The Fascinating History of Wine

The story of wine is as old as civilization itself. Most evidence points to Georgia, Armenia, and Mesopotamia, or even China, where literary mentions of what sounds like wine are found in ancient manuscripts, as well as modern archaeological finds. While the hows of neolithic wine production are still a mystery, what seem to be wine traces have been analyzed on neolithic tools where chemicals found in wine were discovered.

Today’s well-known wine-producing regions are not where wine originated. The ancient wine regions are where the world’s first winemakers developed techniques for fermenting grape juice into alcoholic wine.

The earliest written mention of grape-growing has been discovered in almost 13,000-year-old cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia. Wine was enjoyed by royalty and priests, while commoners drank mead called hydromel, which is a fermented mix of honey and a little water or beer.

Later mentions of wine at about 5000 BCE came from Persia and ancient Greece, regarding drinks made from native grape varietals that still grow in those areas to this day. The oldest evidence of ancient wine production has been found in the country of Georgia from circa 6000 BC.

The Phoenicians are responsible for starting the wine trade. Phoenician traders brought vine cultivation and wine-making to the eastern Mediterranean in what are now Lebanon, Israel, and Syria. They created an entire industry in those areas before written history. The same ancient trading group brought vines to Thrace, the region now divided between northeastern Greece and southern Bulgaria, which was considered by the ancients to be the birthplace of Dionysus, the god of wine.

The Homeric and the Minoan Greeks produced “strong” wine as it is mentioned in both the Odyssey and the Iliad. In the plays of Aristophanes, there is mention of the wine’s “ill effects,” which is what we now call a hangover, from consuming too much wine. To avoid that, the Athenians diluted their wine with water or honey.

In Athens, it was considered vulgar to be seen drunk during a symposium. The Attic word “symposium” actually means “drinking together.” The priests of Dionysus, the ancient god of Wine, were “miraculously” converting water to wine way before Jesus performed his “very first miracle” of converting water to high quality wine at the wedding in Canaan.

Slowly, vine cultivation and wine-making spread through the Mediterranean by colonizing Greeks along the shores of what the Romans used to call “mare nostrum,” meaning “our sea.”

The Greek colonies in Italy and the Italian islands developed the methods of vineyard cultivation. The Greeks were so impressed by Italy’s climate and soil that they named the peninsula “Oenotria,” which means “the land of wines.”

Imitating the Greeks, the Romans had their very own god of wine: Bacchus. This is where we get the word “bacchanalia,” meaning a drunken revelry.

Wine was a part of the daily life of the Romans, and “the nectar of the gods” was easily accessible to rich and poor. However, a wide variety of lesser-quality wines were what the masses drank – mustum (wine mixed with a little vinegar), mulsum (wine sweetened with honey), and lora (a bitter wine made from the leftover pomace after pressing), to name a few of the more popular drinks.

Mustum is the root for the modern word “must,” which is the juice produced when the grapes are pressed.

As the Roman Empire grew across Europe, they planted grapevines in many European areas they had conquered, including modern-day France, Spain, Germany, and Portugal. England was too cold for grapes to flourish, so the Romans imported vast quantities of wine to the British Isles from the other European areas they controlled.

In the 16th century, transatlantic sailings saw Spanish missionaries following the conquistadors who invaded Southern California and Mexico, bringing with them the European Catholic religion-based grape culture. During this time, wine production spread widely across South America as the Spaniards traveled through the continent looking for gold, silver, and precious stones to bring back to Spain.

Spanish missionaries established the first winery in Chile. They brought with them and planted the Pais grape so that they could produce sacramental wines. These missionaries also sailed to Argentina, where they settled in the Mendoza area and planted or grafted the region’s first European grape varietals onto native vines. 

“Old World” wine production uses fruit from a grapevine known as Vitis vinifera. It is native to the Mediterranean region. Every wine begins with the grapes being harvested, then pressed and fermented. The fermentation process is the crucial part, as this is what turns pressed grape juice into wine. 

In 2016, a group of researchers uncovered the oldest actual winery in the world in a cave in the Armenian mountains. Among the discoveries in this cave were a drinking cup, a grape press, and numerous large clay fermentation jars. By analyzing the DNA of the residue in the clay jars, it was also determined that the wine grapes used were Vitis vinifera, the same grape used to make wines today.

High quality wines are now being produced in all of the countries bordering the east, north, and west shores of the Mediterranean. Grape cultivation at the southern Mediterranean shores in North Africa is very difficult because the excessive heat and lack of frequent rains make it unattainable for the vines to thrive.

The reason for the poor grape production pattern is the khamsin or hamsin – a hot, dry, dusty wind of North Africa and the Arabic Peninsula that blows from the south in late winter and early spring.

To your health!