Chapter
3
HISTORY OF WINE
“My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.” — Mark Twain
Since the dawn of history, mankind’s greatest quest has been to find not only food, but fresh, drinkable water. Many wars have been fought and lives lost in the struggle for access to fresh water. Because most available water has not been drinkable and carries disease, alternative liquids had to be found, and since the discovery of alcoholic fermentation some ten thousand years ago, beer and wine have been the most common safe alternatives to water.
Wine has always been consumed, not because it tasted particularly good, but because it was safer than water. Unless it came from a fresh spring, water often carried disease, and after a few days, most water was undrinkable. Because of the fermentation process, the alcohol in wine and beer kills many of the diseases found in untreated water. Wine will also store much longer than water, which made it invaluable for sailors on sea voyages; additionally, the grape juice in wine provided much needed nutrients to the human diet. Unfortunately, however, for most of its history wine has oxidized fairly rapidly, and thus has had (by modern standards) a thin, vinegary taste needing to be drunk as soon after fermentation as possible. For this reason wine was often flavored with resin, which made the wines sticky and thick. Even today the Greeks continue to make retsina wine, which is flavored with pine resin. Other additives included lead, lye-ash, marble dust, salt, pepper, and random assortments of herbs and spices. In addition to improving the taste of the wine, the additives provided valuable nutrients to the ancient diet. Rather than ferment the fresh grapes immediately after harvest, the grapes were allowed to dry in the sun, becoming like raisins prior to fermentation. This concentrated the sugar and resulted in a sweeter, more alcoholic wine which would preserve longer. When ready for drinking, ancient wines were cut with honey, dried fruit, and even salt water. In the first century BC, Pliny the Elder recommended that the seawater used to cut wine should come far away from shore because of all the human waste that contaminated the shoreline. Pliny was a great believer in resin, and was as much a connoisseur of the different types of tree resin as he was of wine.
Just as people today carry around their little plastic bottles to sip water throughout the day, so in the old days they used to carry their wineskins to sip from. The leather wineskin will have done little to improve the taste of the wine. It is probably no exaggeration to suggest that most people were slightly drunk most of the time—which certainly helps explain many otherwise strange historical decisions.
Ancient World
The earliest indications of wine production date back almost 9,000 years to the Southern Caucasus where the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan meet in uneasy harmony. This is also the area where the Caucasus, the Taurus, and the Zagros mountains all come together, and where the ancestors of all our grains and vines are still to be found.
Vitus is the botanical name of the grapevine genus with the specific name vinifera (wine-bearing). Vitus vinifera of the subspecies silvestris is the original wild grape. The original wild vine, Vitis vinifera silvestris, still grows in the Zagros Mountains of Northwestern Iran and is thus the ancestor of all our modern wines.
This original vine, Vitis vinifera silvestris, is dioecious, which means that it has both male and female plants. At first, however, humans selected only the female plants, because only the females bear fruit.
Eventually, after centuries of human selection, a new hermaphrodite sativa subspecies emerged, which displayed both male and female flowers. Increasingly this new subspecies, Vitis vinifera sativa, was selected for human consumption. Thus today, Vitis vinifera sativa is the cultivated vine which has spread all over the globe and from which all wine is produced, while Vitis vinifera silvestris remains as a wild, woodland vine in the Transcaucasian Mountains.
Interestingly, because humans selected the hermaphrodite Vitis sativa to cultivate, this means its descendants have had very little sex in the subsequent ten thousand years. Recent DNA testing and genome scans reveal that Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Merlot, and all the other varietals of Vitis vinifera sativa are all closely-related members of the same family. Forget “kissing cousins;” centuries of in-breeding means that all modern wines are increasingly susceptible to disease and will eventually need some sort of genetically engineered protection.
The oldest physical evidence of large scale wine production is at Hajji Firuz Tepe and Godin Tepe, Neolithic settlements in Iran’s Zagros Mountains just south of the Bible’s Mount Ararat. Indirect evidence of ancient winemaking is provided by the discovery of significant quantities of vinification residues (tartaric acid) with oak resin in clay jars, a wine press, fermentation vats, jars, and cups, dating back to the seventh millennium BC. Throughout the Near East, numerous archaeological grape seeds attributed to the cultivated grapevine, Vitis vinifera sativa, were found in Chalcolithic and mid-Bronze Age archaeological levels. This demonstrates the evolution of the cultivated Vitis vinifera sativa from the original wild grapevine, Vitis vinifera silvestris, which thus marks the beginning of civilized human development.
Because fermentation is a natural occurrence, the pleasing effects of alcoholic grape juice were probably discovered by a happy accident. Interestingly, the Bible describes Noah as being the world’s first viticulturist and as planting the first vineyard after the Great Flood had subsided: “And Noah began to be a husbandman, and he planted a vineyard. And he drank of the wine, and was drunken” (Genesis 9:20). Tradition has always located the resting place of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat in the Southern Caucuses—right in the center of the region where modern archeologists have located the earliest signs of Vitis vinifera sativa grape production and consumption. The oldest documented civilization in this region of Anatolia was the Hittites, who used wine primarily as a religious libation which they offered to the gods during royal ceremonies. Evidence exists to show that Hittite law protected winegrowers, and they would celebrate each successful harvest of grapes with a holiday and copious libations to the gods. Even today the Turkish government has a state-run vineyard, Buzbağ, growing the Boğazkere grape varietal near the town of Elazığ, west of Mount Ararat and between the source of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—the cradle of civilization. Turkey is still the world’s fourth largest producer of grapes, especially the widely-planted Sultaniye varietal.
The primitive method that Noah or any Neolithic winemaker near Mount Ararat would have used to make wine is still practiced in this region even in the twenty-first century. Wine is still made using a Kvevri, a large (800-3500 liters) earthenware vessel originally from Georgia in the Caucasus, and dating back to about 8000 BC. It has an inside coat of beeswax, resembles an amphorae without handles, and is used for the fermentation and storage of wine, often buried below ground level or set into the floors of large wine cellars. In the winemaking process, grapes are poured into the kvevri, crushed, and left to ferment and mature. Over a period of days, the grape skins are pushed down on the hour and the kvevri is finally covered with a suitable-sized stone cap, sealed with pine resin and clay and left undisturbed for up to two years. When the wine is ready, it is pumped out and bottled, after which the kvevri is sterilized with lime and sulphur, ready for re-use.
In many respects the deliberate cultivation of grapes and storage of wine in pots marks the switch from a nomadic to a settled society, and consequently, the birth of civilization. Thucydides wrote that “people only emerged from barbarism when they began to cultivate the olive and the vine.” The potter’s wheel, which was invented in Mesopotamia around the same time, 6,000 BC, is another indication of a settled, civilized society. Obviously, the simultaneous invention of pottery would assist the fermentation as well as the storage of wine. Because this was a period when writing was also invented, metals were being used, irrigated agriculture was first introduced,
and urban living and complex social hierarchies were evolving, it has been argued that another reason people started to drink wine was to escape the growing urban pressures and stresses of Bronze Age life.
Professor Hans Barnard, one of the archeological team who in 2007 discovered the world’s oldest wine production facility at the Areni-1 cave in Vayots Dzor in Armenia, about twenty miles east of Mt. Ararat, wrote: “Deliberate fermentation of carbohydrates into alcohol … prompted the domestication of wild plants and the development of ceramic technology.” In other words: this carefully constructed and sophisticated site for the large-scale production of wine marks a significant step forward in the development of modern society.
Mesopotamia: The grape vine was widely-known in the ancient Mesopotamian world, and both the Babylonian and Sumerian civilizations used wine to mark special occasions. Because wine had to be floated on rafts down the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys from the Caucuses and Zagros mountains and was therefore expensive, its use was restricted to the ruling and religious classes, while the regular population tended to consume locally produced beer. The first written reference to wine drinking is found in the worlds’s oldest written literature, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, written about 3,500 BC, in which the wild man, Enkidu, is seduced and tamed with wine by a lascivious temple-prostitute:
“So he ate till he was full and drank strong wine, seven goblets. He became merry, his heart exulted and his face shone. He rubbed down the matted hair of his body and anointed himself with oil. Enkidu had become a man (Epic of Gilgamesh, 1960: 65-6).”
The drinking of wine had civilized him.
Egypt: The Egyptians, dating back to the First Dynasty, were the oldest civilization to make extensively documented use of wine. Excavation of 5,000 year old tombs in Abydos (Upper Egypt) reveals storage chambers for wine, which the dead were to carry with them on their journey to the afterlife. Spectral and mass molecular chromatographic analyses of amphorae found in Tutankhamun’s tomb proved the presence of red wine as well as white wine. We also have 5th Dynasty written records of wine production which document six different wine-growing regions along the Nile River. Detailed paintings on the walls of Ancient Egyptian tombs illustrate a sophisticated and well-established winemaking culture. Thirty-six different amphorae found in the tomb of Tutankhamen, (ruled 1332 BC – 1323 BC), were each inscribed with the vintage and the terroir as well as the name of the producer. For example: “Year 5. Shedeh of very good quality of the estate of Aten of the Western River. Chief Vintner Rer.”
Archaeologists have even found descriptions of the different styles of Egyptian wine:
Taenioticus: White to green, sweet, rich, aromatic, tart
Mareoticus: White, sweet, rigorous, with fine bouquet
Sebennyticum: According to Pliny, a type of wine produced with both Thasos grapes and another variety called Fuligem (sooty); pine resin was also added
Because of the importance of the annual Nile flood cycle to the whole of Egyptian culture and religion, the vine held a powerful significance throughout society. Starting the year like a piece of dead and discarded driftwood, the vine spontaneously begins weeping in early spring and, with its sudden profusion of buds, seems to epitomize the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Osiris, the Egyptian God of Resurrection, was also the God of the Vine, and, like the vine, he died and was born again each year. Because wine was associated with divinity, it was drunk only by the royal families and the priestly elite; as in Mesopotamia, the common people would have drunk locally-produced beer.
Phoenicians: By 2,000 BC vine production had reached the shores of the Mediterranean where it was spread by the Phoenician traders from modern day Lebanon. Unlike the Greeks and the Romans after them, the Phoenicians were primarily traders, not colonists. They established trading posts all over the Mediterranean where they planted vines and produced wine for trade; vineyards planted in Sicily and Jerez (Cadiz) in 1100 BC are still in production today. The voluminous writings of Mago, a Phoenician wine expert from Carthage (Tunis), were studied for centuries by Greeks and Romans wishing to learn about wine cultivation.
Greeks: In order to cope with overcrowding in the small cities of the Greek mainland, the Greeks founded new city-states in other lands around the Mediterranean where they would try to reproduce the conditions and the culture of the city they had left behind. This included planting vines. When the Greeks first discovered Southern Italy and Sicily, they named it Oenetria—the Land of Vines—and they planted vineyards everywhere they settled. Further north, the Etruscans also planted vineyards, perhaps the oldest in Italy, in what is now Tuscany—the home of Chianti. The Tuscan vineyards continued to thrive under the Romans, and the wine was shipped down the coast from Pisa and up the coast from Pompeii for consumption in Rome.
Although some dry wines would have been produced, most of the wines made and drunk by the Greeks and Phoenicians were sweet, dark and aromatic—hence Homer’s many references to “the wine-dark sea.” Very often, herbs, spices, honey, and even pine resin were added to improve the taste and the wine was usually diluted with water, often seawater. The Greeks regarded the consumption of undiluted wine as being a sign of barbarism. The moderate drinking of diluted wine in a controlled setting, however, is what raised an educated man above the barbarian.
For Greeks, the embodiment of civilized life was the Symposium, when men gathered together to drink wine while talking and discussing politics and philosophy in Socratic dialogs as described by Plato and Xenophon. These were aristocratic and sophisticated gatherings, like a Georgetown dinner party, and wine was used to loosen tongues and create fellowship, not create drunkenness or violence. The drinking of wine in moderation was a recurring theme in Greek literature, and three cups of wine was commonly regarded as sufficient for any civilized person. The third century BC poet, Eubulus, described how Dionysis prepared a Symposium in Semele or Dionysus:
“Three bowls do I mix for the temperate: one to health, which they empty first; the second to love and pleasure; the third to sleep. When this bowl is drunk up, wise guests go home. The fourth bowl is ours no longer, but belongs to violence; it belongs to bad behavior; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness.” (A modern version might conclude with “the midnight posting of inappropriate selfies on Facebook.”)
The first vines to be planted in France were around the Greek colony of Masalia (today’s Marseilles) in 600 BC, and the whole of modern-day Provence and the lower Rhône valley were originally planted with Greek vines. Artifacts from Ancient Greece demonstrate the importance of wine not only to Greek culture but also to the economy, with images of grape clusters, vines, and wine cups decorating everything from pottery to coins. The Greeks founded colonies, traded wine, and planted vineyards, not only all around the Mediterranean coast but also all around the coast of the Black Sea. The importance of the Greek influence is demonstrated by the millions of amphora pieces bearing the unique seals of various city-states and Aegean islands, which are continuously uncovered by archaeologists all over these inland seas. As is discussed elsewhere, DNA testing of amphora as well as the potters’ seal shows modern researchers not only the trading routes but also the volume of wine that was shipped by the Ancient Greeks. A single shipwreck off the coast of Marseilles contained almost ten thousand amphorae holding nearly eighty thousand gallons of Greek wine to be shipped up the Rhône valley into Gaul, and maybe as far as Germany or even England.
The original Vitis vinifera which had originated in the Southern Caucuses was thus transported, cloned, and replanted by each new civilization that discovered the joys of wine. From the Babylonians and Egyptians to the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans—so the original hermaphroditic vine, over the centuries, developed new strains and varieties by cloning as it spread slowly westward through
Europe—and eventually into the New World.
Roman World
By 200 BC the Romans had either defeated or assimilated the Phoenician, Etruscan, and Greek civilizations, and the history of wine cultivation moved onto a new level. Originally, the Romans had disdained wine as being a degenerate ”Eastern” vice suitable only for Greeks and Carthaginians—girlie men.” An austere and militaristic people, the Romans preferred beer to wine and war to discourse. Eventually, however, after the defeat of Carthage in the Punic Wars, the Romans became enthusiastic wine consumers. By the time of Emperor Augustus, the Romans were consuming a bottle of wine per person, per day—or about fifty million US gallons annually. (These statistics include women, slaves, and children.)
Originally, the main source of wine for the Romans was from the old Phoenician vineyards around Naples, but after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii in 79 AD, new vineyards had to be planted. As a result, so much of Roman land was dedicated to the growing of vines that just thirteen years later the Emperor Domitian ordered many of the vineyards to be dug up in order to grow food for the starving population.
The Romans were the first to really “industrialize” the production of wine with large vineyards, built and maintained by slaves, and using the principles first documented by the Phoenician writer Mago. Initially, as the Romans conquered and colonized the rest of the known world, they discouraged the planting of vineyards elsewhere in order to protect the export of their own wine from Italy. But following the destruction of the vineyards around Pompeii, with the rapid expansion of the empire and the growing demand from their own troops and colonies, the Romans started planting vineyards, initially in Provence and eventually all over the Empire—even in the British Isles.
The Booklovers' Guide to Wine Page 8
