A glass of wine: Musings from a Catholic priest

I’ve never had a particularly sophisticated approach to drinking wine. I’m happy enough to drink whatever is offered, whether in a fancy glass or a red solo cup. I know nothing about food pairings or how to activate a palate. Like most everyone else, the wine aisle at the grocery store paralyzes me with too many choices.

This will not be a pretentious essay written to assert my culinary superiority (I have none to assert). Rather, it’s the musing of a Catholic priest on the spiritual lessons we can draw from a bottle of wine, a priest who currently has a sacristy full of wine bottles, whose very prayer life revolves around the daily consecration, offering, and consumption of wine at the altar (after consecration the reality of what’s in the chalice is Christ himself, but the appearance and taste remain that of wine).

It occurred to me the other day just how very important wine is to me even though I don’t think of myself as a connoisseur.

Altar wine isn’t anything fancy. It’s a humble, dependable liquid with a workaday quality that’s a far cry from the purposes to which it will be dedicated at the altar. In this way, it’s very much like you and me. We place our lives on the altar along with the bread and wine, our humble and ordinary lives, and in the hands of the priest, offered to the Father, we are lifted to a purpose far beyond our earthly limits. Something in us transfigures and shines.

What has always fascinated me about Holy Mass is that we don’t offer grapes. We offer wine. This means that we’re not only giving God the fruit of the earth but also the effort and ingenuity and artistry that goes into crafting the contents of the bottle. Through the wine we offer our time and effort. To offer wine means far more than a grape, because the offering includes so much more of us.

Ever since I moved from the east coast back to my home state of Missouri, I’ve been interested in the local wines of this state, particularly the way in which they reflect the history, agriculture, environment, and work of local communities. It’s a little-known fact that Missouri is the first, great wine-growing region in the United States. German immigrants in the Missouri River valley were making world-class wines long before Napa. In the 19th century, Missouri wineries were some of the highest selling vineyards in the nation.

The reason that Missouri wines today are obscure isn’t because of low quality but because, for various reasons, prohibition hit the area with great force and the industry was painfully slow to recover. It was many decades after prohibition ended that wineries finally re-opened here. Today, the wineries are flourishing and making excellent wines, but in the interval the grapes that have achieved massive branding and recognition, such as Chardonnay and Zinfandel, are impossible to grow in our climate.

Our most sophisticated local offering is made from the Norton grape. The Norton was created by Dr. Norton in Virginia, not long after Thomas Jefferson, who lived in the same region, had given up on his failing Monticello vineyards planted with European grapes. The vine simply wouldn’t survive in our different climate.

Over time, the Norton matured and was adopted by Missouri wine growers who finally succeeded in creating a world-class wine from it. At one point after prohibition, the grape was all but lost. The vines had been pulled up and destroyed. It was only recovered due to discovering it growing in the garden of a local bootlegger. Today, the Norton is under cultivation again and is a real pleasure to drink.

Because I don’t have a great palate, the best I can write about the Norton is that I really like drinking it. For a much better description, we can turn to the philosopher Roger Scruton who, in a column on wine for the New Statesman, writes,

The particular bottle he tasted was from Virginia, but I can agree with him that when I drink our local Norton, I get a (slightly different) taste of the Missouri River valley. The grapevines gather up and express hundreds of years of history.

Wine enthusiasts refer to the connection of grapevine to the local environment as terroir. This expression of local place, the beauty and fittingness of the lives we’ve been given, this is what so fascinates me about wine. It tastes like home, my home.

We spend so much of our time wanting to be someone else. Someone better or at least just different. Or we want to be somewhere else, thinking that if we can relocate, all our problems will disappear. But to be in a place and learn to love it, to take up its particular work among its particular people, to live the specific life each of us has been given, nothing is more transformative.

I’ll never be a great California Zinfandel or a French Bordeaux. I’ve been nurtured by the dense clay Ozark soil of Missouri, the oak and dogwoods, the great rivers that empty the continent, and our parochial city of St. Louis with its patchwork neighborhoods and rivalries. At best I’m a glass of Norton or, even better, the unpretentious altar wine that arrives at my parish each month in massive jugs.

We are destined for the altar. We are made to be poured out as an offering before the God who loves us individually and sees within us something noble and marvelous, something worth saving. What is it? I don’t quite know ... such are the mysteries of love. All I know is that God loves me. He loves you. All I know is that we each have a terroir, and our path to greatness is not becoming someone else but, rather, in giving ourselves to God just as we are.