Great passage from Steven Shapin's essay/review of Tom Standage's A History of the World in 6 Glasses in The New Yorker:
The taking of certain drinks could itself be society-making. The Greek symposium was, literally, a “drinkingtogether,” and the watered wine was both such as loosened the tongue and allowed symposiasts to display self-control. Just as drinking opened up the possibility of intoxication, so it allowed for a show of moral discipline. Wine was the perfect drink for the Greeks: with proper management, you could position yourself at the golden mean between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Plato's Symposium instructively ends with everyone except Socrates having gone home, fallen asleep, or gotten drunk: a true philosopher, it is implied, can hold his liquor. Drunkenness was traditionally not alcoholism–that's a fairly modern category–but was encompassed within the vice called gluttony, a moral rather than a medical problem. Social ties are, and always have been, signalled, sealed, and solemnized with a fermented or distilled drink. You don't just drink, you drink to: to life (l'chaim) and health (santé, salud, prosit, na zdorovie, gezondheid, slainte, zum Wohl), to the monarch (“Gentlemen, the Queen”), to absent friends (the Sunday toast in the Royal Navy), to general good humor, well-being, and luck (cheers, noroc), to the company here assembled (“Here's to us. And those like us. Damn few and they're all dead”). Bogart's “Here's looking at you, kid” to Ingrid Bergman is a vestige of the Scandinavian obligation to honor your drinking partner by catching his or her eyes over the rim of your glass–much nicer than skøl, a reference to the use of enemies' skulls as drinking vessels: “Heads up,” so to speak, rather than “Bottoms up.”
Link.
