The writer Santiago Guerrero Llamas was born in Valencia in July, 1971. He soon dropped out of school, but influenced by the large family library, he became a voracious reader from a very early age. He has dedicated himself to hospitality, sailing, and travel. He also worked in communications, directing the project ‘La Magdalena de Proust’, a radio programme and its digital magazine on culture and gastronomy. He runs the renowned ‘Orson’ restaurant in the attractive barrio of Juan Llorens in Valencia.

He has collaborated with other media outlets on culinary history. A self-taught author with a pronounced accent, he has written articles and press reviews. Author of Chain of Custody (Loto Azul, 2024), he now presents, a journey through the history of wine and its importance in the Mediterranean.

The new book ‘A Brief History of Drunkenness’ places us, from the outset, within the framework of a cultural civilization delimited by the latitudes where ‘Vitis vinifera L’ (the common grape vine) flourishes effortlessly. The geology of this space coincides with the Mediterranean, and its history with what has been called the Greco-Roman world. This cultural space, which we now call Mediterranean culture, has undergone a series of heterodox vicissitudes that have given it its personality and its determinants.

The fall of Rome, religious struggles, and the early imposition of Catholic Christianity, which appropriated pagan symbols, gave our territory an original cultural continuity of at least five thousand years. In many ways, this continuity is unconscious, but enduring. It dates back roughly from the origins of the first winemaking to the present day.

One of these ways, inherited as a cultural determinism, has been a particular way of getting drunk in moderation. In Mediterranean Europe, more alcohol is consumed per capita than in the United States, but the rates of alcoholism are minimal in comparison, almost nonexistent. This is because more of us drink, but in more moderation. The Greeks called it sober ebrietas.

What has been the contribution of the Catholic Church to our viticultural space? Why does the border that delimited the new Protestant Puritanism coincide with the marks on the soil of Vitis vinifera? In the mid-20th century, the Puritan neoliberalism of the United States spread like an unstoppable wave. With it, an individualistic and antisocial globalization, an ultra-liberal model that devastates the public sphere, the social support of the ultimate care of the family in the face of social failure. But, here and now, do we still exist?

Drunkenness is a social lubricant that makes us trust others; alcohol is the most suitable intoxicant for socializing; wine is the most enlightened and convenient medium for obtaining a mild ethanol intoxication, almost a food, and there is no other place in the world more conducive to producing and drinking wine than the Mediterranean. Today, drinking and living in the Mediterranean with the moderation of a fifth-century Athenian is a form of dissent.

Report by ‘24/7 Valencia’ team

Article copyright ‘24/7 Valencia’

 Link to buy the book in Spanish: https://www.editoriallotoazul.com/libro/breve-historia-de-la-embriaguez_161308/