Sirach 31:27
Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus25 Do not try to prove your strength by wine-drinking, for wine has destroyed many. 26 As the furnace tests the work of the smith, so wine tests hearts when the insolent quarrel. 27 Wine is very life to human beings if taken in moderation. What is life to one who is without wine? It has been created to make people happy. 28 Wine drunk at the proper time and in moderation is rejoicing of heart and gladness of soul. 29 Wine drunk to excess leads to bitterness of spirit, to quarrels and stumbling.
Clement of Alexandria The Instructor 2.2
PaedagogusIt has therefore been well said, A joy of the soul and heart was wine created from the beginning, when drunk in moderate sufficiency. And it is best to mix the wine with as much water as possible, and not to have recourse to it as to water, and so get enervated to drunkenness, and not pour it in as water from love of wine. For both are works of God; and so the mixture of both, of water and of wine, conduces together to health, because life consists of what is necessary and of what is useful. With water, then, which is the necessary of life, and to be used in abundance, there is also to be mixed the useful.
Notes and References
"... The eighty-fifth of the Apostolical Canons gives a list of the books of the Hebrew Canon, and adds the first three books of the Maccabees and the Wisdom of Sirach; these last four are not, however, included in the Canon, though the Wisdom of Sirach is specially recommended for the instruction of the young. Again, in the Apostolical Constitutions, 6:14, 15, quotations from Sirach are given with the same formula as those from the books of the Hebrew Canon, but in the list given in 2:57 of the same work, there is no mention of any of the books of the Apocrypha ... The evidence of Clement of Alexandria is conflicting; in his Paedagogus he quotes very often from Sirach, and speaks of it as 'scripture', from which it would evidently appear that he regarded it as canonical Scripture; but, according to Eusebius, Clement reckoned Sirach among the 'Antilegomena', for in speaking of Clement's works he mentions the Stromateis, or 'Medleys', and says: 'He quotes in them passages from the disputed Scriptures, the so-called Wisdom of Solomon, for example, and of Jesus the son of Sirach, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, and those of Barnabas, Clement, and Jude ..."
Charles, R. H. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (p. 299) Oxford University Press, 1913