69, Waitrose, to 27 September.

Under a Tenner

2009 Lenswood Hills Pinot Noir, Pikes, Adelaide Hills

Delicately fragrant with pinot noir’s raspberry-scent, this ‘divine juice of the grape’ from the coolest part of the Adelaide Hills boasts a refined core of succulently opulent berry fruit enlivened by a nippy freshness. £9.99, Laithwaites (0845 194 7720).

Splash Out

2007 Les Tourelles de Longueville, Pauillac

‘Forswear thin potations’ and try this second wine of second growth Château Pichon Baron, a claret whose smoky cassis and dark cherry fruit quality and firm backbone will happily murder a Sunday roast. £23.99, Tesco Fine Wine (95 stores).