'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