Seated on a barrel, seminude and wearing grape leaves on his head, the god of wine crowns a young soldier surrounded by a group of drinkers. The treatment of this subject distances itself from the noble tradition of the myth in a naturalistic reinterpretation. There is no lack of paradox between the almost ritual gravity of the figures on the left and the playful irony and realism of the group on the right. Stylistically, this work retains the naturalist taste of the artist's time in Seville, along with the colorist influence he assimilated from the work of Rubens and from the sixteenth-century Venetians.

By Royal Warrant, Velázquez was paid one hundred ducats for this, his first mythological painting in 1629. Here, he developed a pictorial discourse on the virtues of wine and its capacity to console people from the strife of daily life.