# in vino veritas

idiom · CEFR C2 · Literary

Source: https://englishreference.com/idiom/in-vino-veritas
Updated: 2026-08-03

## Meaning

People say what they actually think once they have had a drink.

## Examples

- He told me what he really thought after the third glass. In vino veritas.
- The dinner was pleasant until in vino veritas took over and the two of them started on the inheritance again.
- In vino veritas is usually offered as an excuse, though it works better as a caution: the wine does not invent the opinion, it only removes the judgement that had been keeping it quiet.

## Origin

The observation is older than Rome. The Greek poet Alcaeus has a version of it in the sixth century BC, and it was already a commonplace by the time Latin picked it up. Pliny the Elder records the Roman form in his Natural History, in a long and disapproving section on wine: it is commonly said, he writes, that truth is now attributed to wine. His surrounding argument is that drink loosens what people had good reason to keep shut, and that the results are rarely improvements. In vino veritas survives in English as a half-joke and a half-warning, usually deployed the morning after somebody said the thing everyone had been carefully not saying.

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