BÉLA HAMVAS

The Philosophy of Wine

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 BÉLA HAMVAS

The Philosophy of Wine

Translated from the Hungarian
by Gábor Csepregi

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 After all, two will remain,
God and the wine.

I decided to write a prayer book for the atheists. In the distress of

our time, I felt sympathy for the sufferers and wanted to help them
in this way.
I am aware of the difficulty of my task. I know that I cannot
even utter the word “God.” I must speak of him by using all sorts
of other names such as kiss or intoxication or cooked ham. I chose
wine as the most important name. Hence the title of the book, The
Philosophy of Wine, and hence its motto: after all, two will remain,
God and the wine.
Circumstances lead me to resort to trickery. Atheists, it is well
known, are lamentably haughty people. They only need to glance
at God’s name and they will immediately throw the book down.
When one touches their obsession, they get into a fury. I think that
if I speak of food, drink, tobacco, and love, if I use enigmatic names,
then they can be duped. For, besides being conceited, they are, to
the same extent, stupid. For example, they altogether ignore this
kind of prayer. They think that one can pray only in a church or by
murmuring priestly words.
Atheists are our poor in spirit. They are the most needy children of
our time. They are poor in spirit but the difference is that they have
hardly any hope for the kingdom of heaven. In the past, many were

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angry with them and fought against them. I consider this method
completely unacceptable. To fight? Should a healthy person fight
with the lame and the blind? Since they are crippled, they must be
approached with good will. Not only should persuasion be avoided
but they should not even notice what is happening to them. They
should be regarded as retarded children, even as mentally weak,
although they hold their mental faculties in high esteem and think
that atheism is a sort of perfect knowledge. Why were they fought
against in the past? Above all, it seems to me, because atheism,
understood as mental deficiency and distorted mood, would get no-
thing out of life without some kind of compensation. What is this
compensation? It is excessive activity. Thus, atheism necessarily led
to violence and, since it led to it, atheists had to secure supremacy
over the world. Indeed, they secured it. Actually, those who fought
against them were envious of them. In my opinion, that was a mis-
take. When the atheists saw themselves being envied, they became
presumptuous.
I have changed tactics. It was not particularly difficult. I only
needed to reinstate the truth. The truth is that there is nothing to
envy in them. What can I envy in the cripple even if he is so po-
werful? What can I envy in those who are lame, deaf, idiotic, and
half-witted? If I was envious of them, this would mean that I ad-
mit that they are right; I would create the impression that I desire
what they possess.

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 I have changed my tactics in the following manner. Instead of
fighting against them and making efforts to convert them, I feel
sorry for them. And this is not merely a trick. I do not want to take
anything away from them. I would like to offer something else
whose absence would render them quite weak, poor, and – why to
deny it? – ridiculous.
Incidentally, there were other reasons behind those numerous
disputes. Indeed, most people thought that atheists were irreligious.
Of course, this is out of the question. There are no irreligious people.
Atheists are not irreligious, but, in agreement with their pitiful men-
tal deficiency and distorted mood, believe in a comical religion. In
fact, they do not only believe in it. They are all bigots. So I say that
all of them are, since I have never met an atheist who is not more
bigoted than that bad smelling old lady who, on Sundays, in front
of the church, sells cheap booklets published on the subject of the
miracle-making urine of Saint Homunculus. Of course, the patron-
saint of atheistic religion is not Saint Homunculus, but Einstein, and
the miracle-making power is not urine, but antiseptics. The name of
atheistic bigotry is materialism. This religion contains three dogmas:
there is no soul, a human is an animal, death is annihilation. All
three can be summed up by simply saying that atheists are terribly
afraid of God. Böhme tells us that they live in God’s wrath. They
know only the angry God: therefore, they hide themselves and tell
lies. They think that by saying that God does not exist, they will
cease to be afraid. Instead, of course, they are even more afraid.

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 Of course, the atheist is a presumptuous man, he does not even
want to be different; he has no inclination for humility or love; in
other words, he is so feeble that he cannot even display such an
inclination. He prefers to remain in his fear, which he denies. He
trembles and hides himself and tells lies and becomes increasingly
haughty. From such a disconsolate hotchpotch, in which denial, fear,
lying, hiding, haughtiness, and bigotry are boiling together, emerges
the religious surrogate of materialism.
From this it clearly follows that atheists not only cannot, but
also must not, be persuaded by force. They are wayward people,
full of worries and self-delusions, and one must handle them with
considerable care.
Fortunately, the soul is not like the body. If someone is born
maimed, deaf, or, during his life becomes crippled, no human power
can change that. The realm of the soul is different. Everyone is born
with a wholesome soul and no one can ever lose this health. Every-
one can become cured of the deficiencies of the soul. This does not
even need a miracle.
A prayer book for the atheists? Namely one that does not even
allow them to notice that it teaches them to pray. It is a great thing.
Therefore, as Nietzsche says, one must speak only in this manner:
cynically and innocently. One must speak wickedly and cunningly,
almost with malicious cleverness and, at the same time, with pure
heart, serenity, and simplicity, like a songbird.

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 I must seize this occasion to address a few words to the pietists,
that shady sect of atheists. Pietism is nothing else but atheism in
disguise. The ordinary materialist is a pitiful soul; his mental facul-
ties are weak, sometimes his heart is completely stupid, and hence,
as I have already said several times, one must consider him a cripple
who obsessively holds on to his deficiency and considers his clumsi-
ness a significant achievement.
Actually, the pietist is just as godless as the materialist; but,
beyond that, he also has a bad consciousness that prompts him to
adopt the externals of true religion. The pietist would demand that
one live on bran and water; he would like to see the most beautiful
women wearing badly cut dresses, he would forbid laughter, and
cover the sun with a black veil. The pietist is an abstainer. I know
quite well that even my motto roused his indignation; he asked
gloomily and angrily, “Come on, what is this blasphemy?” He was
scandalized because I dared to say that God is also in cooked ham.
Well, he should calm down. He will hear something even more
daring. I promise that I will have special consideration for him and
miss no occasion to scandalize him to the most serious extent. One
should spare the atheist because he is stupid and ignorant and nar-
row and simple-minded. The pietist cannot expect any indulgence.
He should know that I will be watching him from the corner of
my eye and the more that he puts on a solemn face, the more I will
laugh at him. The more he will express his indignation, the more
I will enjoy myself and I will not even tell him why.

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 THREE

This book must necessarily be divided into three parts. Necessarily

because every good book is divided into three parts – three being
a perfect way of dividing – but also because the number of wine is
also three and this must find its expression in the division.
The first part is devoted to the metaphysics of wine. It is not
only my goal, but also my ambition, in this part, to lay down the
foundation of all future philosophy of wine. Just as Kant sets forth
the pivotal thoughts of all subsequent philosophies, which we may
accept or counter but never evade and consider as unsaid. In the same
manner, I wish, in this part, to expound the universally valid and
timeless ideas of the metaphysics of wine.
By using the word “metaphysics,” I know that I step beyond the
permissible boundary. However, the word remains hidden. It is no-
where in the title. It is a constraint that I cannot avoid since atheists
are even mistrustful of philosophy, although this is the highest term
that they are still able to accept. Metaphysics offends their bigotry
to such an extent that, for example, they would never have dared to
open a book that I had titled The Metaphysics of Wine.
The first part considers wine as a supernatural reality. The sec-
ond one speaks of wine as nature. As to its character, this part is
descriptive. It discusses the properties and types of grapes, the types

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of wines, the relationship between soil and wine, water and wine;
it not only takes special account of our wines but it also pays atten-
tion to the most prominent wines from abroad.
The third part deals with the art of wine ceremony. This part
inquires about when we should drink and when we should not drink.
How should we drink? Where should we drink? From what? Alone?
With someone? With a man or a woman? It speaks of the relation-
ship between wine and work, wine and walk, wine and bath, wine
and sleep, wine and love. It contains some rules indicating what kind
of wine is appropriate for certain occasions, how much is needed,
with what kind of food, where to drink it and in what sort of com-
bination.
This part does not pretend at all to be exhaustive. It merely
wishes to point out the boundless richness of drinking possibilities
and calls upon everyone, even now, to keep adding to the teachings
of wine ceremony with ever new chapters.
Such a triple division is in complete harmony with the three main
ages of the world history of wine. The meaning corresponding to the
metaphysical part is the antediluvian age, during which humanity
did not yet know wine, only dreamt about it. After the Flood, Noah
planted the first vine and, with this act, a new era began in world
history. The third era begins with the transformation of water into
wine, and presently we live in this era. World history comes to an
end when wine flows from springs and wells, when wine falls from
the clouds, when lakes and seas become wine.

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The Metaphysics of Wine

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 WORLD OF THE MOUTH

In our mother’s womb, we are attached to the world through our

navel. After our birth, through our mouth. Among our sensory
organs, the eyes are the abstract ones; they never establish direct
contact with the object they see and they are unable to merge with
it. The ear lets things somewhat closer. The hand grasps them. The
nose even inhales the vapour of things. The mouth takes in what it
desires. I can only come to know what the object is if I taste it. The
mouth is the source of immediate experiences. A child knows this.
When he wants to familiarize himself with something, he puts it
into his mouths. Later we forget this. Yet I can only come to know
who this man is if I have spoken to him with words coming from
my mouth; I only learned to know a woman if I have kissed her;
I have only made something my own if I have eaten it. The world
of the mouth is much more immediate, consequently more religious,
than the world of the eyes, the world of the ear or even the world of
the hand, because it is closer to reality. Hence, as Novalis tells us,
there is a profound kinship between eating and learning. Hence the
mother of all of us is the earth, which feeds us through our mouth,
and we merge with what it offers to us.
The mouth carries out three activities: it speaks, kisses, and eats.
Unfortunately, at this time I have to remain silent about speech

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and, though reluctantly, about kiss as well. I would merely say that
through my mouth I am directly merged with the world and, in such
a togetherness, three of my activities are possible: either I give, or
I take, or I both give and take. While speaking, I give; while eating,
I take, while kissing, I both give and take. The word moves in an
outward, the food in an inward direction, the kiss both outward and
inward directions, and that makes a circle. Of course, one activity
does not exclude the other two but it could even be said to support
them, since when the soil nourishes me, it also speaks to me, teaches
me, and even kisses me; when I kiss a beautiful woman, I also find
nourishment in her as she does in me, and we both feed each other,
teach each other, and talk to each other; most of the time we say
something whose depth is beyond words.
There are three sorts of nourishment: eating, drinking, and breath-
ing. Those who are well-versed in the great science of tradition know
that food has a close relationship with the body; they also know that
the meaning corresponding to drink is the soul’s world; as for breath-
ing, it is a spiritual nourishment. To render the spirituality of their
being more intense, women apply perfumes and men smoke.
Until now, I have discussed the three activities of the mouth,
and the three sorts of nourishment. Now I want to talk about the
third triple division, namely – since we talk about the philosophy
of wine – the three primeval liquids. The three primeval liquids
are cold, warm, and intermediary. Cold and warm do not refer to a
liquid’s temperature but to their characteristic features.

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 There are three sorts of warm liquids: water, oil, and wine. There
are also three sorts of cold liquids: tea (coffee), beer, and milk. In the
middle, there is only one basic fluid: blood.

MOUTH

Speech Nourishment Kiss

(spiritual) (material) (psychical)

Food Liquids (drink) Breathing

(material) (psychical) (spiritual)

Warm Centre Cold

(psychical) (spiritual) (material)

Water, Oil, Wine Blood Tea/Coffee, Beer, Milk*

*
There are only three basic liquids: water, milk, and blood. All
other liquids are the result of the common work of both nature and
humans. Wine and beer are produced with the help of yeast, tea
and coffee require the boiling of the natural products of plants, oil
is a fat of plant origin. Accordingly, the list could have comprised
many other drinks as well. However, those on the list are not due
to the arbitrariness of the writer. In his selection, Hamvas took into
consideration the most often consumed drinks and liquids of people
living in the 20th Century. (Editor’s note.)

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If someone would like to construct the closest corresponding mean-
ings, he may do this in the following manner:

BLOOD
Sun – Sunday – A – red – gold – 1
BEER
Moon – Monday – C – white – silver – 2
WATER
Mercury – Wednesday – F – yellow – mercury – 7
TEA (COFFEE)
Mars – Tuesday – G – violet – iron – 4
MILK
Venus – Friday – E – green – copper – 5
OIL
Jupiter – Thursday – D – blue – tin – 6
WINE
Saturn – Saturday – H – black – lead – 3

Considering the corresponding meanings, this chart presents the

seven fluids’ relationships to the planets, to the days of the week,
to the seven tones, to the seven colours of the rainbow, to the seven
metals, and to the seven numbers. As it appears, the wine’s day is

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Saturday, its planet is Saturn, its colour is black, its metal is lead,
its tone is H, and its number is three.
For some, all this may seem rather odd. What is the meaning of
three and Saturn and lead? Patience, it will become clear that things
are much more interesting than they first appear.

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 HIERATIC MASKS

If I were a woman, I would have liked to serve food with passion.

I am convinced that my sandwiches would have been famous because
no one in the whole wide world would have been able to pick out
with more ambition, and to combine with more ingenuity, the co-
lour harmonies and forms of lemon, salmon, ham, egg, and parsley.
My platter, prepared for an afternoon tea, would have been more
beautiful than if it had been painted by van Ruysdael. In my pantry,
the jars, sugar, semolina, and farfel would have stood like soldiers or
ballerinas, in an orderly line. My linen cupboard would have been
as rational and exact as a library.
But, since I am a man, I like to give vent to this passionate ped-
antry by making charts. It is my prejudice that order is not only
beautiful but also useful. There is order, as I see it, when everything
is in its place. In this manner, I prepared my chart about the planets,
numbers, fluids, and colours. I wanted to put wine into its place in the
world. But the place had to be defined first. The pedants are fanatical
about cases and boxes and they are able to spend days of repeatedly
lining them up according to their size, colour, form and putting the
wood, metal, and paper boxes into separate groups until they find
a perfectly satisfying system. Of course, as I have already said, not
only the aesthetic, but also the intellectual-economic significance

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of this order is very important (I wrote the word “intellectual-eco-
nomic” not for the cultivated reader but for the scientifist.)
Order, I say, is not altogether without meaning. It is so not only
because of the particular significance we humans like to accord to
order. That is merely a secondary matter here. What I would point
out is that, according to the teaching of sacred science, the sign and
planet of this passionate pedantry is a certain Saturn, which was just
mentioned. Saturn is the planet of the golden age. It is the master
of the age when every thing and every being is at its own place and,
therefore, lives in an undisturbed happiness. I say it incorrectly. The
golden age is not a historical era but a condition and, as such, it is
present all the time; the only thing it depends on is whether there
is someone to realize it. Saturn is the symbol of the great primeval
paradisiacal order. Hence this planet is linked to three, which is the
number of measurement. And hence it has to do with wine, which
lifts humans out of the confused world so that it can place them
back into the order of the golden age.
The other planets, numbers, fluids, tones, colours, and metals of
the chart are also symbols. The whole figure represents nothing else
but the world of creation put into exact order, like a linen cupboard
or a catalogue. Order is the key of the world, says the passionately
pedant obsessed by Saturn. If I put things into order, if everything
is in its place, the meaning of the world is restored. All philosophies
are such attempts to restore meaning. And by doing this, something
very peculiar happens. Yes, very peculiar, namely that the follow-

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ing comes to light: ultimately, the multitude of things appearing
different is an appearance. Everything is one. Hen panta einai, says
Heraclitus. Things appear different only in a scattered state. In truth,
all things are different manifestations of the same One. Its masks.
Everything I can see and hear, eat and drink, think and grasp, all
are the hieratic masks of the unique One. The C tone is a mask just
like tobacco smoke; song is a mask just like lead, blood, Thursday,
or yellow. Whose mask? Who is this One? Böhme says that the
devil has no faces, only larvae.
With this I have uttered the basic idea of the philosophy of
wine. What is wine? A hieratic mask. Someone is behind it. Some-
one who has countless masks and who lives, at the same moment,
behind the masks of Mercury, gold, F tone, red colour, who is,
in the same instant, a book, speech, woman’s laughter, a pair of
spectacles, and cooked duck.
Obviously, from this follows something else as well and, for
the sake of what is to come, we should keep it in mind. Since ul-
timately, hen panta einai, that is, everything is one, then, indeed
everything dwells in everything. In the blood, there is also Sunday,
and gold and the E tone. It is such a scale, on which, if I sound
any tone, the whole tone system resounds; it does this, in the di-
rection of kindred tones, more harmonically and strongly, or more
diffusely and faintly; but, as over- or undertone, every tone starts
to sing together.

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 ONE GLASS OF WINE:
THE DEATH JUMP OF ATHEISM

All thinking must begin with sensation, says Baader. I understood

the logic of his advice and hence began the metaphysics of wine with
the most sensuous sense, the mouth. For whatever the eyes and the
nose can experience in wine is insignificant in comparison to the
knowledge of the mouth. The mouth knows that wine is a hieratic
mask, and it knows whose hieratic mask it is.
At this point, by reason of, and in relation to, the foregoing, one
must naturally take a stand for immediate life and against abstract
life. Abstract life lives only through its eyes, at most through its ears.
It does not live through its mouth. Therefore, the eyes and ears are
exoteric organs. Nevertheless, the abstract person distrusts even his
eyes and ears. He likes to use expressions such as “sensory illusion”,
creating the impression that the senses deceive either because of
their pitiful impotence or out of intentional calculation. And so, the
abstract person invents a gruesome chimera, a colourless, odourless,
formless, tasteless, and soundless nothing, destined to substitute the
sensory world. Out of this, mostly in recent times, he has created
science, morality, law, and the state. Of course, whatever he does,
nothing comes of it.
Abstract life is a conceptually designed life, built not upon im-
mediate sensory experiences but upon so-called ideas. In the modern

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age, we know two sorts of such abstract persons: one is a scientifist, the
other is a puritan. It is obvious that both are a variety of atheism.
The characteristic feature of scientifism is that it ignores love
but knows sexual instinct; it does not work, but produces; it does
not take nourishment, but consumes; it does not sleep, but restores
its biological energies; it does not eat meat, potatoes, plums, pears,
apples, bread with butter and honey, but calorie, vitamin, carbo-
hydrate and protein; it does not drink wine, but alcohol; it weighs
itself weekly; if it has a headache, it takes eight sorts of powder; if
the grape must causes diarrhoea, it runs to the doctor; it debates
the increase of life span; it holds the problems of hygiene unsolvable
because, although it can wash the tooth-brush with soap and the soap
with water, it cannot, however, wash water with anything.
The scientifist is harmless, awkward, and more comical figure
of atheism. The puritan is an aggressive person. For his attack, the
strength comes, in no small measure, from the belief that he has
found the only right way to live. Someone can be a puritan even if
he is a materialist, even if he is an idealist, even if he is a Buddhist,
or a Talmudist, because puritanism is not a Weltanshauung, but a
temperament. It requires two things: a dismal narrow-mindedness,
which blindly adheres to certain definite ideas, and a mad and sly
readiness to fight for these very same ideas.
The true strength of puritanism springs from the fact that the pu-
ritan is a desperate atheist. He would send to the stake all the woman
more beautiful than the average; he would throw all the fatty and

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sugary food to the pigs; he would condemn the laughing person to
life imprisonment; he hates nothing more than wine, in other words
and in truth, nothing scares him more than wine. The puritan himself
is an abstract person. The heartless one. It is always the heart, rather
than reason, that causes the atheists’ trouble. The puritan is the idiot
with a hardened heart. World history owes to the puritans its bloodiest
battles and most dreadful revolutions. The reason for all this is that
the poor person has found an idea instead of God, and he knows it.
He knows that he is desperate. He sees his failure, yet he still carries
on. If only once he could take part in a dinner at pig killing time,
could have enough fillet of pork, fresh and blood sausages, could eat
green peppers pickled in vinegar, onion, doughnuts with apricot jam,
and he could drink two bottles of Szekszárdi, then he would be saved.
But there is no power that could move him to do this.
The knowledge that life has meaning only if it is sacrificed is in-
nate in everyone. Life is successful when I sacrifice it. For a sober and
serious person, this task is fulfilled by itself when he places his life at
God’s disposal. The atheist, however, is afraid. He is afraid without
reason since he must also sacrifice it. He does sacrifice it, but not in
a natural manner, for God’s sake, like Abel, but for the sake of some
worthless stupidity. For his own sake? If only that were the case! For
Pleasure? Power? Richness? Though foolish, still, it somehow can be
understood. But the puritan sacrifices himself for an idea. Humanity,
he says. Or Freedom! Or Morality! Perhaps: Future! Progress! But
what is the meaning of freedom and humanism and future? They

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are God-surrogates. And what hides behind this self-mortifying
madness that is horrible in its proportion? It is that he is a desperate
person. He knows his failure, yet he carries on. He knows that he is
an unfortunate fool, yet he perseveres. He is severe, he is irritated, he
is pugnacious, he is dark, he is vile, he is violent because he is desper-
ate. He fails, yet he carries on. And yet he still carries on. He knows
what he is doing, but he does not want to help himself, and, therefore,
he becomes more desperate. More desperate and more abstract and
more irritated and more wretched and more sly and suspicious and
gloomy. And yet again he carries on. The unhappy one.
The scientifist is not worthy of much concern. He is innocent
with all his whims and superstitions. One must handle the puritan
with great care. For my part, I think that there is only medicine that
suits him. Wine. In exactly the same manner as it suits the pietist.
For the puritan is the pietist who has already become a terrorist; the
pietist is the puritan who whines. The pietist rolls his eyes and is
pious. In secret, he collects obscene pictures; when no one sees him,
he drinks, mostly brandy, for he considers this as a greater sin, and
hence falls into this greater pit. The pietist lives in such a way that,
due to the shame, the walls of his room are always burning in red
flames. The walls of the puritan’s room are deadly yellow because,
even when he is alone, he does not dare to disclose himself. He does
it only inwardly. Oh, the poor soul, what kind of mercy can save
you if not the wine?

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 ESCHATOLOGICAL EXCURSUS

People tend to believe that the cause of all troubles is sin. To them
sin means that someone lies, steals, cheats, robs, kills, and fornicates.
Their ignorance goes so far that they issue immensely grandiloquent
laws, in which they even evoke the threat of the gallows. Although
these laws are many thousand of years old, until now they have failed
to yield any result.
I now hereby lodge a protest against this general belief. Following
some careful considerations, I declare that the cause of trouble is not
sin. The cause of trouble is deeper-rooted. The cause of trouble is
bad behaviour. The sin is merely the consequence of bad behaviour.
Hence, following Apostle Paul, I consider the domain of law and
morality as abolished and wish to tie the origin of all human activ-
ity to the foundation, the religion. But I do this not in an arbitrary
fashion and not because I discovered this idea. No. As our contem-
porary said, this was the privilege of the creating eschatolologists
in their moments of establishing a religion. And I do this because,
according to my experience, law and morality abolished sin, at the
most, only in appearance; in truth, however, they could never remedy
one single trouble. The root of sin, and hence the source of evil, is
much, much deeper, beyond the reach of morality and law. Stigma-
tized by the criminal code, sins are merely the final consequences of

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a bad religious behaviour. I have already said, and hereby I stress it
again, everybody must have a religion and a person without religion
does not exist. If someone does not believe in the good religion, he
will believe in the bad one. Among all the bad religions, atheism
is the worst.
But the essential point is this. Bad religion is not the conse-
quence of bad behaviour. No. Bad religion is bad behaviour itself.
This bad behaviour is the breeding place of all evils and the source
of all sins. It is chiefly the source of moral defects such as vanity,
jealousy, greediness, impertinence, boasting, tastelessness. But it is
also the source and breeding place of the sins condemned by the
criminal code: theft, fraud, murder. The so-called sins are merely the
last consequences of bad religion. But the so-called moral faults are
also mere consequences. They are the consequences of what? Those
of bad behaviour. Those of bad religion. What, then, should we
do? Should we enact rigorous laws? Not at all. They pertain only to
the symptoms, not to the causes. Should we teach people to acquire
moral self-discipline? Practice asceticism? Start self-mortification?
No, a hundred times no. These are also mere consequences. The
behaviour must be changed. Bad religion must be transformed
into good religion. No law books, no jurists, no judges, no kings,
no priests, no moralists and no satirists and no heroes of virtue and
no preachers and no missionaries teach that, but only the creating
eschatologists do it in their moments of founding a religion.

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 No one should wonder at the important role evil plays in hu-
man life. Actually, evil is the only challenge we have to face. At the
beginning of beginnings, man committed the first sin. We already
know what this sin is. It is not something that clashes with the law
book. It would be impossible to condemn it even if we follow the
strictest moral teaching. Why? Because the first sin, the deepest sin,
the worst evil is bad religion, bad behaviour. At this moment, man
was seized with a cramp. The Bible calls it original sin. We have
all been carrying this cramp in us ever since, which has settled into
the foundation of our being, into our religious behaviour. For this
shock can be inherited. Our own bad behaviour irritates us and we
frantically search for a relief. The Flood could not wash it out of us.
But, together with the rainbow, the drink of relief has appeared.
I can comprehend wine only as one of the highest act of grace. Wine
brings relief. We have wine. We are able to find relief from the
damned shock. Wine brings back our original life, paradise, and
shows us the place where we will arrive at the time of the final feast
of the world. Only in ecstasy are we able to bear this bridge that
spans the first and last day. This ecstasy is wine.

29
 THE OILS

Wine is the hieratic mask. In former times, every person and every
nation knew it. The clue to the mask is that it brings relief from the
cramp of evil. Dionysus lysios, said the Greeks, God of Wine, the Lib-
erator. Of course, with this expression I merely touched the subject in
the most general manner. I merely said that wine has a divine face.
But we know that there is no common wine, just as much as there
is no common person. There is John, Paul, Bartholomew, Charles,
Louis, and there is Sara, Barbara, Anna, Magda. And there is Somlói,
Pannonhalmai, Arácsi, Kiskőrösi. Moreover, each year, each grower,
and each cask has its wine. All wines fall under one single divinity.
But each wine has its distinct genius. All these geniuses are also
masks. The mouth recognizes the mask. There are some highly tal-
ented persons, wonderful wine tasters, who recognize the geniuses
with deadly precision. As for some of the principles of recognition,
let us discuss now only what absolutely belongs to the subject.
Everybody still bears in mind that, on the chart of hieratic masks,
wine is one of the warm liquids; its closest kin are water and oil.
We have no space here to speak about water since, if it is still pos-
sible, it is an even greater subject-matter than wine. As for oil, let
us discuss only what is necessary for the indispensable understand-
ing of wine.

30
 Everybody knows, I suppose, that wine is made of grapes. As
for the grape, it is a plant. Plants are the most wonderful creations
in the world. Virginia Woolf says that she likes humans more than
plants. If one confronts me with this question, I could not come
up so easily with an answer. And if I consider that I find myself
in perfect harmony with the world only in the forest, garden, and
meadow, I would perhaps decide in favour of the plant rather than
the human person.
In the original state of the Creation, in the garden of Eden, the
plants guarded the most gentle and most essential oils of the world’s
spirituality. Actually, each plant is a genius, which is an angel, and
I can recognize this small demon by its form, or colour, or flower, or
fruit, though not immediately, but only in the same abstract manner
as the eye is able to recognize something. Only the nose can gain
an immediate experience of the living plant because the living oil
reveals what is deepest in it. The scent is the secret of the plant’s be-
ing. Since my childhood, during my walks, I have become acquainted
with plants by plucking their leaves, rubbing them with my finger,
and inhaling their scent for a long time. I still do this today, but I
can no longer find an unfamiliar scent. I know mint, thyme, hem-
lock, centaury, rosemary, basil, celery, yarrow, chrysanthemum, and
oh, the bay leaf, and I also know the dearest little fairy of my heart,
charming lavender. I can say without fear that, under our climate,
but also in the Mediterranean region where I have so often been,
there is no plant whose genius I would not know personally.

31
 At this point, I cannot miss the opportunity to remind the puri-
tans and pietists of some very important matters. These people know
women only in an abstract manner, through their eyes and ears, and
hence they have hardly any immediate experience of them. They
come to touching only rarely. Anyone showing a serious interest in
this subject should read the relevant passages in the books of D. H.
Lawrence, and, from this, get an idea of the knowledge the hand is
able to acquire about a woman’s body. I would dare to go even fur-
ther than Lawrence does. I would say that, just like with a plant, a
woman’s secret is in the scent of her body. From the distance, from
the abstract remoteness, this scent appears quite uniform. But if we
step closer and show concern for the details, we will then see, for ex-
ample, how much the scent of the neck’s back arch, at the beginning
of the hair line, differs from the scent of the wrist or the shoulder.
The woman’s body is infinitely more oleaginous, and, precisely for
this reason, lighter, rarer, more genial, after all more spiritual than
the man’s body. The charm of the woman’s form is precisely the di-
rect consequence of the unlimited richness of opulent oils. Yes, he
who, if possible, wants to acquire many immediate experiences of
oils cannot ever leave women out. He should inhale the scent of a
woman’s lip and analyze it for a while for what it is: it is waggish-
ness, chattering, challenge, seduction, sugar, dizziness, intoxication,
fire, whirl, glamour, villainy, poison, baseness, and lustfulness. These
are all little geniuses who tingle in the scent of the lip.

32
 For my part, following my experience, I mostly prefer three
zones. One of them is the lip, of which I have already spoken, but
particularly the mouth’s corner, which is much more aromatic than
the mouth’s centre. The second one is the inner bend of the knee.
Whether it is nonsense or not, I say that, for me, here, at this place,
the woman is truly woman. Why? I cannot tell. Here, in the dimples
of the knee’s inner bend, exceptionally hot oils cast out their scent.
The third zone, and the most scented one, the most opulent in its
aromatic oils, is above the knee, at the inner side of the upper leg,
where the skin appears the softest and the smoothest. The scent cen-
tre is at the innermost side, approximately four-five inches from the
knee. Often, after a great scent experience, I come to a decision to
write a whole book on this small part, which is hardly the size of two
hand breadths, the most scented in the whole universe and the most
opulent in its aromatic oils. It is here that the essence of the woman
fully unfolds. I would venture to say that here I feel the degree and
character of her erotic intelligence. When I smell this scent, I know
how much spiritual, amorous oil she has, and how this burns, how
much light it gives, how warm it is, what kind of smoke it gives out,
whether it is white, purple, blue, pink, yellow, or gold.
I would not communicate such a teaching to someone who takes
himself and his life seriously. Those people already know it. I address
it to the puritans and pietists. It is a warning that they should leave
the abstract road and they too should take matters more seriously.
They will see that there is no woman (unless she is abstract as well,

33
but she is usually so because she is not beautiful, and, therefore,
she is left out of the play, the poor thing) who would not react with
gratitude to such a study made of her, and the more explicit, exhaus-
tive, long, fundamental it is, the more grateful she is.
From here on, it is easy to guess what I want to say about wine.
Every wine is unique. In every wine (in its type, year, region, soil,
and age) lives an unrepeatable and inimitable specific genius. The
genius is in the materialized form of the oil. Its mask. Every part of
the women’s body has a distinct scent and one cannot confound it
with something else. Why? Because different little sprites inhabit
each of them. Wine is a spiritual, oleaginous drink. In every kind of
wine there lives a little angel who, when we drink the wine, does not
die but joins the innumerable little fairies and angels living inside
us. When we drink, those already inside us welcome the arrival of
the little genius with songs and showers of flowers. The little fairy
is spell-bound and almost catches fire out of joy. It is this flame of
joy that permeates us and enchants us as well. There can be no de-
fence against this. I say, therefore, a glass of wine is the death jump
of atheism.

34
 EPILOGUE TO METAPHYSICS (APOLOGY)

With this I have ended all what I wanted to say about the metaphysics
of wine. According to the wisdom of tradition, I sketched the closest
corresponding meanings of wine and, with the help of the distinc-
tion between abstract and immediate life, I explained the sphere of
sensory experience pertaining to the mouth. I set forth my theory
of the hieratic masks and defined the place of wine in the world. For
future centuries it can no longer be modified. He who writes only
about wine is bound to return to these observations. With my theory
of the divinity of wine and geniuses of wine, I have built a bridge to
nature. But before I start to discuss the natural history of wine, I wish
to say something to those for whom I have written this book.
I know that every atheist was shocked after the first sentences
of the book because of the pert tone I dared to use with him. As he
progressed in his reading, his shock became even greater, and, at some
places, he almost had to strongly protest against such a disparaging
tone. At last he had to calm himself down with the thought that the
author of the book was not supercilious but merely displaying an air
of superciliousness. But suspicions immediately awakened in him and
the question kept haunting him: the author calls him poor in spirit,
but by what right? Where does he take the courage to feel pity for
him, to call him stupid, idiotic, crippled, even imbecile? What an

35
impertinence on his part to use this didactic tone! How dare he to
give advice and talk down to him as if he was a schoolchild?
What annoyed him, above all, was that he expected an unctu-
ous sermon and, in its stead, he got almost the opposite. Well now,
if things are truly as the atheist asserts, then I make amends to the
angry reader and declare that I had no intention to offend him. May
I be allowed to explain my intentions and to sum up my defence
against the raised charges with two points?
First: I did not wish at all to use a supercilious tone because religion
forbids it. The supercilious is superior only in appearance. Religion
does not allow such a conduct. I think that the superciliousness per-
ceived by the atheist was not superciliousness, but, in all certainty, a
genuine superiority. This, however, I was not willing to hide. Here
we deal with real superiority; it is not only mine over him, but that
of all persons of good religion over those of bad religion.
With this I made a very important observation. It should have
been made long ago and I wondered why others, perhaps more ini-
tiated than I am, did not make it. According to this observation,
the person of good religion, necessarily and under all circumstances,
enjoys a superiority over the person of bad religion. He is above him
in intelligence, feeling, heart, earnestness and, this is my discovery,
he is above him in the immediate enjoyment of life.
Therefore, there is no need for the person of good religion to be
supercilious. In any event, thanks to his position, he possesses a huge
superiority. At last, it had to be said that Christianity is not a fabri-

36
cated, but a genuine, superiority. It had to be said, and what existed
in every respect since eternity – and what will always exist – had to
be expressed.
After all, I do not really understand, apart from the already
mentioned case – the case of violently seized world power – where
the often emphasized superiority of the atheists is. In parenthesis:
I would not bet any money on the persistence of this power. How could
the delusion claiming that the atheist is above the religious person
in intelligence, enjoyment of life, thinking, practical sense, presence
of mind, and humanity have spread? Perhaps the claim never did
refer to a superiority, but merely to a shameless caddishness through
which he intimidated the more modest religious person. Of course,
the glory lasted only until this moment, only until someone appeared
who did not become scared. Now that this has been exposed, in all
probability, the situation will very quickly change.
The second point of my defence is as follows: did I ridicule the
atheist? Did I make him appear stupid? Did I call him crippled? I did
not have to ridicule him because he is ridicule. I did not even have to
make him appear stupid. The matter was such that the postponement
of its announcement in public was no longer possible. Confident in his
violent shamelessness, selfish villainy, great wealth, and big mouth,
the atheist has so far created the belief that he is the absolute master
of the world, the most intelligent person, he is triumphant and strong
and skilful and invincible. Now, however, it came to light that noth-
ing of this is true. On the contrary.

37
 I realize that, for atheists, the recognition of this fact is painful.
But I cannot do anything about it. The only thing in my power is to
further reveal to him his hopeless situation and show him the right
way. This is what I have undertaken and it is with this disposition
that I begin the second part of the book.

38
Wine as Nature

39
40
 WINE AND IDYLL

One of the most important observations that I made during my travels

was that there are wine countries and brandy countries. Accordingly,
there are wine people and brandy people. Wine people are endowed
with genius; brandy people, although all are not atheists, are inclined
to worship idols. The Greeks are the great wine people and so are
the Dalmatians, the Spaniards, the Etruscans, and, in genuine wine
regions, the Italians, the French, and the Hungarians. These people
rarely have so-called world history ambitions; they do not get it into
their heads that they must redeem other people, with the barrel of a
gun if necessary. Wine saves them from abstractions.
Wine people do not live in the tradition of world history, but in
that of the golden age. This attitude is the consequence of idyll-oil,
one of the most essential components of wine. Wine countries and
wine regions are all idyllic. Take a walk in the vineyards of Arács
and Csopak, go up to the hill of Badacsony and to the mountain of
Szentgyörgy, not to say to that of Somló, wander about the gardens
of Kiskőrös and Csengőd and you will doubtless be able to experi-
ence all of this. Like calm creeks, the gentle grassy roads undulate
between the strips of the vineyard. At the cellars’ entrance stands a
huge nut tree offering cool shade even during the hottest summer.
In places such as these, we could come to a standstill anywhere, sit,

41
settle down, and say: I stay here. And, perhaps, without noticing it,
it is there that death would come.
I meditated on this at Szigliget and it is there that I introduced,
for private use only, the following very old and common division:
there are lowland wines and mountain wines. The lowland wine is
quicker, but more diluted, more modest, poorer in oil. This is not
necessarily a disparaging statement. It merely means that I would
not take such a wine for my wife. In the continuous absence of more
stimulating oils, I would be unhappy. He who does not like great
tensions, though this is also something respectable, can live together
even with such a wine.
I thought about this, there on the hill, at the enchanting Szigliget.
Gardens lay below me, Lake Balaton in the distance, the wine was
beside me in a flask and, when my meditation faltered, I took a sip.
Such a thing is innate. I prefer mountain wine, which is produced
beside water. Water is the primeval element in which I was born and
therefore I wish for its presence in everything. Therefore, Hegyalja
is further away from me and Badacsony, Csopak, Arács are closer.
Of course, there are some exceptions here too. There is Somló for
instance. For the fiery wine of Somló is grown on volcanic soil. There
is no water beside the mount of Somló. It rises from the middle of
a great plain and has a crown shape. Somlói has, for me, the last
word of all of our wines. I will immediately explain why.
I distinguish between blond (white) and dark (red) wines; there-
after, masculine (dry) and feminine (sweet) wines; furthermore, I

42
distinguish between soprano, alto, tenor, bass, homophonic and
polyphonic, and symphonic wines. But I also like to distinguish
between solar (sun-like), lunar (moon-like), and astral (star-like)
wines. Incidentally, it is very easy to apply all sorts of distinctions
to wines. There are, for example, logical and mystical wines, visual
and acoustical ones, wines that flow from right to left and from left
to right, and so on, ad infinitum. Each wine sets us the renewed
task of making distinctions. For me Somlói is not only a solar bari-
tone, but also a symphonic, blond, masculine wine, which, among
our wines, contains, in a uniquely concentrated purity, the oil of
the highest creative spirituality. Therefore I think that, although all
wines require company and reveal their true nature when drunk in
a community, Somlói is the drink of the solitary. It is so filled with
the oil of the Creation’s intoxication that we may drink it only in
a sufficiently immersed, definitely silenced, and balanced solitude.
Incidentally, about Somlói (I speak of the original, ancient, today
already scarce, almost white-gold, dry, and fiery Somlói) I would also
say that, though all serious mountain wines are more appropriate to
an age above forty than to youth, that Somlói is the wine of the very
old. It is the wine of wise people, of those who finally have acquired
the greatest knowledge – serenity. This is a very personal issue, and
I reveal it only because it is one of the significant outcomes of my
meditation at Szigliget: in the hieratic mask of Somlói I felt myself
the closest to the ripe serenity and wisdom, to the intensive creative
intoxication that brought this world into being.

43
 GRAPES, WINE, PRECIOUS STONES, WOMEN

Characteristically, grapes and wine do not match each other. A fine

grape does not always yield the best wine. Now I neither speak about
the Chasselas grape nor the commercial grape, the so-called dessert
grape that could never say anything essential to me. I wish to speak
of the noble Afouz Ali, Queen of Vineyards, Mrs. John Matthias,
moreover, of Muscat Ottonel, and of the king of all grapes, Muscat
Black Hamburg. Apart from Muscat Ottonel, hardly any of them
is suitable for wine making. Good wine is made from grapes that
are not cultivated for eating. At Somló I tried a cluster of grapes
taken from the ancient Somló vine. It was pleasing to the eye, al-
most wholly whitish green, big, with round berries, translucently
opaline and glassy, but I cannot say anything particular about its
taste. In the Mediterranean region, I often noticed that the better
wines are made from insignificant grapes. Once I became truly per-
plexed. A thin cluster of pea-size berries hung from the vine. Is this
grape sick? I asked myself. I tasted it; it was quite sweet, but with
a peculiar coffee substitute flavour. Its skin was thick and tough.
The Dalmatian laughed wholeheartedly. He brought and offered
some wine. It occurred to me, in this moment, that drinking is so
much more erotic than eating. Drinking is the closest kin of love.
The wine was like a fluid kiss.

44
 Now I would like to speak of one of my most beautiful wine-
meditations. It happened in the gardens of Berény, beside the cellar,
as I was sitting on the stone bench, under a nut tree, from where
I had a view of the lake. On the other side were the slopes of Ba-
dacsony and Gulács, the hills of Révfülöp and Szigliget. It was a
hot afternoon. I had been bathing in the lake before noon then
I took my lunch and, following a short rest, I came here to read. But
the book lay beside me unopened and I just admired the summer.
The grapes were getting ripe on the vine. This is Riesling. There
is Sylvaner. Over there is Othello, Burgundy, Honeyed white, blue
Oporto; how curious, I thought then, all these numerous incognito
appearances, all these are One; yet the value of each precisely con-
sists of being, inimitably, only itself and nothing else. Grapes and
wines are like precious stones. They are revelations of the uniquely
One. Yet each one of them represents a distinct spiritual essence of
the One. I started to compare the emerald, ruby, topaz, amethyst,
charneol, and diamond to their respective corresponding wines. I do
not deny that, while doing this, woman, as a subject of comparison,
has been of the utmost help to me. As always and in everything,
she helped when I contemplated the infinite variety of spiritual es-
sences. The precious stones are nothing else but women and girls,
appearing incognito, preserving only one quality of their beauty,
the brilliant charm. This is their enchantment. But we should
not understand enchantment as trickery, but as a natural magic.
This is their real being. This is the essence. For example, I would, if

45
I could, subtract from a beautiful girl her spiritual being and purify,
condense, distil, strain, and crystallize it until I got her perennial and
concentrated essence. After all, a precious stone could be made out
of every woman. Or wine. But, then, she should not be crystallized,
but dissolved. I would set the precious stone in gold and imbibe its
essence through my eyes. Obviously, I would drink the wine. The
writer of the Psalm says: taste and see. Of course, it would be best
to be able to transform the precious stone into a woman whenever
I wanted, so that I could admire her; hereafter, I would once again
transform her and drink the wine; finally, she would once again
become a precious stone and endure forever. I would have both my
woman and my wine made out of sapphire and amethyst and pearl
and diamond and emerald and topaz.
The mainspring of my anatomy of intoxication: the root of every
intoxication is love. Wine is fluid love, precious stone is crystallized
love, a woman is a living loving being. If I add flower and music to
it, then I know that this love shines in colours and sings and gives
out scents and lives, and I can eat it and drink it.
A precious stone, the Alchemists tell us, is nothing but a pure
spiritual being, namely an angel, who lived at the time of the origi-
nal Creation. But when man fell into sin he carried it along with
him into matter. It became stone. Still, even as stone, it preserved
its brilliant purity. This explanation is consistent with my theory,
claiming that, actually, spiritual oils inhabit wines and grapes and
they are geniuses.

46
 I thus sat and meditated in the gardens of Berény and, at sunset,
as I set off home, I succeeded in ending the productive afternoon
with a cheerful punch. I noticed a Nova vine standing beside the
road. First, I was startled. What kind of precious stone can that be?
At that moment, I realized that wine is a comprehensive world, and
like every comprehensive world – such as, for example, a woman – it
also makes room, and must make room, for evil, baseness, and dark
hells. Nova grape, and the caustic, stinky, wine-like liquid produced
from it, are nothing else but the devil’s clumsy endeavour to join
those who make wine. Let us be spared a more unsuccessful attempt.
The Nova is the wine of puritans, pietists, spinsters, and bachelors,
that of greedy, miserly, envious, and villain people. A healthy per-
son, sensing its smell, closes his nostrils and, after tasting it, madly
begins to spit it out and shouts till he is able to rinse out his mouth
with a decent drink. I say, the devil became jealous of the Creator’s
wine-work and decided to take a turn. He has put into the Nova
his yellow avidity, thirst for revenge, anger, impertinence, grimaces,
cowardly cunning, comical cripplehood, and all his clumsy oils, and,
thus, made it unbelievably productive. Admittedly, the Nova gives
a harvest of grapes at least twenty times greater than a noble vine
does. But for whom? For the greedy and miserly, for whom the only
important thing is to produce more and more and more.
You cannot deceive me, I said to the grape. I know that stinky
hell is also part of the wine. You are that part. Your genius is the
witch. Your precious stone is the urinary calculus. When you are

47
blooming, the blowflies flock to your ammonia smell. You are the
atheist grape.
I carried on home and wondered about the type of wine I would
drink for supper. But, then, something else came to my mind. It did
not concern the grape, since it is not made of grape. It is the false
wine. It is the clarified, lead-sugary, syrupy wish-wash, the grossest
criminal attempt that is surpassed in dreadfulness only by the fake,
thickly rouged, whiny, unbearable, spurious, sly, lustful, greedy, and
hysterical woman.

48
 CATALOGUE OF WINES (SKETCH)

If I continue to live and become very old, and I will, along with age,
also be granted a gentle and serene wisdom, which I wish so much
to acquire, I will write the exhaustive catalogue of Hungarian wines,
for it is impossible to write it without possessing a truly great experi-
ence and an even greater gentleness, serenity, and wisdom. I hope to
reach an old age and, during the last years of my life, I do not wish,
like a contrabandist, to smuggle anything in my back pocket to the
world beyond the grave; I hope that, by then, I will show no envy
for someone’s meal or woman; I will harbour no hidden revenge,
I will owe no money, and I will not lament foolishly over missed
opportunities. Then, yes, I will write the great catalogue of wines,
divided according to flavours, scents, oils, precious stones, women,
areas and regions and types, and I will look for the accompanying
food, the appropriate season, even the part of the day suitable for
drinking, the proper music and its congenial poet. The present essay,
attempting to catalogue the most important wines, may merely be
considered as the preliminary study of this great undertaking. Noth-
ing is complete or definite; above all, the whole thing is sketchy and
undeveloped. I am still too young for such a great theme.
I begin with the wines from sandy soil areas. Summer and early
autumn are the time for drinking KECSKEMÉTI. We may drink

49
it all day, for work, for meals, in company, even for breakfast. It is
the best for card games, but not for very serious ones. For the tarot,
the proper wine is only CSOPAKI or ARÁCSI, with much mineral
water, brought from Parád, with dew water, or with sour water from
Füred. KECSKEMÉTI is the best when it is two or three years old.
The new wine is too dilute, the older one loses its freshness.
The time for drinking KISKŐRÖSI is from May to August. It
goes well with lean meat and vegetables. Once I drank it with as-
paragus and this proved to be the best. One should drink it simply
unmixed, in a small group (consisting of six or eight people, both
men and women). It calls for music. It does not endure solitude. Its
attraction lies in a somewhat gentle tenderness whose most accessible
character still eludes my analysis.
CSENGŐDI (SOLTSZENTIMREI is its kin, held in even higher
esteem by many experts) is more womanly, more lenient. This is
the wine of the small middle class. It holds up quite well to the
fattier meals. A wonderful ability of CSENGŐDI is to incite quick
resolution. Therefore, if you drink a CSENGŐDI, be careful not to
act hastily!
SOLTVADKERTI is more revelling and more noisy. It is a homo-
phonic wine, a tavern wine; it is keen on cold dishes, sausages, and
onions. The time for drinking it is mostly late autumn, when fog
envelops everything, rain is falling, and the mire is bottomless. It is
one of the finest new wines. I do not wish to underrate it by calling
it a tavern wine. Quite the contrary. The tavern is one of the most

50
important institutions of our civilization, much more important than,
for example, the parliament. In one place, wounds are inflicted, in
the other, they are healed.
I have said enough for now of the sand wines. Again, I emphasize
that sand wines are devoid of complication. It is not hard to find out
their secret. Their astral character is simple: if we drink this wine,
we become filled with very small star-like grains, and these grains
dance in our blood like the animated Milky Way. There is no deci-
sive difference between the kinds of sand wines. Riesling, Kadarka,
Muscat, Othello, and Honeyed white are all the same.
Sand wine is the healing wine for the simpler wounds of life. If,
in a tavern, you see a man tormented by a quarrelsome and mean
woman, he is drinking sand wine. If a young student becomes mel-
ancholic because of a secret grief, he is drinking sand wine. If you
see someone unshaved, wearing a wrinkled shirt, he is drinking sand
wine. It is quite right. The mountain wine is appropriate only for
someone facing grave illnesses such as the fight against some sins,
the desire to beat a deadly inner incapacity. It is, above all, for some-
one afflicted with the disease of idealism: he thinks he has solved
the problems of his life if he knows about things. Knowledge is not
enough. It must become real. Wine is the great realizer.
A few wines from the areas of FEJÉR COUNTY, SOMOGY,
BÁNÁT, TRANSTISZA represent the transition between sand
wines and mountain wines. One of the most typical of these wines
is the DOMOSZLÓI, the prince of the wines originating from un-

51
dulating hills and half-lowland. I have gained a rich experience of
the FONYÓDI and BERÉNYI. Here the difference between the
kinds of wines is already quite important. There are some dilute
wines, which may be drunk in unlimited quantity, appropriate for
card games; there are also more solemn, substantial, soporific wines.
Some are rough and hard. All of them go well with meals. They
splendidly hold up to fatty meals, but for sweet noodle dishes they
are not fine enough. Whenever possible, with choice cuts of meat
I would drink something else. It is here that my great catalogue of
wine will discuss the infinite possibilities of transition wines.
The mountain wines? I begin with the GYÖNGYÖSI. It is a
nicely dressed wine. It has everything needed for a proper appear-
ance. Accordingly, it is also a good host, a pleasant conversationalist,
often witty. With GYÖNGYÖSI, age begins to assume an increased
importance. The older it is, the more fiery it is, as all well matured
souls. It matches biscuits and sandwiches the best.
Sometimes a young MÓRI is confusingly similar to the wine
produced in undulating hill country. Its strength begins to appear
only after ageing for five or six years. But then it has strength, with-
out showing coarseness. It has a completely unique and inimitable
mineral bouquet.
VILLÁNYI is an elegant wine, that of ladies and gentlemen. For
my part, I would always bring VILLÁNYI to a ball. It excellently
suits engagements. Sweet, it displays an undemanding sense of hu-
mour that is, of course, far from CSOPAKI’s wise serenity; but the

52
VILLÁNYI does not want to be a Csopaki and the Csopaki does not
wish to go to a ball. After we have taken a bath, shaved, changed
clothes from top to bottom, all of its advantages will emerge. Men
will wear mostly tail-coat or tuxedo, women décolletage. It stirs
only as much excitement as is necessary for the conversations of the
dancers. It is reserved, refined, and well educated. It goes excellently
with small pastry and caviar sandwich.
Now I would like to speak of wines produced around LAKE
BALATON, more precisely in the region situated between Almádi
and Révfülöp. I would divide this region into five districts:

ALMÁDI
FELSŐŐRS, ALSÓŐRS
BALATONKÖVES, CSOPAK, ARÁCS
FÜRED, DÖRGICSE and vicinity
RÉVFÜLÖP and vicinity

Within this circle one can hardly speak of differences of rank. It

all depends on the year, the location of the vineyard, and the con-
scientiousness and seriousness of the grower’s care. My heart leans
towards the CSOPAKI, but I would not be without DÖRGICSEI;
for no money would I give up the ARÁCSI; I would not even let the
TIHANYI go. Especially the ROOT BITTER of Tihany. A friend and
I discovered it when we were fishing there, around the peninsula,
and were looking for a suitable wine for our carp and pike. It came

53
from a peculiar vineyard of the abbey, situated on the north-east
side, and no one knew, after all, why this wine had a root-like fla-
vour. If you once try pike in butter with tomato salad and ROOT
BITTER, you will faster forget all the paintings in the Louvre than
this experience. But even less would I leave out the RÉVFÜLÖPI.
This is a genuine wine of friendship and marriage, it is faithful,
silent, and calm, it seldom speaks, thinks much more often, and
smiles; it is noiseless and harmonious.
There was a time when I drank CSOPAKI during the whole
winter, a slightly yellowish pink, sparkling wine that, with its
remarkable sense of proportion, kept the right balance between
sweetness and dryness. The proper quantity to drink, I noticed,
was exactly three and a half decilitres. I carried out some experi-
ments on others as well and no one fell outside this norm. Three
and a half decilitres of this wine. Such is the CSOPAKI. So exact,
it is a two and two make four wine.
The ALMÁDI likes light lunches and the afternoon nap. The
FÜREDI is romantic. The ARÁCSI is charming and simple. The
DÖRGICSEI is, among all of them, the most impish. The RÉVFÜLÖPI
is one of the most genuine arbour wines. For me, the arbour wine
means that, mostly in September, late afternoon, if a very dear friend
arrives, we go to sit with him under the arbour and drink from very
small glasses, and we drink often. I recommend this wine for letter
writing as well. Of course, for a love letter, according to the nature

54
of the relationship, each time a different one is appropriate; however,
only the SZEKSZÁRDI goes with passionate love.
Yes, the SZEKSZÁRDI. I did not have a true and right idea about
it as long as I did not go there. But when I saw the city concealed
among the trees, the hills above it with their far extending vineyards,
when I breathed in its air, then I knew that here only this kind of
wine can be produced. The SZEKSZÁRDI is definitely a feminine
wine; to be more precise, I would compare it to a twenty-seven or
twenty-eight year old woman, exposing the fullness of her vigour and
beauty, the peak of her amorous knowledge, in complete freedom,
but with a remarkable taste and unimaginable sweet fire.
The SZEKSZÁRDI is the wine for weddings. It takes the bride
into the marriage. A wholly pure wine of Venus. Never mix the
young SZEKSZÁRDI, but, if you want to avoid a disaster, never
drink the old one unmixed.
I consider the HEGYALJAI also to be a woman, but a queen. For
my part, I could not imagine drinking HEGYALJAI every day for a
long time, although I do not consider myself an everyday man. The
whole world knows that the HEGYALJAI possesses distinctions that
cannot be found elsewhere. Generally, wines can be fully enjoyed in
areas where they are produced. This is quite natural, the fruit tastes
perfect when eaten from the tree, since it loses its most noble and
most refreshing oils during the transport. Yet, as the saying goes,
even a journey by sea cannot deprive wines of their greatest distinc-
tions. The most dignified way of drinking: from a small glass after

55
generous lunches and dinners. At weddings, before dispersing, the
guests drink, as a Saint John’s blessing, a parting cup. Each of them
according to his taste: an Aszú or a Szamorodni, sweet or dry. This is
a wine for larger public events. It is magnificent during intermissions
at concerts, between two acts in the opera, if for no other reason than
because it is one of the most musical wines. He who has a mysterious
illness should drink HEGYALJAI. If a woman wishes her child in
the womb to become a proud and king-like being, she should drink
HEGYALJAI. The artist, after finishing his work, which proves to
be successful, should celebrate and drink HEGYALJAI.
Suffice to say now about the EGRI, mainly the red, that it suits
all occasions: a feast, a lunch, when we are with someone, or alone,
it is always perfect. For me, the EGRI has always been associated
with heroic passions. When I drink an EGRI, I immediately start
to dream about great and heroic deeds.
At last, let us speak of the BADACSONYI and the SZENT-
GYÖRGYHEGYI. Both are masculine wines, so are all of their
kind. They possess all the shades of man’s being, from the self-ad-
miring Narcissus to the ascetic, from the royal distinction to the
bohemian conduct. This is a significant thing. For both mountains
are a whole cosmos. Every kind of grape grows here, starting from
the Rhine and Italian Rieslings to the Aszú. The most famous
ones are the Pinot Gris and the Blue Stalk. When I am appointed
to the university, the Faculty of Oenology, I will lecture, for half
the year, about the difference between the BADACSONYI and the

56
SZENTGYÖRGYHEGYI. They constitute a typical example of the
manner in which two great wines can resemble each other and dif-
fer from each other. The BADACSONYI is like the world famous
artist; the SZENTGYÖRGYHEGYI is like the artist who, in his
life, has seldom left his room and yet has created a greater work
than the one who has been celebrated. There is greatness in both of
them, but I would call the first one Olympian and the second one
Chinese, Tao greatness. It is odd how much I am unable to choose
between these two. I had already chosen the SZENTGYÖRGYHE-
GYI when I drank a glass of Badacsonyi Riesling and sided with
it. Then I swore on the BADACSONYI, but only as long as I did
not get a SZENTGYÖRGYHEGYI. After all, what prevents me
from being both Greek and Chinese?

57
58
The Art of Wine Ceremony

59
60
 MOUTH HARMONIES

The art of wine ceremony must begin with a chapter discussing

mouth harmonies. It plays the same role in the science of wine
making as does harmony in music. We must learn that the basis of
mouth harmony is the basic mouth triad: food, drink, and tobacco.
Which food, which drink, which tobacco suit each other and how,
or fail to, or highlight, call for, neutralize each other. There are some
prohibited steps like, in harmony, the parallel fifth and octave. There
are some disharmonies calling for resolution. On the whole, we may
say that eating is a bodily act, the foundation, drinking is a psychic
act, smoking is a spiritual act. We should always begin with eat-
ing, end with smoking. Take note that I consider the antismoker an
atheist sectarian. The motto of this chapter is one of the immortal
sentences of the Upanishads: Brahman’s highest form is food.
Smoked bacon with bread and green pepper provides the simplest
bed for wine. It is the simplest and, at the same time, a classic bed
whose greatness will never fade as long as wine is produced. I know
of something similar, but only in the South; there, of course, it fits
the character of the southern wine: cooked fish, bread, and olives.
If ewe-cheese comes with it, I say that I could spend weeks in this
kind of asceticism. Often, very often, I tried it, and it always worked.
Following the arrival of my train, I first went to the sea. I took a sip

61
of it. This sip was a sign of our passionate love marriage contracted
for this year. Immediately after, I went to the bistro, bought two
robust scombrids, about two handfuls of mille in bocca, olives, a loaf
of white bread, and a piece of cheese. With these in hand, I looked
for the most pleasant tavern. I was never disappointed. I entered
the place that sounded the noisiest. The drinking dens, with their
narrow entrances, were usually in the cellar. There was semi-dark-
ness inside and thick fumes of wine. In the twilight, blazing eyes
and shouting welcomed me. They immediately knew that I was a
stranger and they greeted me with the enthusiasm of the wine. Sail-
ors, soldiers, workers, and peasants. Some embraced me like an old
friend. They asked me where I had come from and wished me luck,
since I dropped in right here. The wine? Tchk – tchk! I had to taste
it immediately. (Taste and see!) Indeed, they also handed ten glasses
to me. I, however, first took out the fish, ate a few olives, and waited
for the thirstiest moment. Well, now! On that day, I contracted a
second passionate marriage – with the wine.
But here at home, I am also content with bacon and green pep-
per. Meat, bread, and fresh greens. That is the basic formula. The
rest is only refinement and elaboration. After all: meat, bread, and
fresh greens. It is so even in the case of a ten course meal with three
kinds of roasts, salad, and four kinds of dough dishes. When, after
the fourth or fifth glass, I calm down, then the spirit may come.
I take out the tobacco, roll it, and light up a cigarette. Do not forget:
Brahman’s highest form is food.

62
 First of all, let us consider bread. In the South, people eat daz-
zling white wheat bread. Only he who has tried it knows how wine
goes with it. As the fresh wind blows from the opposite direction
and whirls the salty dew into my face, I sit at the bow of the ship,
with bread in one pocket, a flask of wine in the other. At home,
I mostly prefer rye bread, especially the sponge-like one; if it is luke-
warm and the bacon melts on it a bit, I want to do nothing other
than drink. Once I practised this at Arács during the whole summer.
I often mixed it with fried dough. Garlicky fried dough with Arácsi.
I lay down under the pear tree and was ready to receive the highest
spirit. Besides rye bread, I also eat gladly wheat bread, at any time
and I do not mind if it is kept in the cellar for a day or two and gets
dry. Instead of green peppers, onion will also do, and tomato as well,
whether served as a salad or just as a fruit.
Speaking of the more complicated, mainly cooked food, I must
first draw the cross of flavours. It is the following:

Salty

Sweet Bitter

Sour

These are the four world regions of flavours. Before drinking, we

should pay close attention to this figure and match foods to the wine.

63
Why do we match the food to the wine? Because wine is the psychic
and hence the higher phenomenon, food is the bodily and hence a
fundamental phenomenon. Learn well the cross of flavours and, when
you drink, think about it. You will never be disappointed.
Actually, wine likes fish the most. Cold or warm, cooked or roas-
ted, dried, smoked, or canned, whether in olive oil, or tomato sauce,
or ground up, no matter how, but it should be fish. The fish takes
nothing away from the wine’s flavour. I would dare to say that fish
is the complementary dish to wine, like yellow is to blue, green is
to red.
I have no idea what kind of mystery lies at the basis of this. I know,
however, that innumerable times, after having anchovies for lunch,
I drank plenty of wine and, in the summer heat, dozed in bed; I say,
innumerable times I experienced that on such an occasion something
very peculiar happens in the stomach. Hunger is the darkness of the
stomach. Food is the light of the stomach. Before the meal there is
darkness, and swallowing the first bite is like the mystery of “let
there be light.” The fish sinks into the stomach and the light begins
to shine. Now the wine, the illumination of the soul, arrives. Man, do
you have an idea of what is happening in this moment? Brahman’s
highest form is food.
Under our climate, the equivalent of fish is fresh, perhaps even
smoked, pork. I associate fresh pork with pig killing time. The meat
cooked in a cauldron, liver, scraps of head meat, mysterious glands,
gristles, and ligaments attached to the bone should be well salted

64
and eaten with a piece of bread and some pickled peppers. Now may
come the wine.
What I have so far recounted was the elementary theory of the
mouth harmonies. Great suitable meals, more complicated flavour
combinations are based upon these elementary laws. Above all, I
would like to speak of three important chapters: the first deals with
meats in general, the second with the dough dishes, the third with
the drinking of many kinds of wines during festive meals.
According to the wine served, we classify meats as cooked ones
and roasted ones. The cooked meat has a lower value. There are usu-
ally three kinds of roasted meats:

1. meats in general
(beef, pork, veal, mutton, etc.),
2. poultry and
3. game
(deer, roebuck, hare, wild duck, pheasant, partridge, etc.).

As I have said, and I must stick to this thesis, the most important
and most general bed for wine is pork. Furthermore, in October and
November, the fattened goose, roasted in its fat, with red cabbage,
potato balls, and baked pippin apple is worthy of notice. When this
food is in season, it should be repeated every second week. You serve
crawfish bisque soup before and mocha or hazelnut cream cake after.
You should drink two or three kinds of wine, notably a young and

65
light red, a partly aged Badacsonyi or Csopaki, and, last, a Rhine
Riesling produced at Szentgyörgyhegy. Right before coffee, a Ruszti
Aszú or a glass of twenty year old Somlói. A rare but eminent bed for
wine is venison larded with bacon, or roebuck back bone, or young
wild boar. I would especially recommend the last one to everyone.
Any kind of garnish goes with it, but, according to my experience,
vermicelli with dark blond roasted semolina suits it the most. The
salad should be entirely mixed. This combines admirably with the
wine, namely with the demanding Egri, the Móri, even the Dörgi-
csei, moreover the Tihanyi.
Enough about the meat for the moment. Exclusively for a group
of men, gathered together for drinking (in summer or early autumn,
on the veranda), I recommend one kind of food: mixed ground meat
baked in short pastry. The meat is made up of one part smoked
bacon cut into squares, two parts pork, one part mutton meat, one
part poultry, one part goose liver, one part calf’s brain. With this, a
little onion, pepper, parsley, and ground vegetables. Tarragon does
no harm to it. It should be eaten lukewarm. Many like it quite hot,
and I am also one of them.
There are two sorts of dough dishes: cooked ones and baked ones.
These are again of two sorts: sweet or savoury. Among the first sort
of dishes, a particularly suitable bed for wine is noodles with cottage
cheese and pork crackling (it may be jam-filled pockets, but then
the dish is served with browned onions) covered liberally with sour
cream. In preparing the crackling, you have to be careful to cook it

66
while it is fresh and put milk into the rendered fat. Otherwise the
whole thing loses half of its value. Furthermore, you may consider
peppered cabbage squares and the potato noodles in bread crumbs.
Both dishes should shine because of the fat. I will speak in a differ-
ent chapter about the half cooked, half baked dough dishes and one
of the eternal kings of these dishes, the ham square. The dough is
cooked, then mixed with minced lean ham and egg, and the whole
mixture is wrapped in butter dough and baked crisp-brown in a
pound-cake form. We should eat it with béchamel or tartar sauce,
and, each time, drink with it a half aged (five to ten years old) Bur-
gundy or Oporto.
Among the sweet baked dishes, crumbly butter biscuits have long
since been proved good and, for my part, I can only say that I never
had the smallest trouble with them. Among the sweet and cooked
pastry dishes, I can most seriously recommend plum jam filled potato
dumplings, but before all other dishes, plum dumplings.
At a multi-wine dinner, it is the feast’s character that usually
determines the order of wines. In autumn, when poultry, game, and
fish are available in abundance, we should drink sand wine with a
(fish) appetizer. If pike perch is served, we may drink a Muscat. If
the fish comes with mayonnaise, a young and dilute red wine is ap-
propriate. The second appetizer should always be poultry liver risotto
with green peas, mushrooms, and parsley. This course calls for tart
red wine; at least in my house, I would not tolerate anything else. We
should eat meat by degrees, according to their heaviness. The same

67
applies to wines. With pasta and noodles the order is reversed. The
first course should be heavy and the following ones lighter. Wines,
however, are always heavier. We top off the meal with a very old
Szentgyörgyi and, when everybody thinks that the meal is over, a
half glass of dry, old Szamorodni is served right before coffee.
I will not talk a lot about tobacco. After a copious meal, the
first thing to light up is a cigar, namely a Cuban one (Havana). The
second one is a thick Albanian cigarette, of the golden, poisonously
strong kind. The third can be a milder Greek or a Serb one. Even
after a more conventional meal, I would always recommend to first
smoke a cigar. Four kinds of cigarettes could follow a modest, friendly
meal: an Egyptian, an English, a Serb, and a semi-strong Hungar-
ian. When drinking alone, you should light a pipe and, according
to the mood, smoke either aromatic English tobacco or the tobacco
from Verpelét. On the whole, I have noticed that even those who
have achieved a sufficiently high expertise in the choice of dishes
and wines pay less attention to tobacco harmonies. Such a negligence
must eventually cease. If we were properly governed, the smoking of
tobaccos accompanying various dishes and wines would long since
have been regulated by decree. Of course, we wait in vain for such
a thing from the present atheist governing bodies.

68
 WHEN SHOULD I DRINK?
WHEN SHOULD I NOT?

Drinking has one law: anytime, anywhere, anyhow. This is sufficient

for serious times, a serious person, and serious nation. Unfortunately,
the gravest abuses are taking place today in the name of this law.
I heard that in summer, at sunset, under the arbour, someone drank
Szentgyörgyhegyi and, at the same time, read the newspaper. If an
unreliable person had said it, I would have thought that he was ly-
ing. Drinking Szentgyörgyhegyi in summer, at sunset, under the
arbour, is one of the truly solemn moments of life. On this occasion,
we must cover the table with a yellow or pink cloth, place a flower
(zinnia or sunflower) into a vase, and read a very great poet such as
Pindar or Dante or Keats. He who does not recognize such moments
can be considered a lost person.
There are still a few such flagrant cases. During a festive dinner,
when Szekszárdi was served with a young half-fat goose, a gentle-
man toasted the estate manager. Unfortunately, today such an act
falls within believable matters. In one of the villages, people were
saying that the notary had drunk an old Pannonhalmi with letcho
and sausage. If this is true, the notary is either an imbecile or an
atheist. I suspect that he is the latter.
Drinking follows the same law as love: anytime, anywhere, any-
how. However, here, as well as there, all circumstances remain im-

69
portant. The season and hour of the day have to be chosen according
to the character of the wine. There are indolent wines, flirtatious
wines, talkative wines, and tragic wines. For example, drinking
a dramatic wine during a cosy family dinner reveals the greatest
degree of insensitiveness. Likewise, drinking lascivious wine at an
official banquet discloses tastelessness. If you are alone and outside,
always seek distance and perspective; wine likes height and vista
and looking from above. If you are in a room, first always place a
shawl over your table. The barbarian lifts his drink from an oil cloth,
the poor unfortunate; he does not do so because he does not have a
shawl but because he has no heart for drinking. In any case, first eat
something, at least a few walnuts, peanuts, or almonds. These oily
seeds enhance the wine’s flavour. In late autumn, chestnuts should
always be on your table, whether boiled or baked, or in some pastry,
and drink a still pungent, new wine with this. Do not forget the
chrysanthemum. It can be yellow, light violet, or white, no matter
what colour, it should be there. Chestnut, chrysanthemum, and new
wine. Keep these in mind!
Admittedly wine drinking has no Muse; but even though there
is none, the only person able to drink good wine properly is the one
whose education has been inspired by the Muses, who constantly
reads the poets, and, if not an active musician, at least listens to
music and admires paintings. This person is also able to choose the
right time for work, walk, sleep, conversation, and reading; only he
knows that love and wine... anywhere, anytime, and anyhow.

70
 By the way, I dislike pedantry. It does not square with wine
and love. He who likes wine and woman is a bohemian. Orderly
people are abstract and worrisome. Due to their frantic fear of not
finding something, they ceaselessly and very carefully tidy things
away. Why on earth do they have such a fright? It is silly to line
up bags in the pantry as if they were books; it is silly to catalogue
everything. I dislike the pedant who puts a glass back in exactly
the same place and does not pick up a chicken thigh with his fin-
gers. Man or woman, such an individual is a whimsical fool. What
this fool desires the most is to nicely line up his kisses so that they
can be counted as well. He would line them up nicely, according
to their length, ardour, and sweetness, and he would also put them
into boxes, and he would place a small piece of paper each of them
indicating the time of their occurrence (the date and the location)
and he would write the whole thing into a big book. In the realm
of drinking and genuine love, these maniacally neat and hygienic
individuals are unbearable.
In this respect, wine is a good example. Wine does not like
straight lines. Therefore, he who drinks a lot accomplishes swirl-
ing movements and, as he sets off, his walk follows parabola and
hyperbola shaped paths. They say that he has lost his balance and
staggers. I do not believe it. Wine likes these swinging balances.
Observe the walk of the wine drinker. What he does is a genuine
dance, the old vagabond, and you would never guess that his move-
ment would show so much grace. And observe someone who gets

71
drunk on brandy. The wine drinker keeps going round and round,
the brandy drinker sallies forth, then sinks down until, as if being
hit on head, collapses. One is a parabola shaped swirling dance, the
other is an angular and disjointed movement. We may observe this
in the culture of people. It indicates the difference between wine
people and brandy people, which comes to light in movement, think-
ing, feeling and in the whole way of life. It is the difference between
barbaric people and people inspired by Muses.

72
 HOW SHOULD I DRINK?

Water is primeval element. First, water changes into wine; second,

wine changes into blood. Water is matter, wine is soul, blood is
spirit. Matter becomes soul, soul becomes spirit; this is the double
transubstantiation that we must live through here on earth.
Such a serious and great, life altering activity must occur un-
der appropriate circumstances. Wine drinking has only one law:
drinking. Anywhere, anytime, anyhow. Still, we must awake in us
the instinct that gives drinking dignity and this instinct raises the
question: how?
Above all, let us consider the glasses. Should I relate the great
grief of my life? Wherever I was, at home or abroad, always the
same thing happened at lunch. I ate the soup, and then, following
the laws of the ancestors, drank forty drops. Forty drops after the
soup is such a wise rule that no one will ever be able to invalidate
it. After this, I ate meat with vegetables and salad. The most ap-
propriate time for drinking is when we have eaten a large part of the
second course of the meal. At this moment thirst reaches its zenith.
The glass, however, is small. I have never found a three and a half
or four decilitre glass in which I could have prepared my carefully
devised mixture and, at the appropriate moment and at one breath,
drunk the whole thing.

73
 I know what some will say about this: why don’t I drink another
glass? This question makes me recognize the barbarian who has no
sensitivity for the most important matters. Two glasses are not one
glass and, if the momentum of drinking breaks, its most important
aspect, the one-breathness is lost. If I wish to drink out of two glasses,
then I put two glasses in front of me. However, I want to drink from
one glass, and at one breath, exactly the amount that corresponds to
my thirst. The extent of my thirst is three and a half to four decili-
tres. No more, no less. The exact equivalent of this thirst is a glass
emptied to the bottom. Do I explain it in vain?
Here, too, the ancients were wiser. They had placed a cup in front
of them and everyone took from it as much as he wanted. My objec-
tion against the cup, however, is that it only holds either unmixed
wine or one sort of mixture. Sometimes, however, for my second or
third drink, I want something differently.
I consider it an urgent task to produce 4.2 to 4.3 decilitre glasses
and to promote their regular use on the whole Earth, especially in
the restaurant business. This is approximately the proper amount
we drink in our thirstiest moment. This is the measure. Of course,
today’s atheists have no sensitivity whatsoever to this. It would be a
waste of time my demanding such a thing from heartless people. Or
let us consider the damned ten decagrams. For me, ten decagrams is
an insufficient amount of anything, be it meat, cold cuts, cheese, or
sweet. Fifteen decagrams, however, is too much. The obtuse, atheist
society is not organized for the use of twelve and a half decagrams.

74
And it wonders why everything stands on its head. The wine should
determine the measure of the glass, not the glass that of the wine.
That is the gist of my demand. Actually, in all normal houses, where
wine is held in respect, there should be at least twenty kinds of
glasses, ranging from the half decilitre glass (for the Aszú wines) to
the litre and a half one. Different glasses are to be used before and
after noon. At a lengthy common meeting, each participant receives
his litre and a half cup and drinks from it according to his liking.
For a shorter discussion, smaller glasses are suitable. Considering
the types of wines and their combinations, the variations are hardly
exhaustible. The choice is a matter of taste. Card games call for a
different glass than a house concert. Of course, a different type goes
with a jass game than with a tarot game. One must take into account
the quality of the glass’ material, especially its thickness. How could
someone drink a Szentgyörgyhegyi from a thick glass?
The question of how also includes what kind of company is best
suited for drinking. The cardinal rule: anywhere, anytime, anyhow.
The wine’s character should always determine the number of im-
bibers. There are a few universal wines that all humanity could
drink on the occasion of a great feast, let us say the feast of world
peace. For this purpose, from our wines, I would recommend only
the Somlói. And, oddly enough, this is the wine of solitary people.
For still today world peace is only the solitary person’s intoxication.
A large company of twenty to thirty persons should always drink
new wine: the lowest category (students) nothing but Homoki, the

75
highest one (artists) Csopaki or Arácsi. A smaller group should go
with Gyöngyösi, two or three persons with Badacsonyi, lovers always
with Szekszárdi. Friends should drink only very old wine, from small
glasses so that they can often clink them together.
I would like to institute wine competitions. One of these competi-
tions would, of course, consist of finding out how much one is able to
drink. A much more important one is the quiz. It could be practised
in larger groups. A hundred types of wine would be in the bottles
and only the judging committee would know what type of wine is in
each bottle, what area it is from, and how old it is. He who correctly
guesses the origin, age, and kind of the greatest number of wines
receives a laurel wreath. The same sort of quiz should be organized
under stricter conditions so that the participants could not even see
the wine’s colour. The winner of this competition should receive a
life-long, generous annuity in one of the well-known wine regions.

76
 WHERE SHOULD I DRINK?

If a woman came to see me and asked me how she could be beautiful,

I would answer: my dear, go out in the sun. Only what is under the
sun can be beautiful. Look at the hidden parts of your body, they
are like blind people. When you take off your clothes, they, unused
to light, blink helplessly. These blind thighs are a sorry sight and
nothing is more pitiful than the beautiful, velvety stomach kept in
the dark. Have you not seen, in the public bath, a woman who has
never dared to undress, who did not even take off her night-dress
on her wedding night? How lecherous, how much more lecherous
are those body parts that are still covered by many layers of cloth.
Sun is needed, sun for all those small places, so that they can open
their eyes and become free and conscious of themselves. Conscious
of themselves and modest, since these two are the same. So they
could disclose and hide themselves. If a stomach, which is kept in
the dark, is suddenly exposed to the sun, then the poor thing is un-
able to be modest and becomes frightened, and nothing spoils the
appetite more than such a body part that one forgets to cover. Sun
is needed. Throw down your clothes and allow the light to reach
you, and you will become like the statues of the goddesses. But do
not think that beauty has anything to do with the modern cult of
nudity or red-burnt skin. Such a claim is an aberration. To become

77
beautiful, go around naked each day for ten minutes, in front of
a male mirror, if possible. You will learn that you cannot live in
obscurity. You cannot let the unconscious rule over you. You must
free yourself. You are not allowed to live a life without light. Sun is
needed! Sun! Then the sultry vapour from your clothes evaporates
and your scent will be like the sea. Like the wine.
You can drink anywhere, but never hide yourself. If you hide
yourself, you will become like the thigh of that woman who did not
take off her night-dress even on her wedding night. You will become
sly, blind, and rank. You can drink anywhere, but be conscious of
yourself and modest since these two are the same. In summer, drink
in the garden, under a tree, or on the veranda: on a hot day, in a cool
room or in the cellar. Have no worries. You should not live in obscu-
rity. Always say: I am now drinking wine. Never deny it to yourself
and no harm will happen to you. Do not be like the pietist or the
puritan who gobbles up food and, at the same time, says: I am not
eating, I am not eating. Just do whatever you feel like doing. Above
all, do not deny love from yourself. And wine. If you live this way,
you can sit at the side of the road, take out your flask and drink,
and you will act properly. In the winter, you can drink beside the
stove, in the kitchen, outside in the snow, in the tavern, or beside
a writing-desk. You can also drink on the corner of the street, take
a sip from the bottle, “by heart,” as they say. You can also drink in
your solitary room, you can drink in the bed and in the bathtub.
All this is well and good.

78
 RES FORTISSIMA
(FOR THE PIETISTS AND PURITANS)

Women and men, old and young, about twenty of them together drink
in the cellar. Such a mixture is very important. In a larger group,
we can hardly enjoy ourselves if the old ones are absent. They can
say some of the boldest things, they are the most mischievous ones.
If someone has drunk well during his entire life, he has become, in
his old age, completely liberated by wine.
In front of the cellar’s door, under two big nut trees, there is a
table covered with coloured cloth; sausage, bacon, a huge piece of
bread, and crackling biscuits are on it. There are green and red pep-
pers, hot and mild, according to the liking of each person. At the
bottom of the nut tree, bottles of mineral water stand side by side.
Ten feet away, the fire is already burning and men sharpen the spits
for bacon roasting. The grower has a decisive talk with the council
of the elders, with three of the oldest and most experienced wine
imbibers. The matter is not simple. Which wine to begin with?
The common solution suggests that they go with the most diluted,
acetic young wine. It is an old custom, almost impossible to give
up. Last year’s Muscat was a splendid success, says one of the old
men. It went quickly to the head, declares the other. The grower
thinks that it makes women crazy too soon. This can never happen
too soon, objects the wisest one.

79
 They all go to the cellar and suck up the Muscat. The noble and
pure Muscat Ottonel, from the most golden kind, has green glint-
ing and impish eyes. In the cask beside it, there is sweet Kadarka.
Raspberry juice, says one of the old men as he tastes it with his
tongue. But they fill a few bottles with this wine as well. The third
kind is a Rhine Riesling. They all taste it and nod repeatedly. Taste
and see, says the Psalmist. They fill the bottles with silent respect
and take all three wines to the table.
Now comes the first glass. One of the scoundrels has, neverthe-
less, served the Muscat to the women who eagerly imbibed the aro-
matic, maddening drink. By the time the bacon roasting started the
women already had lifted their skirts up to their knees, the girls,
with their glittering eyes, had thrown their heads back and their
lips had become swollen.
It is about this that I would like to speak: about the dreadful
power of the wine that, whether I want to or not, I have to call “whore-
dom.” Have no fear of this word, my male and female friends. When
we talk about wine, surely, do not be afraid of anything. Think it
over, what would happen if women were missing this fundamental
world reality. Think it over, if they were not provocative, they never
wanted to seduce, they were not flirtatious, and, through the impa-
tient ardour in their voice, they never reminded you: when will you
undress me? What would happen? According to my experience, this
also, like every great thing, can be of two sorts: good or bad. The
bad one: the atheist. I dare to express it this way: this is the atheism

80
of women. This is bad whoredom. I do not know a more ravishing
thing in a woman than good whoredom. This is the greatest danger
of a woman, her profoundest darkness. This can be in her the most
perverse and, precisely for this reason, when it is good, this can be
almost something that touches the borders of sanctity.
Look carefully at this young woman with her tousled hair; all her
movements are round, just like her bosom and her thigh. Round-like
music, made of scent and flavour. Taste and see, says the Psalmist.
Her voice, when she laughs, is like a transfiguration. Her eyes sparkle.
Her nostrils expand and tremble. Daughter of intoxication, she has
forgotten the bad whoredom, the make-up, frippery, perfidious and
calculated charming. In this moment, she has the sweetest scent and
gives the most passionate kisses. She can no longer speak, she just
stutters, but, visibly, she is bored with this too, and her lips move
like that of the suckling; they purse up, but not to get milk. All
impurity is burnt out of her. When she hiccups, the sound dripping
from her mouth is such that we would like to lick each single drop.
She idiotically shakes her dishevelled head, throws herself back on
the lawn, opens up her arms. Her skirt slips up, but she does not
notice it, neither does anyone else.
The Greeks knew that the profoundest essence of a woman is
this sacred whoredom. But when, in the mountains, at the great
feast of Dionysus, women, drunk of their own free will, began their
delirious dance, men were not even allowed in the vicinity. The
Maenads tore to pieces whoever they found there. For whoredom is

81
connected to love only in its lower, only in its red-hot form. When
it is already white-hot, it has nothing to do with man. Then it is
already the intoxication of passionate self-sacrifice. Sacrifice. In an-
other word, religion.
It is permitted to create love out of this religion. It must be done.
Chiefly, we men say this, we who are without such a womanly fire
will shiver throughout our entire lives. We must proclaim this and
must explain to women that their fire exists for our sake. To be
sure, there are some women who will believe it, there are some who
will only smile. I say, to create love out of this is permitted. But to
generate business, to create power, to make use of this sacred abil-
ity in such a way that a woman can acquire clothes, jewellery, and
money is forbidden. But I point out what is the least permitted:
pietism and puritanism are not permitted. Sternness and prejudice,
indignation and prudishness, cruel and teeth clenching moralities,
neurotic pedantry, whim, quarrelsomeness, hysteria, arrogant and
vain self-adoration are not permitted.
Wine comprises all the oils of noble and ignoble, red-hot and
white-hot whoredom, and when a woman drinks wine, her prefer-
ence comes to light.
At the mount of Somló, I heard a saying: a Hungarian count
went to India for hunting. He was the guest of the Raja and, when
he bid farewell, he invited his host to visit Hungary. Indeed, in the
same year, the Raja paid him a visit and, during a winter evening,
in the midst of a friendly drinking bout, he recounted the grief of

82
his heart. Although he was not even thirty-five years old, he lost his
virility right after he married a young, beautiful woman. In vain, he
went to a sanatorium. In vain, he called a world famous doctor. The
tablet, the cure, and the injection were all in vain, the lost virility
was not recovered. The poor wife stood at the brink of melancholy,
the poor Raja, at that of madness. The Hungarian count did not say
a word; he only called the steward and asked for Somlói wine. Then
he gave the order to always put some Somlói into the Raja’s room
and, as his Indian guest prepared to leave, he gave him, as a present,
a case of wine. After only a few weeks, the post brought a telegram
from India. It said only this: Thank you my friend. I request ten
more cases of Somlói.

83
 VITA ILLUMINATIVA (THE LAST PRAYER)

The final lesson of the anatomy of intoxication is this: intoxication is

an infinitely higher state than everyday thinking and is the begin-
ning of actual awakening. The beginning of whatever is beautiful,
great, serious, enjoyable, and pure in life. This is the higher sobriety.
Actual sobriety. This is the enthusiasmus, as the ancients put it, from
which art, music, love, true thinking spring. And it is from this that
true religion springs. Good religion is a religion of intoxication; bad
religion is the everyday rational religion: atheism. The key of vita
illuminativa is here in our hands, to say it better, it is here in our
casks and bottles. From the wine we learn what intoxication is, what
higher sobriety is, what illuminated life is.
We have observed innumerable times, in ourselves and in others,
that when we acted foolishly, we always did so because we wanted to
be very clever. Clever, but not clever enough. We were never so clever
as to throw reason out of the window. The calculations did not work.
Yet how clever was I! I am telling you, my male and female friends,
that calculations usually do not work. It is already a characteristic
feature of calculations that they do not work, and the more clever
we are, the less they work. What must be done? Yes, indeed. What
must be done! I have already said it. We must be sober. Truly sober,
therefore, intoxicated. We must drink wine.

84
 This is the ultimate conclusion, however daring it appears, and
I am not even willing to stop here. Thus, I ask the question: what
is this restlessness, very similar to sickness, this irritated narrow-
mindedness, this hectic haste – called nervousness today – that is
so characteristic of atheism? It is impossible to live without religion.
This is an old and irrefutable statement. There is good religion and
bad religion. That is all. People believe either in God or in surro-
gates. The surrogate may be quite diverse: one may call it conviction,
Weltanshauung, dictatorship, progress, and humanism. In women:
vanity, haughtiness, self-adoration, dresses, hysteria, and whim. The
name of today’s surrogate for religion: materialism. Why it calls
itself with this name is a mystery. I am the materialist, my dear. It
is I who prays to the stuffed green pepper and plum dumpling and
dreams about the scents diffused by the parotid region of women’s
necks, who adores precious stones, who lives in polygamy with all
the stars and flowers, and who drinks wine. Wine. Do you hear it?
As in everything, here too, all depends on whether it is a good one
or a bad one. I am the good one. I have a spontaneous feeling about
matter of the bad materialists, that it is not really matter, but cement.
One can neither eat, nor drink, nor lick it, nor sleep with it. That
is the corpse of the matter, that ugly, heavy powder, that symbol
of the stupidly grey and everyday reason, that unintoxicated mass,
that wretched, cold calculation (which never works) the abstraction
itself, that is the atheist matter.

85
 Well, yes, I raise the question: what is the cause of the atheist’s
restlessness? I will tell you. In truth, atheism is a sickness. The
sickness of abstract life. Only one medicine can help: to live for the
moment. To fall in love with the first woman, without any delay, to
eat well, to walk among flowers, to go to live in the pine forest, to
listen to music, to admire paintings, and to drink wine, wine, and
always wine. Good religion is, therefore, a sort of talent that lives
only in the healthy person. In a state of impurity, it dissolves and
evaporates. Our great and wise contemporary said it in one of his
illuminated moments. This impurity is the cause of a senseless and
hectic haste, the agitated, formless, empty, and pitiful aberration of
today’s atheists. Believe me, the only medicine for this sickness is
wine. Take notice of this, my poor disciples, you are not only crippled,
not only stupid, idiotic, beggars of the richness of life, not only sick,
but also impure. This is the first cause of your restlessness. Hence
you are as miserable as you are. Good religion, immediate life, good
consciousness, quietude, understanding, and happiness do not in-
habit the impure person. You are nervous and selfish, abstract and
unhappy because you are not pure enough to experience the great
illumination. Let us drink wine! Again, I just say: drink wine. Af-
terwards, you will take delight in kissing, picking flowers, making
friends, sleeping deep and well, laughing, and, in the morning, you
will read poets instead of a newspaper.
I know that, in the eyes of many, what I say is a scandal and a
foolishness. I know those who say that. Two thousands years ago, the

86
very same people reviled the Apostle Paul: scandal to the Jews, fool-
ishness to the Greeks. Today too, it is a scandal to the Jews (puritans
and pietists), a foolishness to the Greeks (scientifists). Do not think,
my friends, that you get the better of me: do not think that, being
religious, I am a stupid, dark, sly man, full of hatred for the world,
and that I dare to lick up the sweet crumbs only when no one sees
me. This is not me but the pietist whom I just unmasked and who
has nothing to do with good religion. He is just as much an atheist
as the puritan or the scientifist. One is the pharisaic Jew, the other
is the cynical Greek. I am not a stupid man; I am not dark and sly;
I am not full of hatred for the world. Now you can be convinced of
that. And believe me, all persons of good religion are so. Therefore,
all persons of good religion know that the two thousand year old
accusation about scandal and foolishness is utter nonsense.
Now I tell you something else. What is scandal and foolishness
is not my behaviour, but yours. I do not turn the accusation around,
it turns by itself against you, Jews and Greeks, that is, against the
abstracts, that is, against the atheists. I will not stand any longer
that the world becomes duped by the false rumour spread about the
religious person, believing that he is a sad, awkward, hypocritical,
broken down and mendacious nitwit, and that religion is a scandal
and a foolishness. How could this sensational superstition come into
being?
You, atheists, are living foolishly and scandalously, but I am
not indignant and I do not scold you. I inform all of you about the

87
things to be done. I do not even expect that you give anything up,
poor souls; after all, you are in great need. On the contrary, I exhort
you: do not give up anything. Eat, love, admire and, above all, drink
and drink and drink.
I do not want less, but more. Do you understand? You ass! I spoke
with my whole heart, namely to the scientifists and to the puritans
and to the pietists. If, sometimes, you get a thorough scolding from
me, you must take it very seriously, but you should not become an-
gry. It was a blasphème d’amour, as the French put it. We only scold
the ones we love. And believe me, my atheist friend, it is for good
reason that religion is called religion and is related to God. It is a
truly divine matter, unable to do anything else but to love, even its
enemies. I do not say that I have a particularly great share of this
kind of oil, but I know that I used this oil for my wick, and while
I was writing this book, the light of this oil shone for me. And keep
it in mind (I imagine the puritans’ dumbfounded faces as they most
stupidly stare at this) that you are not lost until the last moment.
You are not externally condemned to damnation. You, yourself, keep
yourself in a state of damnation. Everything depends on you. Every
soul is born whole and cannot loose its health. Be clever, recover your
health. Remedy can be acquired anywhere. Drink. What I offer you
is the oil of purity, the oil of intoxication.
Drink and the wine will take care of the rest.

88
 THE MOST IMPORTANT LITERATURE
(IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)

The Upanishads
The Complete Works of Chuang-Tzu
The Poems of Li Po and Tu Fu
The Old Testament
Homer: The Iliad and the Odyssey
The Poems of Anacreon and Sappho
The Complete Works of Plato
The Complete Works of Lucian
The Complete Works of Horace
The Works of Epicurus
The New Testament
The Works of Origen (Edited by H. U. von Balthasar)
The Sermons and Treatises of Meister Eckhart
Tales from the Thousand and One Nights
Tales of Nasreddin Hodja
Till Eulenspiegel
The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes
Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
The Essays of Montaigne
The Characters of La Bruyère
Lawrence Sterne: Tristam Shandy

89
The Complete Works of Hölderlin
The Fragments of Novalis
The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rosetti
Franz Rosenzweig: The Star of Redemption
The Works and Journals of André Gide
D. H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Short Stories
James Joyce: Finnegans Wake
John Cowper Powys: In Defence of Sensuality

90
 INDEX

Abstainer (see atheist) 9

Abstract (and immediate) life 23, 36, 88
Atheist (atheism) 5-10, 23-25, 29, 35-39, 43, 50, 63, 70-71, 76, 82,
86-90
Bachelor and spinster 49
Bacon 63-65, 68, 81-82
Barbarian 72, 76
Beer 17-18
Blood 17-18, 22, 53, 75
Brandy 26, 43, 74
Bread 24, 63-65, 67, 69, 81
Calculation (unfulfilled) 86-87
Cellar 43, 47, 65, 80-82
Coffee 17-18
Colours 18, 20-22, 48, 72, 78
Cripple (see atheist)
Cup 76
Damned stupid (figure, see puritan) 90
Devil 22, 49
Dough dishes (biscuit) 54, 69, 81
(dumpling) 69

91
 (ham square, the king of dough dishes) 69
(plum dumpling) 69
(salty) 68-70
(sweet) 54
Drinking in a cellar 80
Drinks (in general) 15-17
Fish (fresh water) 63-65
(salt water) 62, 65
(with mayonnaise) 69
Flavours (see mouth) 51, 65, 68
Flood 11
Flower 31, 47, 70, 86
Food (in general, see under meat, pasta, etc.)
Genius 31-33
Glass 56-57, 75-78
Grapes (in general) 10, 32, 46-48
(Muscat Ottonel) 46
(Noble) 56
(Nova) 49
(Riesling) 47
(Muscat Black Hamburg) 46
Hen pantai einai 22
Hysteria 50, 84, 87
Idea (see atheist) 25, 88
Idiot (see atheist) 25, 88

92
Intoxication 5, 33, 45, 77, 83-84, 90
Intoxication (anatomy) 48, 86
Intoxication (red and white hot) 84
Meat (in general) 64-68
(goose) 67, 71
(mixed) 67
(other poultry) 67
(other) 67-68
(pork) 66-68
(smoked) 63, 66, 68
Milk 17-18
Mouth 15-17, 23, 31, 36, 63, 67
Narrow-mindedness (see atheist) 9, 24, 87
Nut tree 43, 47, 81
Oil (olive) 63-64
Oil (spiritual essence) 16-17, 31-34, 45, 49, 51, 84
Old age 51, 81
Pedantry 20-21, 73, 84
Pietist 9, 26, 33-34, 49, 80-81, 89-90
Pig killing time 25, 66
Planets 18, 20-21
Poetry 51, 71-72
Poor in spirit (see atheist) 5, 36
Precious stone (see spiritual oil) 46-49
Puritan 24-26, 34, 49, 80-81, 89-90

93
Religion of intoxication 84, 86
Sausage 52, 71, 81
Scandal and foolishness (Jewish and Greek) 88-89
Scientifist 24, 26, 89-90
Sickness 53, 58, 87-88
Sly (see pietist) 24, 26, 50, 80, 89
Superiority and superciliousness 38-39
Tea 17-18
Three 7, 10
Tobacco (cigarette, cigar, pipe) 5, 16, 22, 63-64, 70
Water (primeval element) 11, 17-18, 24, 31, 44, 75
Water (with wine) 51
Whim (of women) 84. 87
Wine (analysis) 10-11
(definition) 22, 31-32
(kinds) 51, 59
(old wine, new wine) 52, 72, 77-78
(sweet, dry) 44-45
(white and red) 44
Wines (only the most notable ones)
(Arácsi) 31, 52, 55-56, 78
(Badacsonyi) 58-59, 68, 78
(Csopaki) 52, 54-56, 68, 78
(Hegyaljai) 57-58
(Kecskeméti) 51-52

94
 (Somlói) 31, 43-45, 68, 77, 85
(Szekszárdi) 25, 57, 71, 78
(Szentgyörgyhegyi) 59
(Villányi) 54-55, 68, 70-71, 77
(according to the kinds of grapes)
(Aszú) 58, 68, 77
(Burgundy) 47, 69
(Kadarka) 53, 82
(Muscat)
(Pinot Gris) 58
(Riesling) 47, 53, 58-59, 68, 82
(Sylvaner) 47
(Szamorodni) 58, 70
Woman (in general) 15-16, 34, 47-48, 51, 79
(corner of her mouth) 34
(her ears) 87
(her eyes) 82
(her kiss) 15-16, 46, 83
(her leg) 34
(her mouth) 33-34
(her neck) 33
(her nostrils) 49, 83
(her parotid region) 87
(her scent) 33
(her stomach) 78

95
(her thigh) 79-80, 83
(loving being) 48, 83-84

96
 “GOOD RELIGION” AND WINE
Epilogue by Antal Dúl

The Philosophy of Wine is an apology for the rare, solemn instants of

life, of ease, play, and self-forgetting serenity. This is the world of
dionysian, Mediterranean intoxication, the bee-master’s half-awake,
half-dreaming meditation on an August afternoon, under the nut
tree, the pure, glittering serenity of Orpheus: some of the rare, idyllic
moments lived by Hamvas. It is precisely a glass of fiery Szekszárdi
or green-golden Somlói that could make us aware of them.
In the Summer of 1945, during a short holiday spent in Balaton-
berény, Béla Hamvas writes, practically in one breath, The Philosophy
of Wine. It expresses the first quiver of a people who, harrowed and
starved, sorely tried by front lines, concentration camps, and bomb
shelters, have just reached the sunlight; curiously, it expresses not a
despair over the ruins, but an exuberant joy of life.
Hamvas begins by saying that he writes a prayer book for athe-
ists. But what is atheism? “The sickness of abstract life.” It is also a
religion, because the most obdurate sceptic, and even the materialist,
has a religion. But a bad religion: a belief in negation, and a belief
in the lowest level of consciousness. For Hamvas, atheism is not a
question of Weltanschauung or confession, it is not even an abstract
speculation as to whether God exist. And, if the answer is yes, it
does not inquire how God exists and in what manner: in substan-

97
tial unity with the world, or high above the created being? These
questions concern atheists just as much as the negation of God does,
and neither Jesus, Buddha, Lao-tse nor Heraclitus were willing to
speak about them. For the atheist is not only someone living in the
religion of matter, and not only the Cartesian fanatic of reason. The
circle is much wider. The zealously praying, devout pietist or the
daily communicant could be, to the same extent, an atheist. One can
hardly provide an exhaustive list of all those – from the fanatics of
Weltanschauung to the hypocritical overeater, from the mad worship-
pers of fame, rank, power, and money to the stone hearted misers,
from the obsessive advocates of hygiene to the indignant prudes, from
the life-torturing ascetics to the alcohol addicts – who belong to this
group. One thing is certain. The number of inanities are infinite,
and the normal existence is always the same. As Heraclitus put it:
“The waking share one common world, but when asleep each man
turns away to a private one.”
The infallible sign of bad religion is “existence without intoxi-
cation.” The cause is a stiff fear of life, penetrated deeply into the
soul. Nothing is more difficult to achieve than a liberation from
this state.
Good religion (the vita illuminativa) means higher sobriety. The
first sign of healing: seeing God in stones, trees, fruit, or stars: in
love, food, and wine. He who does not know, says Béla Hamvas, that
God is in the cooked ham will not understand anything of this book.
“I understood that Brahman’s highest form is food.”

98
 Whose religion is good? The religion of he who dares to live in an
immediate manner and knows that the joy of life is not something
forbidden. Not something forbidden but, as the Gospel says, a plus.
Food, wine, and love are not the goal, but helpful means. This world
is a place of crisis and separation, and everybody has to declare his
intentions. But in whomever the order is re-established, he does not
need laws, prohibition, and asceticism.
The Philosophy of Wine is not an inventory of Hungarian wine
treasures. Neither is it that of botany nor gastronomy. As in his
other writings, Hamvas always pays attention to the main features
of human behaviour, to the bases of life. Classification is the task of
books on oenology. The concern of this book is altogether different.
It prepares the reader to worship the Presence.

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 BIOGRAPHICAL DATES

March 23, 1897 Born in Eperjes into the family of an evangelical

pastor. His father, József Hamvas, takes a teaching
position at the Evangelical Lyceum in Pozsony.
1898 The family moves to Pozsony.
1915 After graduation he enters into voluntary military
service.
1916-1917 Wounded twice on the front-line in Ukraine.
November, 1919 His father refuses to take the oath of allegiance to
Slovakia. The family is expelled from Pozsony and
moves to Budapest.
1919-1923 Enters the Péter Pázmány University to study Hun-
garian and German languages.
1923-1926 Journalist at the Budapest News and Szózat.
1927-1948 Librarian at the Main Library of Budapest.
1936 Completes A magyar Hüperion (The Hungarian
Hyperion), a collection of essays.
1937 Marries the writer Katalin Kemény.
1940-1944 Called in three times for military service. From
April 1942 onwards, he is on the Russian front.
1943 Publishes a volume of collected essays under the
title A láthatatlan történet (The Invisible Story).

100
1944 Completes the first part of the Scientia Sacra.
1945 Bomb hits his apartment. His home, library, and
manuscripts are destroyed.
1945-1948 Editor of the Booklets of the University Press.
1946 Anthologia humana – Ötezer év bölcsessége (Wisdom of
Five Thousand Years)
1948 Placed on the B-list (interdiction to publish) and
forced into retirement.
1948-1951 Land laborer in Szentendre. Completes collected
essay volumes Unicornis, Titkos jegyzőkönyv (Secret
Minutes), and Silentium, and writes the novel Kar-
nevál.
1951-1964 Store-keeper and unskilled worker at the Power Plant
Investment Company in Inota, Tiszapalkonya, and
Bokod. Completes Az ősök nagy csarnoka. Fordítás és
kommentárgyűjtemény (The Great Hall of the Ances-
tors. Collection of translations and commentaries),
Az öt géniusz. Magyarország szellemi földrajza (The
Five Geniuses. The Spiritual Geography of Hun-
gary), Szarepta, Patmosz I, II, III.
1964 Second retirement at the age of 67. Completes Szil-
veszter, Bizonyos tekintetben (In Certain Respects),
Ugyanis, Három kisregény (That is to Say, Three
Short Novels), Öt meg nem tartott előadás a művészetről
(Five Undelivered Lectures on Art).

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November 7, 1968 Dies of a brain haemorrhage. Buried by his wife
in Szentendre.

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 CONTENTS

The Philosophy of Wine ........................................................... 5

Three ................................................................................................. 10

I. The Metaphysics of Wine ..................................................... 13

World of the Mouth ....................................................................... 15
Hieratic Masks ................................................................................ 20
One Glass of Wine: The Death Jump of Atheism ................. 23
Eschatological Excursus ................................................................. 27
The Oils ............................................................................................. 30
Epilogue to Metaphysics (Apology) ............................................ 35

II. Wine as Nature ....................................................................... 39

Wine and Idyll ................................................................................. 41
Grapes, Wine, Precious Stones, Women ................................... 44
Catalogue of Wines (Sketch) ........................................................ 49

III. The Art of Wine Ceremony ............................................ 59

Mouth Harmonies ......................................................................... 61
When Should I Drink? When Should I Not? ......................... 69
How Should I Drink? ................................................................... 73
Where Should I Drink? ............................................................... 77

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Res Fortissima (For the Pietists and Puritans) ........................ 79
Vita Illuminativa (The Last Prayer) ........................................... 84

The Most Important Literature ................................................. 89

Index ................................................................................................. 91
“Good Religion” and Wine, Epilogue by Antal Dúl ............ 97
Biographical Dates ........................................................................ 100

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First published in Hungarian as A bor filozófiája in Életünk, Szombathely, 1989.

© 2003 The Estate of Béla Hamvas and Medio Publishing House

© 2003 English translation Gábor Csepregi and EDITIO M Publishing House

Cover art by Teodóra Hübner

Typeset by Attila Horváth
Printed by AduPrint in Budapest, Hungary

ISBN 963 85878 7 3

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