Fright Night

Fright Night

 There’s sound rationale behind drinking wine on All Hallows Eve, and not just in case you find yourself trailing a posse of sugar-crazed children dressed as pixies, princesses or Voldemort. Or that enough of it turns white teeth vampire red: costume, sorted.

For years the back label of Cline's Zin sported this poem: Know me, stranger, for I am thy blood and thy nectar. But blood and wine have a much longer history. Ancient Egyptians, who drank predominantly red wine, imbibed it with superstition aplenty, due to its resemblance to blood. Shedeh, the most precious drink in ancient Egypt, is now known to have been a red wine and not fermented from pomegranates as previously thought. 

And yet Pharaohs did not drink wine nor offer it to the gods "thinking it to be the blood of those who had once battled against the gods and from whom, when they had fallen and had become commingled with the earth, they believed vines to have sprung.” (According to Plutarch, via Wikipedia.)

This is thought to be the reason why drunkenness "drives men out of their senses and crazes them, inasmuch as they are then filled with the blood of their forebears.”

Personally, it’s not going to put many of us at WineGame off a good Halloween tipple.

But it is, seriously, one more good reason to do drink responsibly.