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In 1984, what is the significance of the wine O'Brien serves Winston and Julia?

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The wine O'Brien serves to Winston and Julia highlights the stark contrast between the luxurious life of Inner Party members and the deprivation faced by Outer Party members. It symbolizes their entry into the Brotherhood, akin to a baptism, and connects Winston to a "vanished" and "romantic" past, representing his longing for a pre-Party era. The wine underscores the restricted existence of the Outer Party, as Winston and Julia experience its rarity and significance for the first time.

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The wine O'Brien serves Julia and Winston signifies the huge gulf in living standards between Inner Party members like O'Brien and Outer Party members like Julia and Winston. O'Brien might come to the office in the same overalls everyone else wears, but behind closed doors, he lives an entirely different life. While Julia and Winston deal with constant deprivation, O'Brien lives in luxury. He has a servant, he drinks wine, he has soft carpeting, and he can turn off his view screen.

As if to emphasize the point, the text points out that Julia has never seen wine before. When O'Brien hands her a glass, she smells the wine with "frank curiosity."

"It is called wine," said O’Brien with a faint smile.

Winston has read about wine, and it carries a flood of associations, representing to him the texture of life before the Party took over:

Like the glass paperweight...

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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.

We see how much everyday life has narrowed for Outer Party members through Winston's and Julia's reaction to the wine. Winston thinks wine is sweeter and more powerful than it turns out to be, he thinks it has "an immediate intoxicating effect," and when it does not, he is disappointed. He drinks it all down at once, having no idea he is meant to sip it, another sign of the distance between him and O'Brien.

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In Part Two, Chapter Eight of 1984, Winston and Julia go to O'Brien's apartment where they drink wine for the first time in their lives. This act is significant for two reasons: firstly, because it is used to mark their entrance into the Brotherhood, an underground resistance movement. The act of drinking wine demonstrates their commitment to rebelling against the Party and is similar to a religious baptism.

Secondly, as Winston comments, the wine serves as a link to the "vanished" and "romantic" past because it is no longer a part of the lives of ordinary and everyday people. It is, therefore, representative of Winston's innermost desire to remove the totalitarian rule of the Party and to replace it with the democracy of the past.

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