Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook on the History of Wine, Terroir, and the Judgment of Paris
The Rest Is History | 5 May 2026 | YouTube
Holland and Sandbrook trace 8,000 years of wine in seven key moments — from the domestication of the vinifera grape in Georgia to the 1976 Judgment of Paris. The episode treats wine not as a product but as a civilisational instrument: a mechanism of trade, conquest, legal debate, spiritual metaphor, and national prestige.
Key ideas
- Domestication and the amphora. The vinifera grape — a self-pollinating hermaphrodite produced by crossbreeding wild vines — was first cultivated around 6000 BC in Georgia/Armenia. The amphora, invented by Canaanites and refined by Phoenicians, made wine portable and tradeable; Phoenician ships off Gaza carried equivalents of 20,000 modern bottles, spreading wine culture from the Levant across the Mediterranean.
- Rome weaponised wine. Roman merchants deliberately addicted Gauls to undiluted wine, banned the export of vines to Gaul, and inflated the exchange rate to one amphora per slave. The resulting Gallic competition for slaves to trade for wine made unified Gallic resistance to Rome impossible; wine was, in effect, the economic infrastructure of Caesar’s conquest.
- Islam as rupture — and loophole. The Quran’s prohibition was decisive: it destroyed the amphora culture that had survived 1,500 years. But Islamic jurists found room for manoeuvre — date wine is not grape wine; intoxication, not consumption, is the offence. Sufi poets like Rumi inverted the prohibition entirely, using wine as the central metaphor for divine love: “Before garden, vine, and grape were in the world, our soul was drunk with immortal wine.”
- England’s technological contribution. France grows wine; England built the infrastructure to store it. Kenelm Digby’s coal-fired glass furnaces (1620s) produced the first durable dark bottle — dark because of coal fumes, a quality signal that persists today. The corkscrew followed, and the 1703 Methuen Treaty secured Portuguese cork. The English aristocracy also set the price benchmarks for Bordeaux: the 1855 grand cru classifications were based on what English consumers were willing to pay.
- The Judgment of Paris (1976) as myth-breaking event. A blind tasting organised by English wine merchant Steven Spurrier, judged by the heads of France’s major wine institutions, placed Californian wines first in both the white and red categories. The shock was not that French wines lost but that the arbiters were French. Californian chardonnay beat Burgundy; Stag’s Leap beat Château Mouton Rothschild, which had only just been elevated to the top classification in 1973.
Context
Holland and Sandbrook read from Kathleen Burke’s forthcoming Wine: A Global History and from Pliny the Elder’s encyclopaedia, which they treat as the ancient prototype of modern wine writing — forensic regional surveys, discussions of terroir (avant la lettre), and a first wine snob anecdote about the Emperor Augustus. The episode positions terroir as a 19th-century political construction — conservative resistance to industrialisation dressed up as ancient attachment to the soil — rather than a natural category.
The episode frames the Judgment of Paris not as a final reversal but as a complication: New World vineyards responded to the shock by adopting French vocabulary (château, grand cru, terroir) rather than displacing it, confirming French cultural prestige even in defeat.