The Monkey In Us

A pause in the Drunken Monkeys series. To contemplate your inner monkeys

I have been a bit furtive with all this Drunken Monkey carryon; cloaking the poor creature in flippancy or swamping it with beavers and wolves and such. Time for a clean explanation. Whether you’re ready to hear it or not.

In so doing, exposing the Drunken Monkey states a truth regarding wine which will offend many and endanger my standing as a fit and proper person to hold an alcohol license. Not to mention the risks of an algorithmic pile-on from individuals with motivated reasoning regarding alcohol. (I flatter myself here. A reaction of any kind assumes a reader.)

Fuck it. Here goes. You are an ape. And before that, you were a fish. As a sentient, rational human, you cannot exempt yourself from this evolutionary biological geneaological inheritance. By all means, you can be willfully or blissfully ignorant of it, never contemplating the end of your nose and wondering, why? Why this shape? Why centred slightly above the plain of the face, positioned over the mouth? Why two nostrils? To the same effect, you can slavish retreat to dogma, ideology or indoctrination to believe instead in creation myths; aliens, enchanted apples and such.

But, you are sequenced beyond any doubt, as a ‘perfected’ ape.

Drunken Monkey Theory has it that you are two quite distinct apes, in fact. A more ancient sober monkey and a moderner, more progressive drunken monkey.

The fast and loose DMT essay maps the architecture of our ancient brain structures, the stem and limbic system’s amygdala and hippocampus and older still, the pineal gland. This is the hardware of the sober monkey. The drunken monkey brain hardware is the neocortex. A magnificent thing that continues to baffle in its sophistication. Along with hemispheric complementarity and such, it sets Sapiens apart. It’s physical form-the billions of neuronal connections-are capable of plasticity and change, and is the operating system that allowed human flourishing. It facilitated abstract thought, language, culture, music, cathedrals, and wine.

So, ancient and modern, these are the processing hardware and OS of the contemporary human. And you can see where I’m going with this. Two ancestral operating systems: the sober one associated with zero-sum self-maximising, wired for threat assessment, caloric reward, tribal loyalty and dealing with what is immediately before it. The other sets us part from beasts who have little choice but to live nastily, brutishly, dog eat doggishly. The drunken monkey neocortex endows us with reasoning and curiosity; capable of both complexity and subtlety. Able to deploy sophisticated ingenuity alongside genuine connection and cultural depth. Allowing us to abstract ourselves from the foodchain.

The contemporary sober monkey tells stories that justify whatever it was already going to do, for it’s own gratification. It mistakes confidence for competence and authority for truth. It slavishly defends rules and laws even when these protect abhorrent systems like slavery or apartheid. Or trickledown economics fantasies. It builds towers and opulent indulgences for itself while the weakest and most vulnerable of its species suffer. It deifies the individual and denies the collective, hypocritically socialising costs while privatising gains. It optimises and contrives for more. It understands culture only in so far as the balance sheet defends it. Left unchecked, the sober monkey exhausts and exploits until it can no longer breathe the air. And it has no mechanism to notice this Thelma and Louise trajectory, as long as it is ‘winning’.

These two lesser and greater inheritances of the ape ancestor wrestle for supremacy inside the modern human and the social webs we weave, if you’ll allow this cross-species metaphor. The tension is evident in every sphere of modern life and, to my mind, attempts to explain intractable modern issues are folly until this deeply engineered operating logic is understood and factored. The sober monkey defends and captures flags. The drunken monkey celebrates what flags represent, their own and that of others.

And end to all this chattering

There cannot be serious argument against the present being a period of ascendency for the sober monkey. The destruction of attention spans, epidemics of loneliness and isolation, actual epidemics and reemergence of diseases of poverty. Social contracts stretched frayed and tearing. Re-heating of global tensions, and an age or terrorism both real and manufactured.

In very real ways, that inner ape is remerging to control your own destiny and that of our common future.

The drunken monkey struggles to be heard above the chattering and howling of its older, baser self. And this is where a firebreak between our monkey selves is vital. A pause. A space. A rest from the grind and adrenal competition of the jungle, the workplace or social media channel. A clearing.

When the sober monkey can be quieted for long enough, something real and rich has a chance to occur. As any practitioner, coach or sentient person will attest, rest, pause, and reflection are essential to basic health and function. Taking this back to why any of this is relevant to me and should be to you, wine. Wine represents a very real physical and mental pause from our daily sober monkey lives. A respite when you return home at the end of a supercharged work day. The celebration of a milestone or happy occasion. The start of a holiday. The simple act of sitting around a dinner table with family or friends. Wine is a product, well worthy of lyrical prose, but it is simultaneously a ritual, a signal to slow down, to gather and revel in connection. And surely, these are the moments of purpose and meaning worth more than accumulated material trappings or performative experiences - the sober monkeys among you are hooting in remonstrance that I can go be fulfilled in a roadside ditch, poor and ignored. Must everything be zero-sum, oversimplified argument designed to prove how clever you are? What is threatening to you about the notion of a break from toil, of calm and meditation?

Let’s sit down over a glass of wine. Have a moment of unfreighted engagement in the present; disconnected from the usual sober competition over tiny slices of the world or higher positions in the monkey troupe.

In the DMT essays, I frequently return to the Mark Rowland’s wolf as both an architect of a clearing in its ecosystem. Acting, with fear and maw, to keep the foodchain in harmony with the environment. Ultimately contributing to balance and renewal. Wine, at its best, plays the same restorative and balancing function but in us. At a moment in our species development where red-arsed baboons have taken the wheel, bricked the accelerator and lurched us off track, wine stands in serene and quietly dignified opposition. Alongside literature and art, home grown food, restaurant cooked meals (where you sit down, perhaps for hours!), club nights, open curious conversation, and working bees, wine foments slowness, presence, appreciation of nuance and complexity, and greatest of all, genuine connection.

Wine in the Jungle

All very interesting. But why? Well, an amuse-bouche. We’ve traversed some toothsome topics so far. Predator chefs, tribal Indian council etiquette, Papal Bulls and craven lunatic tech oligarchs. But, we have even gristlier dishes to come as we examine the deeper roots of the current crisis in wine. A story that tracks why our food has become a creature of Frankenscience and how much of the wine people experience is venture capital owned, industrially made generic juice shipped in bulk containers to global supermarkets to have parody clipart labels and progeny stories attached to them. And the anarco-capitalist fugue sleepwalking us to protein supplement supplication and Pringles. And ultimately how grower wine stands in glorious opposition to all this sober monkey hypermanufactured snakeoilery, if only we could stop thinking soberly for long enough to properly contemplate wine; this living artefact of human culture, at the beginning of and at the apex of our developmental arc. This most simple and complex taste experience in the human repertoire.

Brent

October 2026