On this day 350 years ago, famed diarist Samuel Pepys wrote that he "drank a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan [Haut Brion], that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with". Pepys' epiphany with this top Bordeaux is one of the many references to wine that runs through his work, as well as that of numerous other writers, inspired by the liquid itself and the imagery it evokes.
Go back further in time and wine flows strongly through the literature of Ancient Greece. It's perhaps not surprising that a culture that worshipped Dionysus, the god of wine, and made some of the world's earliest examples, saw poets such as Homer inspired by the substance.
In Homer's Odyssey, wine appears throughout the epic poem, from the sea that Homer describes as "wine dark" to the musings of its hero on its effects: "The wine urges me on," Ulysses says, "the bewitching wine, which sets even a wise man to singing and to laughing gently and rouses him up to dance and brings forth words which were better unspoken."
Wine also makes regular appearances in the plays of Shakespeare. These range from the role it plays in the excesses of a character like Falstaff, who eulogises the effects of a good sherry, which "ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish and dull and curdy vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and delectable shapes, which, delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit". It also becomes associated with the horror in the tragedies through its connection with blood and disorder, as well as in the history play Richard III, in which a corpse ends up in a barrel of sweet wine.
