The wine of Christian Scripture, on the other hand, is first and foremost a divine blessing and image of God’s bounty (Gen 27:28; Deut 7:13; 11:14; Ps 104:15; Prov 3:10; Isa 25:6; 65:8; Jer 31:12; Joel 2:19-24; 3:18; Amos 9:13-14; Zech 9:17), and an appropriate thank offering by which to declare Israel’s love of God (Exod 29:40; Lev 23:13; Num 15:5-10; 18:12; 28:14; Deut 14:23; 15:14; 18:4); it is the wine that “cheers the hearts of gods and men” (Judg 9:13), to be drunk and shared with those for whom nothing is prepared on the day holy to the Lord (Neh 8:10), the sign of God’s renewed covenant with his people (Isa 55:1-3), the drink of lovers (Song of Sol 5:1) and the very symbol of love (7:2, 9; 8:2), whose absence is the eventide of all joy (Isa 24:11); it is, moreover, the wine of agape and the feast of fellowship, in which Christ first vouchsafed a sign of his divinity, in a place of rejoicing, at Cana - a wine of the highest quality - when the kingdom showed itself “out of season” (John 2:3-10); the wine, again, forsaken with all the good things of creation, when Christ went to his death, but promised to be drunk anew at the banquet table of his Father’s kingdom, and from which - embittered with myrrh - he was forced to turn his lips when on the cross (Mark 15:23; Matt 27:34); the wine, finally, whose joy is imparted to the church again, and eternally, with the fire of Pentecost (Acts 2:13), and in which the fellowship of Christ and his flock is reborn with every celebration of the Eucharist.

Of course, Nietzsche was a teetotaler and could judge the merit of neither vintage, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that his attempts at oino-theology should betray a somewhat pedestrian palate.

- David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, 108-109.