It's hard to think of another drink so woven into who we are as Catholics.
It starts at Cana, with that first miracle, and it doesn't stop there. Christ ate and drank freely enough, at ordinary tables, that his critics turned it into a slur. They called him a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners (Matthew 11:19), and they meant all of it as an insult. And then there's the night before he died. Of all the things he could have left us, he took bread and he took wine, and he said this is my body, this is my blood. It wasn't a symbol picked at random. Wine was already the drink of covenant, celebration, and sacrifice, already poured out in the temple for centuries. It only makes sense to be a part of the new and eternal covenant. Thought of that way, the bottle on your kitchen counter is a cousin of something genuinely sacred. And as with many things, something that can be sacred, can also be misused.
Now, obviously none of that makes your Tuesday glass a sacrament. But there's something worth noticing in the fact that a drink this ordinary, this old, made by farmers, out of fruit, time, craft, experience, and patience, was the thing Christ reached for, again and again, right up to the end. People have been making wine for longer than they've been writing things down. When you drink it, you're doing something almost unbroken — a small human act that runs all the way back through the saints and the apostles and the ancient world, to the wedding where it all began.
