In “Wine and Milk,” one of the short essays collected in Mythologies, Roland Barthes is not interested in how wine tastes. He is interested in what France has decided wine means.
Wine appears as a substance of conversion. It can make the weak feel strong, the quiet become talkative, and an ordinary situation feel briefly transformed. Its symbolic power matters more than the liquid itself.
Milk is its opposite. Where wine changes, milk restores. It is associated with calm, purity, and childhood innocence. Barthes is not proposing a tasting comparison; he is showing how two everyday drinks can carry completely different social meanings.
Wine also belongs to the nation before it belongs to the individual drinker. It represents conviviality, courage, work, and a recognisable idea of Frenchness. Drinking it requires no explanation. Refusing it often does.
But the essay is not a toast to wine. Barthes ends by returning the myth to its material conditions. French wine was tied to private capital and to colonial agriculture in Algeria, where vineyards occupied dispossessed land while the local population lacked basic food. The national symbol depended on a history that the symbol itself helped conceal.
This is where Barthes becomes useful for natural wine. Words such as “living,” “honest,” “pure,” and “untouched” may describe real choices in the vineyard or cellar, but they can also become myths of their own. They can make labour, ownership, price, access, and commercial interests disappear behind a reassuring image of authenticity.
Low intervention is not automatically innocent because it presents itself as natural. Treating it that way would repeat the mechanism Barthes was trying to expose.
Barthes does not prevent us from enjoying wine. He simply makes innocent enjoyment harder. Every bottle carries a story, but also the conditions that allowed that story to be told. The useful question is not only whether wine can transform us, but what has been transformed to produce it, and for whom.