To ’choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

The line contrasts two ways of approaching truth: accepting inherited certainty (“dogma and faith”) versus living with uncertainty while testing ideas against reality (“doubt and experience”). Hitchens frames the choice as not merely mistaken but perversely self-denying: discarding “the ripening vintage” suggests rejecting mature, hard-won understanding for something crude and instant. The “Kool-Aid” reference evokes the Jonestown mass-suicide/murder (often misremembered as Kool-Aid), using a cultural shorthand for credulity, groupthink, and lethal surrender of judgment. The overall effect is polemical: faith is portrayed as an addictive, socially contagious substitute for evidence-based inquiry.