History Of Wine

Prehistoric people found grapes growing on wild vines, ate the fruit and squashed the grapes in their hands and underfoot to make juice. When they tried to keep this juice for a day or two in their simple clay pots, they noticed that it began to bubble and take on a different character.

The fermented result led to many a splendid party. Wine had appeared on the global scene. However, it quickly became obvious that with an abundance of flies and microbes at large, this newly made and exciting beverage soon turned sour. There was no way to preserve it, so it was drunk right away.

It was discovered that a donkey (or more likely a goat) had chewed up a straggling vine in the winter, leaving nothing in the ground but an unsightly stump. In summer, to general delight, from the gnarled wood grew a fine vine, producing a large crop of high quality grapes. So the art of pruning was established.

We now take a great leap forward in time to when the Phoenician businessman plied their trade across the seas of the then known world. Wine was one of their cargoes, and it was transported in amphorae, stacked in racks aboard the ship. Wine in these containers attracted flies and germs and soon went bad; so to keep the insects away, a layer of olive oil was floated on top. This also preserved the wine both by keeping the insects and bacteria at bay and by preventing oxygen in the air from oxidizing the wine (which, like the action of yeast, was something else that was to be discovered very much later).

This was all fine until a storm blew up at sea. The wine spilled, which may have done a lot to preserve the ships timbers and improve the atmosphere, but did nothing for business. So a plug had to be found, and it took the form of pinewood disks, which were bedded into the necks of amphorae with a clay and resin mixture. Disks of cork may also have been used with a similar bonding compound.

The resinous wood and sealing mixture flavored the wine as they came in contact with rolling seas. The Phoenicians and Greeks came to believe that the resin preserved the wine. Anyhow, a taste was acquired for it, which has survived until this day, in the form of Retsina wine which is stored in barrels with lumps of resin.

Ahead we go again, this time to ancient Rome, its empire and army. To keep the soldiers happy and healthy, each was given a daily ration of a litre of wine. But as the armies advanced over Europe, lines of supply were stretched to the limit. So the wily Romans planted vines wherever they went to reduce the burden on these lines of supply. The wines they found and developed in Worms, for instance, became so good over the centuries that in the eighteenth century, an Englishman called Maximilian Mission wrote that the monks there thought the wines were as delicious and as sweet as milk from the holy virgin (hence today's Liebfrau(en)milch). What a legacy!

When the Romans reached England, their lines of supply and communication had become even longer and more perilous. So, again, vines were introduced, and for the first time. The variety planted to produce the daily ration may have been Wrotham Pinot. Wine making in the UK since then has been a spasmodic business and generally on a small scale.

Since the fall of the Roman Empire, through times of prosperity, plague, wars and famine, wine making skills have progressed, until it has now become a high-tech industry in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Wine is also made in China, India, Japan, Holland, Denmark, Sweden and elsewhere. Suitable micro-climates can be found in the most unlikely places. Vines seem to have no bounds.