History of Wine

More than any other drink across the world, wine fascinates, entices and seduces. Tea and coffee have their rituals, beer and water quench the thirst, whisky and brandy intoxicate, but none of these attract so many connoisseurs, stimulate such fellowship, or even give so much pleasure as wine. More books are written about wine than any other drink, and more wine is tasted in the formalized rituals of sniff and slurp than any other beverage.

It is too easy, while we enjoy a glass of chilled Chardonnay, to ignore where it came from, how it was made, or the cultural background that spawned it. However, wine is rooted in history, and it has a dynamic relationship to both those cultures who have drunk it for millennia and those who have enjoyed it for less than 100 years.

Wine was probably first made in the region of the Caucasus Mountains between Europe and Asia, roughly in present-day Georgia or Kurdistan. The current best evidence for its origin suggests that it was being made there perhaps 8,000 years ago. Some archeologists think beer was made before wine because barley, which is essential for making beer, was a key initial crop in the diet of our ancestors. Mead, made from honey, and palm wine were also important early beverages. Nevertheless, wine has a venerable history.

It is likely that the first winemaker would have been a woman, for women would probably have been responsible for gathering fruit and nuts in Neolithic society. The usual hypothesis is that a few bunches of wild grapes were stored in a clay pot and forgotten for a few days. They began to ferment, probably by carbonic maceration. As juice ran out, yeast fermentation may have begun. After a few days, the owner of the pot remembered the grapes and, perhaps feeling thirsty, she drank the juice that had accumulated at the bottom. Although it may not have been very pleasant, it made her feel strangely euphoric. Thus the first wine, and maybe the first alcoholic drink, was born.

At first, wine would have been made on a haphazard basis, probably from the wild vines of the region. Initially, its limited availability, depending on grapes occurring naturally, would have confined its use to special occasions. Later, when wine was made from cultivated grapes, its use would have become more widespread.

WINE AS A COMMODITY
As Neolithic society became more developed due to the more efficient cultivation of crops, so it started to create surplus product and afford certain individuals the opportunity to trade that surplus. Wine could not easily be produced everywhere. The climate around cities like Ur and Babylon, the earliest centers of civilization in the Middle East, was too hot to produce the balanced grapes needed for good wine, but these places had the wealth to purchase wine. Thus, wine became a commodity, with the power to make its traders rich.

The first wine trader might have lived in one of the cities of Sumer, in what is now southern Iraq. These cities were on major rivers, like the Tigris and Euphrates, which gave the cities their wealth. They not only irrigated the crops, but the were also arteries of trade. The rivers flow down from southeast Turkey, close to the original cradle of wine production. Wine producers there would load up reed boats with large pots of the magic liquid and float it downstream to the great metropolises of the south. There they could trade for gold and jewels, and later for bronze weapons Wine spread through the Mediterranean world rapidly. It was produced by the Egyptians, though only for the rich, and then by the Greeks, who produced it for all classes. The austere early Romans were suspicious of it, but wine had become popular well before the time of Caesar, and was again a source of wealth for those who produced it (using slave labor) on a large scale.

The wine drunk in the ancient world would not have resembled most of the wines we drink today. The taste then was for sweeter wine. It may well have had a lower alcohol level, and would regularly have been mixed with other substances such as honey, spices or even seawater! The two wines we see today that most resemble the ancient styles are probably the dried-grape wines of northeast Italy, the recioto, and retsina, the Greek wine flavored with pine resin.

The peace established by the Roman Empire, and its efficient transport system, encouraged not only trade in wine but also the spread of the vine. Even before the Romans arrived, Greek traders had brought the vine to the south of France, but the pax Romana sent it out through France and Spain-and possibly encouraged the use of wild vines in Germany. By the end of the third century AD, wine was being made in many of the places we now see as its traditional home- Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Mosel valley and Jer6z. In time, these areas started to send wine back to Rome itself.

Critical to this spread was a revolution in the method of transporting wine. The early storage of all liquids, including wine, was in clay jars, usually long thin ones called amphorae. However, in the second century AD, a new form of container appeared from France.

Barrels, invented by the Celts, were probably being made in 500 BC. In the first century AD, they were generally used to transport wine, ultimately replacing amphorae as the preferred container. The coopers developed substantial skills in shaping and fitting the staves into watertight containers and, though despised as barbarians by their Roman overlords, they revolutionized the transport of wine. Amphorae are cumbersome, heavy, unstackable and easily broken. Barrels, on the other hand, are resilient, hold more and are stackable-they were the technological change necessary to spread cheap mass-produced wine to the burgeoning masses of Rome. In one respect, however, the barrels had an adverse effect on wine. Clay pots could be made airtight, which meant that wine could mature in them for many years. Oak casks sped the oxidation process, so that wine aged, and spoiled, more rapidly.

The end of the Roman Empire in Western Europe led to the period known as the Dark Ages. During this time, although there was a dramatic decline in the European wine trade, viticulture thrived in the eastern Mediterranean vineyards of Greece, Turkey and the Balkans in the Byzantine Empire for many centuries.