What if Dionysus was burgundian ?

''Wine is the most civilized thing in the world'' wrote Ernest Hemingway. He was undoubtedly right in
his indictment but also in the preservation of his sensitivity rooted in civilizational semantics.
In virtually all his works, Hemingway portrays wine as a nebula and a protean character. The major
message of his prose is his metamorphic principle.

Within its multitude of spaces, feelings and meanings, we must retain the seductive idea of Burgundy
wines as stimulators of the impulse of love and Dionysus as a key protagonist of artistic stimulation.*
History sometimes brings knowledge but also illusion.
In the sixth and fifth centuries BC, the first Greeks arrived in the territory of present-day France via
the Mediterranean sea. They will progress to the lands of the Kingdom of Burgundy by taking the
Rhône as a waterway. This is where the Hellenes will plant their grape varieties and promote the
cultivation of the vine.
Would Dionysus be at the origin of this new thrill in France and more particularly in Burgundy? Yes,
definitely! Is he not the God of Wine and its excesses, of seed, of joy, of theatre, of madness and
excess?!
He is a major figure of the Greek religion and a god of primary importance within Orphism, and his
Festivities were the driving force behind the development of theater and tragedy.
In  Les fleurs du mal , Charles Baudelaire compares drunkenness to eroticism. He considered wine as
a benefit for man, for his sociability. He believed "that wine is the most civilized thing in the world." It
is possible that for the writer, wine was a literary theme and an element of life.
In this theme proposed in the lair of X-Booze, I do not give up distorting history by imagining that a
link exists between Dionysus and Burgundy.
In this maze of poisonous passions, long waverings, intoxication and voluptuousness, colors,
expressions and contrasts, you will meet Poseidon, the friend of always and some authentic wine
experts, like Amédéo Modigliani, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Appollinaire, or even
Nikos Louvros, Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, because we are here on the chessboard of life.
We can imagine the three sharing a bottle of Chablis, Pommard, Côtes de Tonnerre, Beaune,
Meursault or Romanée-Conti...
The prophet is the one who remembers the future.

Jacques METAIREAU -May 2023