He quotes from an essay by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset on the bacchanal paintings of Titian and Velázquez: Once, long before wine became an administrative problem, Bacchus was a god, wine was divine…Yet our solution is symptomatic of the dullness of our age, its administrative hypertrophy, its morbidly cautious preoccupation with today’s trivia and tomorrow’s problems, its total lack of the heroic spirit. Who has now a gaze penetrating enough to see beyond alcoholism—a mountain of printed papers loaded with statistics—to the simple image of twining vine-tendrils and broad
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