Wasn't it the late Tory MP and diarist Alan Clark who famously complained in the 1980s, "You can't get a decent bottle of claret for under £100 these days"?
There was no such problem for the bons viveurs at the wedding in Cana of Galilee who were treated to a vintage more memorable than Chateau Lafite 1961 when, St John records, Jesus of Nazareth changed water into wine and "revealed his glory and his disciples put their faith in him" (John 2:11).
In tomorrow's Gospel reading viticulture is again in focus in John 15:1-18, where the apostle introduces the seventh staggeringly egocentric "I am" claim made by Jesus: "I am the true vine and my Father is the gardener."
Putting this text in its overall biblical context leads back to a cluster of Old Testament references where God's chosen people, Israel, are described as a vine. Regrettably, the descriptions are always of a fruitless, unfaithful people who are warned of judgment and exclusion from God's Kingdom.
However, the prophet Isaiah associates the coming of God's King, Messiah, with "a fruitful vineyard" (ch.27: 2- 6). In asserting himself as the true fruit-bearing vine, Jesus claims that in his own person and work he will be able to deliver all that God's people failed to achieve throughout the Old Testament.
More than that - and this leads directly to the then unmentionable "Jesus is Jehovah" equation which the first disciples, steeped in their monotheism, were nevertheless driven after the Resurrection to preach as the basis of the Gospel - Jesus goes on: "I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing" (15:5).
The finality of Jesus's assertion takes the breath away. It demarcates his own uniqueness and the futility of all religion in which he is not the central focus. A person can enjoy the status of being part of God's fruitful people only by being joined to Jesus.
The entry point to becoming part of the vine is by receiving Jesus's words, that is, his truth claims (v.3) in their explicit exclusivity. It is all of a piece with the more familiar, much-debated and resisted these days, John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."
Then the emphasis switches from belief to behaviour. What is the nature of this fruitful life lived in union with Jesus? In a masterly survey of Jesus's teaching on holiness in John's Gospel, David Gooding, former professor of Greek at Queen's University Belfast, paraphrases: "God himself has provided a magnificent method of making himself known to the world, and that method is Christ, the true and never-failing vine, into whom God incorporates all his people so that Christ can express his own life, character and power through them, as a vine expresses its life and power through its branches."
Or, as a preacher to schoolboys once put it: "The Christian is a fruit tree, not a Christmas tree. His virtues are produced from within, not attached from without."
The transforming nature of this relationship for Christians is as miraculous as water into wine, and as enriching and life-affirming too. No wonder one's eyes are drawn to the jewel in the crown of the promises in this discourse: "I have told you this that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete" (v. 11).
The whole passage is a deathblow to that kind of Christianity which will, alas, go on parade again tomorrow as mere religion. Whatever about its show and pretension, it has all the length and complexity of Chateau Plonk. It perversely denies all that the Founder endlessly spoke of in terms of an intimate, joyful personal relationship with himself which day by day yields honour and praise for him and the richest blessing for us.
Alan Clark's resources and capacity for indulgence over his claret may not be ours. We can still learn from his long experience of disappointment and consequent selectivity. For in Christianity, as in wines, there is no substitute for the real thing.
G.F.