New Wine in an Old Bottle

I finished reading Walter Isaacson’s “The Innovators”. I was delighted by his previous work on Einstein and was hoping to be captivated by this one too. It was not the case, and when I reached the final pages a line from Isaacson, while written for another context, summed up my thoughts: it was “old wine in a new bottle”. I found little innovative thinking in this book, but that line made me think.

Where did the saying come from? Today it insinuates that one is “pouring” old ideas into a new framework and selling it as a new creation. Was that the origin of the saying?

So I did a bit of research.

Interestingly, “new wine in old bottle” is a conceptual transliteration of a parable found in the New Testament. There are different versions of it, but the one in Matthew 9:17 reads:

“Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.”

A little more reading on this and I discovered delightful anthropology and philosophy to form the background for explaining this parable.

Indeed, historically wine was made by first fermenting the pressed juice in clay jars to let the gassy phase take its course. Then the fermenting juice was placed in new vats or if to be transported, in “wineskins”. The wineskins were actually the entire skin of a goat where the openings of the legs and tail were tightly sewn. The opening of the neck was the “neck” of this container and the partially fermented wine was poured in the opening at the neck then tied off securely. (Now I know where the “neck” of a bottle came from!)

One never puts freshly pressed grape juice immediately into the goat skin “container” as the gassy phase (Tumultuous Stage) of fermentation would burst the wineskin. But once partially fermented, the “calmer” fermentation of the juice can be accommodated by the stretchiness of the goat skin. But “old” wineskins stretch once, and if new juice is poured into old wineskins, even the calmer fermentation phase would tear the skin!

Wow!

So, the “new wine” is not really wine yet; and, the “old bottle” is not even a bottle! Instead, the parable has at least two philosophical implications:

            a. The container should be adequate for accommodating what is poured into it; and

            b. Tumultuous phases should be contained within flexible contexts.

Of course these are my interpretations and I am sure there are a multitude other ways for analyzing this parable.

… So, I believe that today we are using the old parable in a non-authentic way. But does the lesson, the implications and philosophy of the parable still hold true today?

The poet in me immediately placed wine within the context of love and passion. After all, even today, wine is often associated with romance, and from Rumi to Baudelaire has found its place in poetry. So I went to search in my favorite poets’ and philosophers’ works lines about wine and love.

Let’s start with Rumi:

“There are thousands of wines that can take over our minds. Don’t think all ecstasies are the same!”

Was he really talking about wine or about what passions can fill our lives and gives us the ecstasies we so pursue? If one replaces “wines” by “passions” would the message be the same?

Wine and”French” cannot be dissociated easily, so I looked into the works of Baudelaire, Colette, and even Pasteur.

According to Baudelaire:

“One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters…But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, if you so chose. But get drunk.”

Again, wine seems irrelevant to this saying. He is suggesting a life of passion, of going to the limit, of being totally driven and taken by our interests. Poetry, science, philosophy or love of nature – it does not matter.

Colette brings wine into the domain of “influence” and psychology when she writes:

“There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.”

While pharmacologically easily understood, these lines from Colette can very easily also dissociate themselves from wine. What will happen if I replace “wine” again with passion, or ideology, or professional drive? Would our psychological state show similar side-effects?

Since we are talking pharmacology, let’s go to Pasteur, who is often quoted to have said:

“Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages.”

There is no poetry here, nor any philosophy. It is the most famous bacteriologist who looked at the composition of wine from a biological point of view. Possibly Pasteur never got drunk, nor did he pursue Rumi’s ecstasies. For him it was a medium where fermentation took place.

… What about wine and love?

It can be as simple as a bucolic setting to which wine adds a special touch. Pablo Neruda said it simply and with grace:

“I like on the table, 

when we're speaking, 

the light of a bottle

of intelligent wine.”

Every time I read these simple lines I see a painting in aquarelle. What would have happened if Neruda and Monet were contemporaries?

Yet love is never pure aquarelle. It is never two-dimensional as a painting. It is rarely the “light of a bottle”.  W.B. Yeats, in a few words, brings love and wine together:

“Wine enters through the mouth, 

Love, the eyes.

I raise the glass to my mouth, 

I look at you, 

I sigh.” 

… So what to do with the wineskin and wine parable? Can one resemble the wineskin to a person’s soul? A soul where love had already fermented and given the passion, the ecstasies and their side-effects? So now would it be wise to pour new love into this used, expanded to its limits, and old soul? Would the “Tumultuous Stage” of a new love’s fermentation tear this soul to parts?  

In other words, and to stay conform to the original parable, should one pour new wine in an old bottle?

.. And I smiled realizing that our present day usage of the saying is “Old wine in a New bottle”!  The implications of this version deserve a discussion in a separate essay….

February 22, 2015

© Vahé  A. Kazandjian, 2015

I wanted a picture that also represents the old and the new, while touching on the topic of wine. So, I used the new technology of scanning film negatives and decided to use this picture of a man in a large city drinking wine in the street. The quality of the scan is so bad that it cannot be used for photographic work, but the bad quality also preserves the privacy of the person. I took this picture with a 1970’s Mamiya 645 medium format camera.

PS/ I hope this essay will also have an additional contemporaneous dimension as 2015 is the Chinese Year of The Goat!