We're All a Bunch of Drunken Monkeys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnfT0RyoYCc

Video from the day that sparked this reflection. Turn on audio to hear Oz Clarke on the subject of natural wine. Oz, fatigue and appearance of a creature that pre-dates the dinosaur could not but set off some crazy mental sparks.

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Part One - Holy Grails & Drunken Monkeys!

Sang Greal or holy blood, the Arthurian Holy Grail was found long ago. It turned out to be quite other than what the Knights of Camelot, Sion or the Disney Channel expected. But so much more wonderful.

There are two searing insights I wish to advance which speak to wine as the real Holy Grail, an actual elixir of life:

1) wine is not only an essential part of a modern balanced life, our very existence as a super sophisticated, largely hairless ape is only possible because of wine, and

2) the wine you’re hopefully drinking today is little changed from pre-human vintage stuff!

Both observations should excite your imagination and cause you to consider that glass with awe and wonderment. And feel a renewed reverence for the alchemist troglodytes knuckling and grunting around vineyards and wineries to serve forth this holiest of holies.

But all is far from well. This most simple and natural of companions to human cultural life and wellbeing is facing an existential moment. Its all very ungrateful given we owe our position at the top of the food pyramid to wine. And having been there at the beginning of our evolutionary journey, I would argue we need wine now more than at any time in human history.

If the promise of the Grail is eternal youth, healing, fecundity and abundance or communion with JC, then if you consider the frame of reference to be the species rather than any individual, then wine is the Holy Grail - wine allowed us blast past the limitations of opposable thumbs, granting us brains with which to go forth, multiple and have dominion and iphones and gorpcore and Real Housewives of Who Cares Where.

And so, before we throw out the Cup, let’s reflect on what wine is. The origins of wine and the relationship to our own genesis, this piece. What wine actually is as a thing, because myths, misconceptions and misdirection abounds. And what wine really means to us in the modern world; how it quite literally helps us maintain equilibrium and wellbeing and powers up social cohesion. The richness of our social living, our language and culture, are the defining features of the hominid, perfected in the homo-sapien, though falling a long way short of perfection. Wine was there to kick off this social evolution and has been with us ever since. It’s quite a story.

There’s some ground to cover!

In the beginning there really was wine

Whether the light at the beginning was from a cosmic bang or from the tip of some chap’s index finger is your call. Regardless, soon after the light there was wine. Not soon in news cycle terms but once the primordial soup had cooled off and life began manifesting all over the show wine soon followed. And we can confidently say that we owe our very existence as a species to this. Well, I’m saying it! Although in all likelihood wine will be my financial if not existential demise.

It was Rotten Fruit Not a Monolith and Bone

There is an excellent school of thought called Drunken Monkey Theory you may have heard about (or perhaps you’ve muttered the phrase while observing three or more IT sales people together at lunch). DMT argues that groups of ape-ancestors began foraging for fallen fruit from the forest floor when the arboreal trees that had, until then, sustained them began to fail. The tree-huggers too afraid or prudish to come down soon failed too. But the bottom-dwellers; they pushed past survival and thrived. They were selected for additional evolution, culminating in some very fine prefrontal cortex and, ultimately, you.

Forest floor fruit was abundant, easy to find, and rich in sugars. It also came in various states of ferment and therefore mildly alcoholic. Ground apes had found nutritional sustenance and metaphysical shelter from the storm of their brutish existence. Unfiltered, fault-ridden and not an anchovy on toast in sight but in its essentials, natural wine. Five stars! DMT doesn’t say this but you could gaily make a case for monkey-gets-tipsy as the true zero point for the emergence of life. After all, until wine, life was perfunctory, slavish, and devoid of anything resembling culture. In any case, the Drunken Monkey is a much more compelling image than a protozoan splitting or a slimy leg/fin fish beaching itself on some mud.

By now it will be apparent that I am not Linnaeus or Attenborough. Neither am I submitting this to the Royal College. So let’s continue going boldly and lightly without fretting over details and referenced research. Much like a Government Minister might. Suffice to say this early wine-drinking behavioural adaption led to abundant dietary energy and a whole new set of social considerations for our increasingly clever ancestor. There was a sufficiency of kilojoules and ample social complexity to warrant some literal mind expansion. And with it, cultural richness.

Howling at the Moon

I am no Mark Rowlands either. Rowlands’ rather special 2008 book The Philosopher and the Wolf (which influenced our family in ways he could not imagine), amongst other things, contrasts the development of the ape mind with that of the wolf mind. Rowlands has distain for the ape brain. Nevertheless, he writes beautifully of the complex inner world of the drunken monkey, requiring a Moore’s Law approach to brain development in order to process the burgeoning information stemming from the apes’ social living arrangements. To live long and prosper, the ape must have a theory of mind - the ability to process what other apes might be thinking and how they may behave in any given circumstance. This needs processing hardware. And all those spinning discs, or firing synaptic connections as the case may be, need energy and cooling.

Where is my mind?

Having a theory of mind is particularly important if you are not the Charles Atlas, Silverback sort of ape; trading on great looks, shear bulk and a jacked up amygdala. If you can’t bully and fight your way through the social jungle you have nothing but your wits! You must know the rules and apply them to your advantage.

Rowlands gives the example of a troupe sauntering through a forest. A lesser monkey towards the tail of the line spots a strawberry, or a Grand Cru or something, just off the trail. No one else has noticed. Its ancient brain wants it to scream huzzah! rush over, pop the cork and glug. But the wily sub-alpha’s new brain knows that to do that will have the jocks rush in to snatch it and beat the shit out of it for good measure. Hold your peace little monkey. The marshmallow must wait. You‘ll need a cunning plan. “Oh, I think I left my mobile back at the clearing. You guys carry on. I’ll be right back”. Such apeish sophistication of thought, such deviousness, needs cerebral cortex power. And that needs calories.

Leathery leaves aren’t going to cut it. The fruit sugars help. But Koko can’t live on bread alone. The mental processing required balancing social rules and second-guessing complex interrelationships needs exponential grow in numbers of neuronal connections. And the firing of those connections in the service of parsing crashing waves of stimuli is exhausting; as any, many, some “knowledge worker” types well know. A way to cool down one’s synaptic jets, to quiet a busy, cortisol-soaked mind, is more than an indulgence. It is essential. What could be better than relaxing at the end of the day over a handful of semi fermented fruit picked up off the floor? Thus a straight line connection is drawn between a forest in East Africa 80 million years ago and a Friday afternoon glass of Chardonnay at the office, deck, kitchen counter or couch.

Welcome to the Jungle

What has changed? Silverbacks now run hedge funds. They trade crypto. Have obfuscated trust (account) arrangements. Or they may sift like Remora for consulting fees around the reefs of government or Government. More than ever the Silverbacks think of themselves as gods. That’s the jungle we’ve created since coming down from the tops to taste of drops of god.

This little monkey is your life. And already exhausted from toil at the office, or wherever you go in service of driving the wolf from your door, your real life is ever more complicated. Stephen Pinker might counter that at least it is less violent, brutish and short. Cold comfort while our personal dramas play out in a world riven with division, tied up by enfeebling bureaucratic webs, with unserious men and women driving us to war and environmental brinks. And with all this going on we seek relief in the algorithmic sensory assaults of social media and the amygdala / dopamine excitations these bring?

That chattering chimp brain of yours is running perilously hot.

Sweet Oblivion

The essential point of Drunken Monkey Theory is that without the disinhibiting effect of wine (alcohol) the ability to maintain exceedingly complex, frequently fractious, social bonds would not have been possible. To paraphrase Garrison Keillor’s Powder Milk Biscuit jingle, wine gives shy persons the strength to get out and do what must be done. Wine’s gift here is the gentle push or the devil-may-care chutzpah grease on the social gears which built our troups, communities, cities, culture and civilisations. At a very prosaic level, who can doubt that there are many many relationships, marriages, and children that would not exist at all but for wine. So we can add families to that list.

But disinhibition is really the second great power of wine in the enablement of human socio-cultural development. The first power was to inspire the build of our complex reasoning hardware layer. A platform on which to run the ape brain’s self-maximising, “I win, you lose” calculations. A drive essential to Alpha whether in a proto-human primate troupe, a corporate hierarchy, Goldman Sacks or a Harvard dweeb using software to rate classmates’ attractiveness.

This zero sum, self-maximising is at the roots of Mark Rowland’s antipathy towards the primate mind compared to the noble integrated mind of the wolf. This difference of mind is a subject we will get to soon enough. Suffice to say that Rowland’s wolf archetype fits beautifully alongside David Quammen’s thesis on the role alpha predators have played in keeping ecological wilds in balance and reminding humankind that we are part of the natural world not abstracted Olympians immune to its affects. Quammen reminds us we are in the food chain and in the wrong circumstances on the menu.

The Clearing

A third power of wine, what wine is to modern culture and individual wellbeing, will pick up on a synthesis of Rowland/Quammen. The concept of a clearing. The equivalent in our chimp brains to the space that the wolf or any hungry alpha predator makes in the forest, riverbank or savannah for balance to emerge. Think of recent reintroductions of wolves into Yellowstone or beavers into Britain. The consequent rejuvenation of waterways and increased biodiversity. Even the prey species of the Yellowstone wolves benefit in the most Darwinian of ways; the weak are culled so that the herd is stronger.

I would, and will, argue that wine plays the role of the clearing in our modern life. A wolf rebalancing an overwrought mind, cooling synaptic overheating, diluting dopamine and giving a gentle boost of confidence and pleasure. Facilitating our socialising and our social regeneration.

Showing just how badly our monkey brain lets us down, Rowlands talks about customary Native American framing of decisions effecting territories and resources. In council, elders will ask “who here speaks for the wolf?” There is deep understanding that the primate brain is, by-design, out of balance with the natural world and needs compensating for lest its endlessly chattering and self-maximising chimpishness drives it over a zero-sum cliff. A beautiful example. Humility and sense emerging in the clearing created by the wolf.

Before we move into how the concept of the clearing relates to wine, a subsequent chapter, the central question is who will speak for wine? Because, really, no one in any meaningful way is breaking through to the great unwashed wine public in defence of wine. Spruikers are spruikeing and we the lesser ape wine producers are ants in the wilderness. The detractors and enemies of wine have the field to themselves.

A Fight for the Holy Grail

This has been a frivolous ramble. A diversion in a time of cholera. But there are rich themes of relevance and moment here for wine and for wider aspects of culture, social living and individual wellbeing. Themes that need a more serious treatment. Because things are serious for wine. Despite its undoubted central role in human life, wine is under attack. Around the world wine sales are tanking. There are various organic reasons for this - a cost of living crisis affecting us unfortunate non-Silverbacks foremost among them. But wine is also under orchestrated attack from organised, well funded and effective actors. But even this is not without some amusement! As [I'm not saying crazy ape] bonkers it sounds without context there is a powerful global anti-alcohol temperance society with roots in the Knights bloody Templar! The Holy Grail again! They want no less than the removal and “prevention” of all alcohol.

We will set out to on a quest to track them down in the next chapter, exploring human systems and scurrilous actors interposing their primitive ape-brain agendas on the beautiful world of wine. I’m thinking of titling it, Adam Smith and the Ants. We’ve got monkeys and wolves. Another species for our Ark seems apt.

But before we leave our jungle, Elvis Costello has a thought. I’ve always rather loved Elvis. There’s a line from his song God’s Comic. In it, God is contemplating her/ his/ they/ them’s creation. Upon browsing an airport bookstore, Elvis has God “…wading through all of this unbelievable junk and wondering if I should have given the world to the monkeys”. Brilliant. But he did.

Those monkeys quickly found where he hid the wine though!

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And I am certain that a better told wine story can credibly equate wine with our human story from early social cognitive development to contemporary rituals, wellness and meaning. So, do we go there?

If so, we’ll obviously need some coconut shells. And I think we might just watch some Monty Python tonight! And drink to those non-discriminating wine scooping/sucking primate ancestors and their modern day inheritors - those passionately and fearlessly making wine. A toast to them; to the winemaker!

Part two to come. But first, a vintage to prep for!

Brent Eddy

Autumn 2026