Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [675]

Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness. Wine was a thing he had read and dreamed about. Like the glass paperweight or Mr Charrington’s half-remembered rhymes, it belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the olden time as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts. For some reason he had always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like that of blackberry jam, and an immediate intoxicating effect. Actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly disappointing. The truth was that after years of gin-drinking he could barely taste it. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 675

Note

The disappointment of the real thing against the idealized: wine, dreamed of as intensely sweet like blackberry jam, is ‘distinctly disappointing’ to a palate ruined by gin. This figures the broader theme of the ‘vanished, romantic past’—its objects survive in imagination, but their reality is inaccessible, a loss of sensory continuity.