I thought my eyes were deceiving me when this popped into my email. I figured I had been working too hard with the new product.
Carl Jung wine and alcohol free into the bargain. I upset my French visitor last year by ordering a crate of alcohol free wine. I felt very left out of things as he made wine all sound very interesting, so I ordered some wine for me so I could join in.
He wasn’t impressed but then again he had been supping the best that France could offer all his days.
I’m not sure if your drink of choice is a personality issue. If I was a drinker I would probably be a wine drinker more than a beer drinker. As it is, I am mostly a tea drinker; Earl Grey mind you.
They say that each wine has a personality of its own and I like to believe that. Despite not drinking it, I find everything about wine fascinating and like the idea of each one having a personality.
I liked the reds as long as they were chilled (sacrilege, I know). So if you’re not French and you are into psychological profiling then you may fancy a bottle of Carl Jung.
Jung’s work was a great influence on Alcoholics’ Anonymous founder, Rowland Hazard, whom Jung had treated for alcoholism in the early 1930s.
Martin is right when he says that the drink of choice is probably not a personality issue. For my part, I think it is above all an education issue. For a Frenchman, as for a Bavarian regarding alcohol free beer, an alcohol free wine is a heresy because we have no tradition of this kind of product. But, if we leave the emotive reaction to touch the product itself, I concede that alcohol free wine is not totally a gastronomic contre-sens (misconception): the important is to judge the quality of the product in the context in which it is consumed.
To drink with food, the alcohol free wine is for me really a contre-sens. The alcohol is the support of the mix in the palate, between the “corps” of the wine and the food, especially food which contains salt, spices or lactose. It is the element which permits to discover the secret savour of both drink and food. It is not a poetic view, it is simply chemical. On the other side, I am sure that a good alcohol free wine white or rosy, very fresh, could be an excellent aperitif (I don’t speak about alcohol free wine red because I have a too bad memory of his odour…). It’s my objective opinion but I am not sure that my compatriots could agree with that.
In France, wine is a very old cultural tradition. I remember that, when I was child, my parents brought my brother and me in a village in the mountains of the South of France, to visit a very old man, the grandfather of my mother. This man had just a little house and a field where vines was growing. He brought us among his vines without saying any word. Finally he cut two little pieces of vine, and gave them to my brother and me. We have never seen this man any more, but I have religiously conserved this piece of familial vine and I know that my brother too. I remember also when the uncle of my wife presented to me his little vineyard and speak to me about it during a long time. At the end, he gave to me three bottles of the wine he has made with it, that means I was accepted in his family. This wine was absolutely bad, but I was very touched of this mark of respect.
So, wine is a business between men and earth. Maybe it means that we try to find in the wine the lost blood of our foster mother. In this way, an alcohol free wine called “Sigmund Freud Red” could probably be a very attractive product in France.