What it means
شراب (sharâb) is the standard Persian word for wine. It covers the literal bottle of red on a table and the symbolic wine that floods Hafez and Rumi. From the Arabic root sh-r-b (“to drink”), it shares ancestry with شربت (sharbat, “sweet drink”) and مشروب (mashrub, “beverage”).
How to use it
- یک گیلاس شراب (yek gilâs sharâb) “a glass of wine”
- شراب قرمز (sharâb-e ghermez) “red wine”
- شراب کهنه (sharâb-e kohne) “aged wine” (also a poetic image)
- شراب شیراز (sharâb-e Shirâz) “Shiraz wine,” historically famous in Europe
- مست شراب (mast-e sharâb) “drunk on wine,” common Sufi phrase for divine intoxication
Register notes
شراب is the workhorse word. You use it in conversation, in recipes, in poetry, and in Sufi commentary. Its lighter pure-Persian cousin می stays in literary registers; شراب moves between everyday and elevated speech without any awkwardness. Persian also has مشروب (mashrub) for alcohol in general, and عرق (aragh) for distilled spirits like the homemade Iranian raisin spirit. The Quran’s promise of rivers of شراب in paradise complicates the legal picture: the same word names what is forbidden on earth and gifted in the next life, and Persian Sufis built centuries of poetry on that tension.
Legal and practical reality
Alcohol has been illegal for Muslims in Iran since 1979. Production, sale, and possession carry penalties on paper. In practice, Iranians make wine at home (especially in Armenian and Assyrian neighborhoods of Tehran and Isfahan), smuggle bottles across the Iraqi Kurdish border, and import through diaspora networks. Iranian Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews retain legal access for religious and personal use. Underground vintners in Shiraz, Urmia, and Qazvin keep regional wine traditions alive privately.
Cultural note
The word شراب stays untouched in poetry, school textbooks, and casual speech because Persian literature without wine is unthinkable: Hafez, Khayyâm, Saadi, and Rumi anchor the canon and they all drink. The cultural memory of Shiraz wine, exported to Europe for centuries before Prohibition-era Iran, gave the world the Syrah grape’s name by some accounts (the etymology is debated). Sufi commentators read every شراب in Hafez as divine intoxication; secular readers read it as the bottle. Both readings are valid, and the ambiguity is the point.
References
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