Whether you like it or not, what you drink and how you drink it says an awful lot about you.

Ordering a glass of wine may seem innocuous at first, but the reasoning for that wine being chosen, how the necessary interactions between server and customer play out, and the subsequent way the wine is drunk, discussed and displayed to the wider world can speak volumes. Just ask anyone who serves drinks for a living.

Which is why watching HBO’s critically acclaimed Succession over the last five years has been such a source of anthropological delight for me.

Succession is a television show that uses drinks to convey the status, relationships and transitions of their characters like no other. It is a bibulous, zeitgeist-defining work of art—hang it in The Louvre.

I first noticed it with the coffee.

Early in season one Kendall stands in his state-of-the-art kitchen and attempts to make a coffee. He’s given his staff the day off, but it’s fine because his coffee machine is so high-tech that on the right setting it could probably make him breakfast, too. The only problem is that he has no idea where the coffee beans are kept. In this and every instance of his life, Kendall is the epitome of all the gear and no idea.

In the same season, Shiv and Tom sit at their dining table, reading from the same papers, drinking from the same cafetière, their dog sits to the side. It’s a nod to the socially self-aware, politically on-the-pulse, in-touch presence Shiv is supposed to have compared to her siblings. But a scene that should depict domestic bliss runs cold. Their conversation is stilted, the coffee sits untouched, a caged enclosure surrounds their dog.

Then there’s Roman. With a tongue so caustic his consistently coarse dialogue gives the impression that he couldn’t give a fuck as to what the others think of him.

“I guess if I ask for a cortado with almond you’re gonna think I’m some kind of jerk, right?” Roman asks, flirting with the server in the run-up to season one’s vote of no confidence in Logan. Then Kendall walks into frame and the vibes—as they say—shift entirely.

“I’ll have a black coffee please and thank you,” Roman says, changing his order and straightening in his seat. And the penny drops. Despite every word to the contrary, Roman does care what his brother thinks of him.

***

Picture this: You’ve gone home with someone rich and charming and handsome. The lights are dimmed low in his penthouse apartment, the air is heavy with desire and then, oh god, he’s just decanted an entire bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti into a NutriBullet.

Hyper-decanting—a real-life technique credited to former Microsoft CTO, Nathan Myhrvold—is the process of giving your wine a whizz through a blender in an attempt to accelerate the ageing process. The theory is that a spin in a Magimix will aerate the wine and soften its tannins in a way that will save your bottle a decade in a wine cellar. And—according to Connor Roy—it’s the only way to treat your Burgundy with the respect it deserves.

That’s the thing about Connor. He doesn’t just drink like a man who has access to obscene amounts of money—“I was wondering if I could hit you for a little 100 mil” he asks his Dad in the same way I would ask mine for a lift to the train station. He drinks like a man who is completely unhinged from the physics of reality because he has access to obscene amounts of money.

The man believes in cryogenics and that he has a chance of becoming the next President of the United States, of course, he thinks a domestic blender can break through the time-space continuum to age his wine “five years in ten seconds.”

““Oh god, he’s just decanted an entire bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti into a NutriBullet.””

And it’s these nonsensical ways of moving through the world that estranges Connor, not just from the vast majority of the population, but from his nearest and dearest too. He is the last to know but the first to be mocked.

But is it just that Connor is stupid-rich? Is that all that’s being said here?

Jump to season four and in the rehearsal dinner for his wedding, Connor sits alone at a table. His siblings are late, his father doesn’t care and Willa—his reluctant bride-to-be—has deserted him. The only thing keeping him company is a bottle of Château Haut-Brion—one of the four original first growths of Bordeaux.

In a Twitter thread by sommelier Rapha Ventresca, they break down why this choice of wine is so intriguing. As half-brother, not only is Connor the oldest of the four siblings, but his oddities have him consistently excluded from the machiavellian manoeuvres that make up most of Succession’s plot.

Château Haut-Brion, then, is not only the oldest of the first four Bordeaux Chateaux, but it is the only one grown outside of Medoc, to have majority Merlot in its blend and to be bottled in a sloping shape that breaks away from the traditional Bordeaux style. In essence, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Not unlike the man using it to drown his sorrows the night before his wedding.

***

What makes a good prop?

Is a prop something for actors to do with their hands, to motivate them from one point in the scene to the other? Is a prop to help set designers build interiors and create worlds at the whim of the director? Or is a prop for the audience? To relate to, to read into, to help form feelings into the tangible characters they are choosing to spend time with?

When a prop is just for the actor you notice—those takeout coffee cups are never heavy enough! When it’s simply a glass of wine because they’re sitting in a bar you notice that, too—the ice doesn’t look real, there is never condensation on the glass of white wine. But when a prop is chosen because it makes perfect sense for the setting, the story and for those watching at home? Well, that’s dramaturgy, baby.

To disregard the meaning of these props—to say that I’m reading too much into them—is to disregard entire departments who work so hard to create these worlds for us to enjoy. The team at Succession have both a luxury consultant and a business consultant to help ensure they get everything just right. Nothing you see on screen is by accident.

Wine’s symbolism runs through entire histories of religion, culture and art. Imagine those first, human instances of becoming drunk—of muscles relaxing, of inhibitions loosening, of feeling capable of power and confidence and sex in ways you haven’t before—and not attributing it to some higher being?

From the writings of classical Arabic poet Abu Nuwas to the miracles of The Bible, from Shakespearean verse to Dutch Still Life paintings, wine as a symbol of life, wealth and transformation is not a fleeting fashion statement. So why wouldn’t you use it in modern-day television?

***

“Ohhh, screwtop,” Tom exclaims in season three, slowly unwrapping his and Shiv’s wine from their vineyard.

“So it’s biodynamic… has quite a funk to it. You kind of have to meet it halfway, right?” He sniffs at the glass. “Lots to unpack, it’s not sugary… or vegetal. It's quite agricultural.”

The disappointing wine can simply be taken as a symbol of Tom and Shiv’s deteriorating marriage. In an interview with Esquire, Monica Jacobs—Prop Master for Succession—admits they have Tom and Shiv in matching Cartier watches—Shiv’s designer of choice—but move Tom onto other brands as the foundations of their relationship start to crumble. A faulty, screw-top wine would compliment this perfectly.

But Tom has always experienced joy through his taste buds in very specific, decadent ways, and this scene provides a layered, continued nod to that.

“Here’s the thing about being rich: it’s fucking great. It’s like being a superhero, only better,” Tom explains to Greg in season one whilst talking him through a wine selection with prices so “obscene” they don’t bother to put them on the list.

Whilst Shiv was born into being a snob—“House red? Do I dare?” She quips in season four—Tom’s fixation on having money in a very specific and repugnant kind of way comes from someone who desperately wants a superpower he hasn’t always had. Connection, wealth and power motivate him so much he’s even willing to risk prison time to attain it.

““When a prop is chosen because it makes perfect sense for the setting, the story and for those watching at home? Well, that’s dramaturgy, baby.””

But Tom’s fixation on prison wine, his insistence on taking himself to a diner because his prison consultant says that’s the closest thing to the canteens inside, and his amazement at the existence of biodynamic wine isn’t just for comedic effect. It’s to show how completely out of touch these manipulative, multi-millionaires are with the ways most people eat and drink their way through the world.

“So this German one with this label, let’s push this, okay? Say it’s a light, fruity red. Don’t say it’s biodynamic, don’t say it’s German, just say it’s a light, fruity red. And, yes, a little bit of fizz is normal. It’s sophisticated, okay?” Tom briefs the server ahead of the tailgate party in season four’s eighth episode.

The nod to the wine he unwrapped and tried so hard to defend a season earlier is a clever one. In freeing himself to actively acknowledge how bad the wine is, he frees himself to admit to Shiv how bad their marriage was, too. A beautiful moment shows him forcing a glass of this red upon Nate—Shiv’s partner in adulterous crime—a mirror image of Tom’s wedding night in season two where he forces Nate to pour the wine Tom’s parents contributed to the wedding back into the bottle.

Wine as a symbol of love gone sour, of enforcing power, of acknowledging the relationship between feeling and flavour, of status and of humiliation. See what I mean about art?

And then there’s Greg. In his first time drinking wine on screen he clumsily grips the entire stem with his fist and plans on spending his first paycheck on a coveted cajun chicken linguine.

But what starts out as an “undereducated palate” quickly shifts. By the end of season two his adoption into the Waystar media conglomerate is complete. His suits are sharper, his posture is less stooped and he’s spotted beachside in the sun with a glass of Champagne in hand—glass cradled with a more attuned delicacy this time.

“What are you drinking, Greg?” Tom asks.

“This is, I’m not sure. It’s a rosé. It’s not my favourite,” Greg responds.

“What?” Tom exclaims, “You’ve got a favourite champagne now?”

“Well, you can’t help noticing,” Greg shrugs back.

He’s right, you can’t.