On whether alcohol is a drug and whether wine is just alcohol

The other day, The ARA editorial spoke of a very serious problem: Catalonia leads—in other respects, no—world drug consumption. We read: "What has become of the "No to drugs" of a few decades ago? Is there a certain frivolity when talking about it? Tobacco is fortunately stigmatized, and alcohol increasingly so. Regarding the abuse of anti-anxiety drugs (here too, we are world leaders in consumption), associated with a hard and marginal drug addiction, it is on the decline. On the other hand, cocaine, linked to glamorous success (economic, artistic), far from creating social alarm, circulates with impunity."

Everything in this paragraph couldn't be more true. Now, when we say "alcohol," we mean beer, we mean vodka, and we mean wine. And they are not, at all, the same thing. I would say that wine, because of the history of the Mediterranean, because of Christian culture, because of the incomparable landscape of vines that have lived longer than us, is not exactly the same as a mixed drink, with all due respect to them, which I adore, or a beer, with all due respect to it, which I adore.

Wine is culture, we repeat, because wine is peasants maintaining a landscape that has been ceded to them and that they will cede; they are winemakers working their magic, bottling bits of earth and stone; they are sommeliers uncovering what someone has been covering up for so long. Imagine if at the Last Supper Jesus Christ had offered his blood into the chalice and Peter had said: "Holy crap, 14 degrees! I'm not going to drink that, I prefer a soft drink, I have to drive the chariot." And Lucas would have replied: "It starts by drinking your blood and ends badly. Don't you have anything dealcoholized?" And Marc, while he was at it, would have added: "And bread has gluten!"

Only Mary Magdalene, hidden in a corner, would have tasted it and ended up saying: "Blindly, I say it's a Bull's Blood."