The Origins of wine

 

If you walk through the countryside of modern-day Georgia or Armenia, in the shadow of the Caucasus mountains, look closely at the hedgerows. By the roadside you will find that there are grapes growing wild. If you stop to pick one, you’ll be sharing in an act that men and women have been doing there for many thousands of years. These grapes are Vitis vinifera plants: wild, native, uncultivated versions of the same type of grape that now produces almost every wine you’ll buy, wherever it is made in the world. 

They still make wine in rural Georgia in traditional ways that have changed little for many centuries, perhaps even for millennia. The grapes are trodden by foot in old, hollowed-out tree trunks, and then fermented in large clay pots that are sunk in the ground up to their necks. The jars are sealed with wooden bungs and covered by earth, allowing the wine to ferment and mature in cool conditions. It’s a far cry from modern winemaking with its hydraulic grape presses and stainless steel, temperature-controlled tanks, but it represents a direct link with the origins of wine culture. 

A little further south, in the mountains of northern Iran, archaeologists have found the earliest evidence yet of a winemaking tradition. Clay jars were found during the excavation of a village called Hajji Firuz Tepe and the residue left on the inside of the nine litre jars (incidentally, exactly the same size as a modern case of wine) was identified as the remnants of wine made from grapes, dating back seven thousand years, to around 5000 BC. 

It’s no coincidence that this part of the world was also amongst the first to develop an agrarian culture, as communities of hunters and gatherers moved to becoming sedentary farmers, living in established settlements and growing cereal crops. Cultivating grapes would have been an obvious extension of this, and thus wine has a history that is intertwined with the very development of civilisation itself. 

So this is where it all began. From the wild grapes that grow in the Transcaucasus region, the mountainous land that runs between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, a global wine industry has gradually emerged, as varied civilisations have transported these vines and their wines to every corner of the world. 

At least five thousand years ago, grape vines also arrived in north-west India, transported by Persian traders, with the Indus Valley civilisation using them for their fruit, but possibly not for wine itself. 

The first major civilisation to embrace the wine grape, and to record what it did, was Egypt at the time of the Pharaohs, when wine played an important part in their rich, ritualised culture. The wild grape did not grow in Egypt, but international trade brought the vine to the country as early as 2700 BC, and they learnt to grow and tend the vines effectively. They also applied new technology to the art of winemaking, like refinements to the grape-treading process, and careful methods of sealing wine in clay amphorae (giant clay flasks) – even the recording of specific vintages on individual wines, with all these details carefully depicted on many tomb paintings of the time as an indelible record of their practices. 

When the tomb of King Tutankhamun was opened, thirty-six amphorae of wine were discovered, left there to fuel his trip to the afterlife. Most were dated with a vintage and the names of individual vineyards, and almost all were marked with the name of the chief winemaker who made them: evidence that winemaking skills were highly valued as well as where a wine was made. 

As the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean started to be able to trade ever more wines across the wide extent of their empires, wealthy city dwellers began to enjoy wines from more distant shores, rather than just to rely on the single product of a particular village. As a result of this they began to develop clear hierarchies in the quality of individual wines – the start of the wine trade, and inevitably, the beginning of the wine critic too. 


While wine always remained a luxury product for the aristocracy of Ancient Egypt, for the Ancient Greeks it became part of daily life. From the second millennium BC, the Greeks were developing a vast array of vineyards spread across the territories of the different states – each one small in size, but adding up to a substantial industry. As colonisers, the Greeks also took viticulture with them, spreading the reach of the vine to Sicily and to southern Italy, which the Greeks called Oenotria (the land of trained vines), and as far afield as the Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea coast, and even southern France. In the town of Massalia (modern-day Marseilles) the growing of vines was well-established by 500 BC. As well as taking their vines where they went, the Greeks also traded the wine itself, using sea routes to take their amphorae right up into northern Europe and forming an important part of their economy.

Wine was centrally important to Greek culture. Drinking it was generally safer than drinking water, while a formal social event called a Symposium largely centred on the drinking of wine, usually diluted with water (surprisingly, often sea water) to bring down the alcohol level to between three and eight per cent. Wine was also deemed important for its medical properties, as a tonic, for pain relief and as an aid to digestion. It was also a vital part of religious ceremony, and was even given its own god: Dionysus, the symbol of wine, and the embodiment of its varied qualities, and one of the ten most important deities that they worshipped.

Ancient Greece was known for its culture; Ancient Rome was feared for its armies, and as the power of Rome grew, so its wealthy citizens were attracted by a higher quality of life, and wine. They soon developed the concept of a ‘first growth’ wine, and the product of one particular vintage, and one special vineyard, the Opimian Falernian of 121 BC, went down in history as the greatest wine of the time. Enthusiasts were still talking about the wine from that vintage more than a century later. The vineyard of Falernum sits roughly halfway between Rome and Naples, and was a dark, rich, white wine, tasting probably a bit like Madeira.

By the time the Emperor Augustus was in charge, by 27 BC, wine was being made all over Italy. Their technical innovations had developed the grape press to such a form that it barely changed until modern times, and they introduced the wooden wine barrel – much more practical than the clay amphora of the Greeks and Egyptians.

As they colonised Gaul – modern France, Roman citizens began to grow vineyards across the Languedoc region, and spread up the Rhone Valley, then across into Germany by way of those famous rivers, the Mosel and the Rhine. Wine culture grew along with the vines and formed the roots of a tradition that continues today.

When the Roman Empire faded and fell, gradually the power of empire shifted, and the countries of northern Europe like Germany and France became powerful mercantile economies in their own right. The strength of the Christian church became a dominant force, certainly for wine production, as wine has a central role in the Catholic church, ceremonially drunk as the blood of Christ in the holy mass. Monasteries and churches had substantial wealth, and they used it in part to manage and develop vineyards, with the wine used for themselves, and also to sell to wealthy patrons. In regions like Burgundy in France, the church started to codify the best vineyard sites, and to pay more attention to the particular grape varieties that were grown in these places. In the Middle Ages, wine was France’s main export, and proximity to the country’s main rivers determined how easily wines could be exported from particular vineyards. Bordeaux and Burgundy, the Loire and the Rhone Valleys grew into substantial export economies and the wine map was fixed for the future.

As countries around the world grew wealthier, it was wine that they wanted to sample as evidence of their prosperity. As people travelled and migrated to ever further places, they took wine and vines with them. Wine industries grew up in South America as the Spanish colonisation expanded, Australia and New Zealand grew vines almost as soon as Europeans arrived to live there, and South Africa has long been providing wine for the maritime trade that passes its coast. From small beginnings, the roots of the Vitis vinifera vine now cling to the soils of nearly every continent, and each country is now developing its own particular history of wine culture.