'Wine also has links to Christianity, particularly Catholicism.4Wineand vineyards, often representing prosperity, figure more frequently in the Bible than the milk and honey of the Promised Land.5In Genesis, Noah plants vines after the flood. In the New Testament, Christ’s first miracle is to turn water into wine at the marriage in Cana. Wine is an essential ele-ment of the Eucharist in the Catholic mass. In a more practical expression of this link, during the Middle Ages Benedictine monks in the Loire, Bur-gundy, and Champagne regions maintained some of the finest vineyardsin Europe. Monks and missionaries setting out to evangelize the New World brought wine as well as the word of God: the Jesuits brought vinesto Peru in the seventeenth century, and the Franciscans were instrumental in the introduction of vines to California in the eighteenth century. The connection with wine was not as strong in Protestantism, where wine and alcohol have met with a more ambivalent reception.In France, the strong association with national identity and the church has given wine a cross-class appeal. Even so, different strata of society have had different consumption patterns. Wine did not become a drink of the urban working class until the second half of the nine-teenth century, when national rail networks made transportation eas-ier. Before that, wine was a popular local drink in wine regions but asign of wealth and status in Paris or Versailles, because only premium wines were worth the effort and cost of transporting them.6The sym-bolic importance of wine could be summed up, with apologies to Brillat-Savarin, in the expression “Tell me what you drink, and I will tell you who you are.”7Indeed, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noted that knowing which wine to drink was a mark of distinction, showing whether the drinker had “luxury taste” or a “taste of necessity.”8'
https://vinumvine.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/tyler-colman-wine-politics-how-governments-environmentalists-mobsters-and-critics-influence-the-wines-we-drink.pdf