The History of Wine

Tom Holland

Anyone who knows the work of Alan Partridge will know that Alan Partridge has a huge World Book of Wine — and it sounds remarkably similar to Pliny's. Like Alan Partridge, Pliny catalogs wine by region with great thoroughness. And, Dominic, you will no doubt bring a lot of expertise to this discussion, because I have seen you sampling wines in the Napa Valley, in Sonoma, twice, in the Barossa Valley in Australia. I will never forget the occasion in the Sonoma Valley when the guide put down two wines — one a very heavy rich red, the other a very light Pinot Noir — and asked everyone to identify which was which. And unerringly, you chose the wrong one. It was a tremendous moment.

Tom Holland

And that is the level of expertise that we will be bringing to today’s episode, which is all about the history of wine. Pliny is the prototype for Alan Partridge, and indeed for both of us — everyone who fancies themselves a wine snob. It is a reminder that wine has been part of human culture for millennia. The history of how people have grown it, drunk it, been unable to taste it correctly, enjoyed it — and on occasion tried to ban it — is a great theme for a history podcast.

But there is another reason the history of wine is so interesting. It connects everything. The Barossa Valley, which we visited last November outside Adelaide, would have had no wine growing without the British Empire. The First Fleet, arriving at Botany Bay in 1788, brought vine cuttings from Rio and the Cape. Where did the German settlers of the Barossa bring their traditions? From Roman vineyards planted along the Rhine. And where did the Romans get their wine? We will be finding out today, because the story reaches back at least 8,000 years.

I thought we could trace that history through seven key moments — moments that will enable us to follow wine’s emergence, its spread, and its evolution into a five-hundred-billion-dollar industry.

Tom Holland

Where does the story begin? Let us turn for that answer to the Bible and the Book of Genesis: “Noah was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard and he drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent.” Noah planted his vineyard on Mount Ararat, which is where the ark came to rest — part of a great range of mountains south of the Black Sea: the Taurus, the Caucasus, the northern Zagros in Iran. This is the area where the decisive development in the history of wine took place.

That development involved the domestication of the vinifera grape, from which all the great varieties of today descend. As Kathleen Burke writes in her forthcoming book Wine: A Global History: “Wild grape vines are male or female. The female vines can produce fruit, but the male cannot, and so pollination has to take place by bees or the wind. What had to happen was crossbreeding, either accidentally or by early man, in order to create the hermaphroditic vine able to produce fruit by itself.”

Tom Holland

They argue that Georgia is the place on earth where wine has been produced for longer than anywhere else — and I think most people would say they’re right. There is firm archaeological evidence: shards of pottery found near Tbilisi, only about a hundred miles from Ararat, bearing chemical traces of wine dating to 6,000 BC. Then, around 4,000 BC, a village called Areni in Armenia has evidence of the oldest known winery — a large wine press discovered in a cave, with withered grape vines, skins, and seeds. Wine is made in Areni to this day. I looked it up: there is a Zulal Areni dry red described as “balanced, pure, and lush.”

What is interesting about the Areni press is not just that it is incredibly old, but that it is already large — suggesting wine was being made on a scale sufficient to distribute. And so this is looking forward to the emergence of the wine trade. In due time, wine reaches Iran, Mesopotamia, Canaan — what is now the Levant.

Tom Holland

The Canaanites are the forebears of the Phoenicians, and they rank as the first mass exporters of wine. The centre of the Canaanite wine trade, which begins in the sixth millennium BC, is the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon.

Tom Holland

Canaan becomes famous in the ancient world for its wines. There is an Egyptian story written around 2,000 BC in which Canaan is described as “a land where wine is more plentiful than water.” By that date, wine is being exported to Egypt, to Cyprus, and to Crete — and the reason the Canaanites can transport it overseas is because they have invented the amphora.

Most people can picture an amphora: two handles, a pointed base so it can be stuck in sand or mud, a narrow neck that can be sealed with a clay stopper. Having invented it, the amphora is then used for thousands of years — right up to the coming of Islam in the 7th century AD. Wine kept in a clay amphora tastes different from wine kept in oak; there is a distinct, not unpleasant clayey quality. That is what most people in human history would have tasted when they drank wine.

The Phoenicians are great merchants. They export even more wine over even greater distances than the Canaanites. In 1997, two Phoenician ships were found off Gaza by a US submarine. Their cargo: 781 amphorae, equivalent to 20,000 modern wine bottles. The Phoenicians were able to export wine across the entire Mediterranean and beyond. Wine amphorae have been found at Cadiz — ancient Gades, the Phoenician settlement just south of Portugal — dating to around 800 BC.

The Phoenicians are also in direct competition with another people who are very keen on wine: the Greeks. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and his men are returning from Troy carrying twelve jars of a precious red wine from Maron in Thrace — which they bring as a gift to the inhabitants of the Cyclops’ island. The Greeks dilute their wine, nineteen parts water to one of wine. But Polyphemus, the Cyclops, necks the whole lot — because he is a barbarian who does not understand wine culture. The Greeks and Phoenicians are not merely exporting alcohol; they are exporting an entire way of life governed by rules: how much you dilute it, the sociability it fosters, the symposium — lying around, drinking wine, talking philosophy. The Phoenicians take this to Spain; the Greeks take it to Gaul, founding Massilia (Marseille) around 600 BC.

Tom Holland

By the time the Roman Empire emerges, a wine culture has spread from the Near East across the Mediterranean, and the Romans inherit it. The Roman Empire constitutes the first properly international wine culture — a giant globalised single market. To begin with, the Romans are very conscious of being parvenus. They have a default assumption that the best wines are Greek, and Greek wines fetch the highest prices. They also treasure a Carthaginian agronomist called Mago, whose treatise on viticulture was the one volume from the Carthaginian libraries they chose to preserve after destroying Carthage — translating it into Latin.

But wine beds down so deeply into Roman Italy that as the legions expand, wine becomes a marker of civilisation itself. A bit like whiskey in the expansion of the American West, wine plays a role in Rome’s imperial advance into Gaul. In the 2nd century BC, Roman merchants travel up the rivers into the Gallic interior carrying wine. The Gauls absolutely love it. Being barbarians, they do not dilute it. They wallow in drunken binges. One Greek historian records that they end up “so inebriated that they either fall asleep or go mad.”

And here is the genius of it: the merchants create a market of alcoholics. Because the Gauls are addicted, merchants inflate their prices. To ensure wine remains a Roman monopoly, the Senate passes an official decree banning the export of vines to Gaul. The result: by the time of Julius Caesar, the exchange rate is one amphora of wine for one slave. You buy the wine, you get the slaves, you use the slaves to make more wine, which gets the Gauls even more addicted, which causes more wars among the Gauls to capture more slaves. Wine is, in effect, what enables Julius Caesar to conquer Gaul.

Tom Holland

By the time Pliny is writing in the 1st century AD, the Roman world encompasses most of what we now associate with wine: Greece, the Beqaa Valley, France, Germany along the Moselle and Rhine, and above all Italy. Italy has taken over from Greece as the heartland of wine. The Romans are not just producing on an industrial scale — they also have superb wines, of which the supreme example is Falernian. Pliny loves Falernian. All the Romans love Falernian. And wine saturates the work of the great Roman poets: carpe diem, from Horace, is an allusion to viticulture — pluck the day as though the day is a bunch of grapes on the vine. There is, in our everyday language, a trace element of how deeply the Romans were shaped by wine.

When Roman power collapses in the West, this common civilisation bonded by wine unravels. Vineyards are destroyed or abandoned. The barbarians who replace the Romans tend to prefer beer — better suited to colder climates, easier to produce without the sophisticated trade networks wine requires. Yet wine culture does not disappear. Trade links survive; the Rhine in particular becomes what contemporaries call “a river of wine.” Wine reaches Scandinavia, where it becomes a prestige drink for Viking elites — expensive then as it is now. And Christianity preserves it: if you are going to celebrate the Eucharist, you need wine. Abbeys along the Rhine become great enthusiasts for vineyards. Under Frankish law, a vineyard worker’s wergild — the compensation due if he is killed — is set at twice that of a ploughman, which suggests how precious vineyards had already become.

Tom Holland

The amphora, which had survived for over a thousand years since the Canaanites, vanishes in the 7th century — the century that sees the caliphate established over much of what had been the Roman and Persian empires, both of which were very keen on wine. The repudiation of wine culture under the caliphate is a dramatic marker of how transformative Islam set out to be.

In Islam, the mainstream legal position is unambiguous. According to the Quran, wine is an abomination, invented by Satan to encourage brawling, fighting, and distraction from prayer: “Will ye not then abstain?” The Prophet is reported to have said: “God has cursed wine, the one who drinks it, the one who pours it, the one who sells it, the one who buys it, the one who squeezes the grape to make it, the one for whom it is made, the one who transports it, the one to whom it is brought.” All four Sunni legal schools agree: for a free person, the penalty for drinking wine is eighty lashes of the whip. Some schools specify palm branches stripped of their leaves.

Tom Holland

Both punishments sound unpleasant. Yet wine drinking persists — partly because the Quran contains ambivalences. There are verses that seem to grant wine some positive qualities, and one that seems to permit drinking as long as one is not about to pray. Islamic scholarship rules these verses abrogated by the explicit ban, but they leave room for creative interpretation. The Hanafi school rules that the ban applies specifically to wine made from grapes — not from dates. And they further rule that it is not consumption of wine that offends God, but intoxication. As the jurist Sadakat Kadri quotes, this meant Muslims could legally drink “as much wine as they liked” — until, in the legal formula, they became incapable of telling a slave girl from a beardless boy.

A large number of caliphs are very keen on wine. Baghdad at its medieval peak has many taverns — run, tellingly, not by Muslims but by Christians, who need wine for the mass and are not bound by Quranic prescription. Harun al-Rashid, the caliph of the Arabian Nights’ golden age, sponsored the poet Abu Nuwas, who was notoriously dissolute and wrote about the rivers of wine promised in heaven: “Before garden, vine, and grape were in the world, our soul was drunk with immortal wine.”

Tom Holland

Against all of this, there is a figure called Ibn Taymiyyah — a hardline Sunni reformist who emerged in the wake of the Mongol catastrophe of the 13th century. He is absolutely opposed to wine, hashish, and all legal quibbling. He describes hashish as being to wine “as faeces are to urine” and declares that anyone who disagrees with his judgement is an apostate. Ibn Taymiyyah is, in essence, the godfather of Salafism — of the hardcore, radical strand of Islamic thought.

Against him stands a much more expansive tradition: Sufism. The great representative figure is the Persian mystic Rumi, who became a massive bestseller in 1960s and 1970s America. In Rumi’s poetry, wine serves as a metaphor for divine love. The soul that has opened itself to God is the drunk, staggering and overwhelmed by something greater than itself. Rumi is not recommending wine; he seems not to have drunk it himself. But he uses it as the best available metaphor for how God should be experienced: “Before garden, vine, and grape were in the world, our soul was drunk with immortal wine.” Wine is here a Platonic category, something that has always existed; the spiritual path is a journey back to tasting that primordial wine.

Ibn Taymiyyah thinks this is rubbish. Rumi sees the sobriety of the conventionally pious as a kind of spiritual death. What this illustrates is that even when wine is banned, it can still exert massive cultural influence.

Tom Holland

The first modern wine bottle, not the first wine bottle. Wine bottles are about 2,000 years old, originating in Syria in the 1st century BC, refined by Roman glassblowers. But Roman glass was too fragile for transportation — bottles smashed and were purely decorative, markers of status. In 1867, one such Roman bottle was found in a 4th-century tomb in Speyer on the Rhine — still sealed, with liquid wine inside. It is the world’s oldest unopened wine bottle. Two years ago, an even older wine, from the 1st century AD, was found in an urn in a tomb in Spain.

The problem with wine bottles up to the early modern period was that the glass was too delicate. It is English glassmakers who solve this. In the 1620s, English glassmakers develop furnaces fired by coal rather than wood. Then, in the following decade, they introduce wind tunnels, which produce even higher furnace heat. Simultaneously, the recipe for glass changes: a higher ratio of sand to potash and lime. If you have more sand, you simply get a better bottle.

History records one inventor in particular, identified in a parliamentary inquiry of 1662: a man called Kenelm Digby. Digby is a tremendous character. Raised Catholic — his father was one of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, executed for it. He became a privateer, sailed into the Mediterranean, negotiated the release of fifty English slaves from the Barbary pirates of Algiers. Briefly imprisoned for killing a French nobleman in a duel. Had a shambolic record in the Civil War. Became a favourite of Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, and followed her into exile. When Charles II was restored in 1660, Digby was two years later fingered by the parliamentary inquiry as the inventor of the new glass. Part of that credit is likely because he was the queen mother’s favourite. But he is a fun figurehead, and so let us celebrate him.

These bottles come to be called “English bottles” across Europe. The glass is thicker, heavier, stronger, and cheap to manufacture. It is also very dark — because of the coal fumes. Consumers come to regard the dark colour as a mark of quality. That is why wine bottles are dark to this day: it is a legacy of 17th-century English manufacturing. And crucially, the glass is strong enough to contain sparkling wine. Before English glass, if you kept sparkling wine in a cellar, you had to wear a helmet; the CO2 trying to escape could shatter a bottle into flying shards at any moment.

Tom Holland

Cork is produced in Portugal — and English access to it is facilitated in 1703 by the Methuen Treaty, which allows English wool into Portugal and cuts English import duties on Portuguese wine. This is the genesis of the English passion for port wine. In the Alentejo, Portugal’s rural heartland, there are vast forests producing cork to this day. Portugal remains the world’s great producer of corks. Cork has become, like the dark bottle, a marker of prestige — a screw cap is perfectly functional, but a very expensive bottle is expected to have a Portuguese cork.

Which brings us to the corkscrew. The first mention of one, described as a “silver worm,” comes in 1681. In 1720, there is the first poem about a corkscrew, which I shall quote: “Roger set his teeth to work. This way and that the cork he plied and wrenched in vain from side to side. Then, Bacchus appeared to him in a dream and gave him a corkscrew. He to the cork applied the point, then bending earthward low betwixt his knees the bottle firmly fixed, and giving it a sudden jerk from its close prison wrenched the cork.” The first corkscrew patent was granted in 1795 to a clergyman called Samuel Henshall.

Tom Holland

France has been producing wine throughout this period. Bordeaux, when the English controlled it in the Middle Ages, was producing claret for English tables. “Claret” comes from the French clairet — meaning lighter — which tells you that medieval claret was a lighter red than the heavy wines we now associate with the name. But after the English lose Bordeaux at the end of the Hundred Years’ War, and as the Dutch rise as the great global commercial power, France’s economic dominance of the wine trade weakens. Meanwhile its cultural centrality is growing by leaps and bounds — and its legacy is with us today: why New Zealand winemakers talk about their terroir, why South African wines are labelled grand cru, why there are chateaux in a land famously without castles.

We can pinpoint the moment French becomes the language of wine. Samuel Pepys, diary entry for 10 April 1663: “Off the exchange with Sir J. Cutler and Mr. Grange to the Royal Oak Tavern in Lombard Street, where drank a sort of French wine called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with.” “Ho Bryan” is Haut-Brion — the first Bordeaux to be sold in London labelled not as “Bordeaux” or “claret” but with the name of the estate. Its producer, Arnaud de Pontac — president of the provincial parliament of Bordeaux and a marketing genius — sends his son to London to open what effectively becomes the city’s first restaurant: a luxurious tavern called Pontac’s Head. The normal price for wine in Restoration London is about two shillings. Haut-Brion at Pontac’s Head sells for seven.

What Pontac is demonstrating is that ultimately a wine is worth what people are prepared to pay for it. That is the only objective measure of quality. He begins marketing Haut-Brion as his premier cru — his first growth — and his second estate as his deuxième cru. By the 1720s, three other estates — Lafite, Latour, and Margaux — are marketing themselves on the same basis. In 1855, Napoleon III, staging a great universal exposition in Paris, asks the wine brokers to classify the best Bordeaux wines. They draw up a list of sixty reds, placed into five classes. The top class has just four wines: Haut-Brion, Lafite, Latour, and Margaux. That status has never been lost. Only one other vineyard has ever been added: Château Mouton Rothschild, promoted to the first class in 1973.

Tom Holland

Exactly. As Kathleen Burke writes: “The English had long been admired for having the best palates in the world, and so what the English were prepared to pay for these wines provided the French with their standard for judging which were best.” The French make the best wines; the English decide which those wines are.

John Locke, who tours Bordeaux in 1677 on one of the first recorded wine tours, visits Pontac’s vineyard at Haut-Brion and is puzzled. He expects rich, fertile soil and finds “pure white sand mixed with a little gravel. One would imagine it scarce fit to bear anything.” Touring the Languedoc, he observes that the more barren and gravelly the slope, the better the wine. This is the concept, going back to Pliny, that in France comes to crystallise as terroir: the totality of the vineyard habitat. As France industrialises through the 19th century, terroir becomes for conservatives the emblem of everything under threat — the roots of la patrie, ancient France, the attachment of the French to their soil against industrialisation, foreigners, Germans.

Tom Holland

People genuinely believed that until the 1970s — specifically, until 1976 and the Judgment of Paris, which is probably the most celebrated and controversial moment in the modern history of winemaking.

To understand why it was such a shock, you need to understand what California represented to French wine opinion. The archetype of Californian vulgarity is a man called Leland Stanford — railroad entrepreneur, Governor of California, founder of the university bearing his name. Stanford tours the great Bordeaux vineyards and decides to replicate them at home on a massive scale. But he knows nothing about terroir: he plants on rich soil, on an enormous scale, without scoping the climate. By his fourth vintage in 1890, the result is terrible — two million gallons, so poor that all of it has to be distilled into brandy. When the news reaches Bordeaux, everyone finds it hilarious.

Then came Prohibition, between 1920 and 1933, which completely destroys the Californian wine industry just as it was getting on its feet. Would-be winemakers find loopholes: they could order packages of pressed grapes from surviving California vineyards — “wine bricks” — accompanied by a yeast pill, with a warning label reading “on no account use this yeast pill, which would turn this into wine, which would be illegal.” Others register as rabbis, since Jewish ritual requires wine in the home. Millions of people of all faiths — some without their knowledge, when lists were copied from telephone directories — became members of fake synagogues to obtain legal wine permits.

Against this background, the English wine merchant Steven Spurrier stages a blind tasting in Paris in 1976, using nine of France’s foremost wine experts as judges — the head of the Enological Institute of France, the head of the Wine Academy, the Inspector General of the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée board. First, the whites. A Californian Chardonnay comes first. Then a Burgundy. Then two more Californian Chardonnays. Then the reds. Again: a bombshell. The wine voted number one comes from a Californian vineyard — Stag’s Leap, planted only in 1970 by a man called Warren Winiarski. Château Mouton Rothschild, just promoted to the top tier of the 1855 classification, comes second.

Spurrier had invited the Paris correspondent of Time magazine to observe. He writes: “Last week in Paris, France, at a formal wine tasting organised by Spurrier, the unthinkable happened. California defeated all Gaul.”

Tom Holland

And the notion of terroir, like a vine cutting, has been transplanted to the opposite ends of the world. In New Zealand, winemakers combine the French concept with the Māori concept of tūrangawaewae — “a place to stand.” If you are not a wine chauvinist but simply someone who enjoys wine, the history of wine is not just about competition, but about partnership. Though I suspect you are probably right, Dominic: it is mainly about competition. But let us end on a note of poetry. Omar Khayyām:

Ah, fill the cup. What boots it to repeat
How time is slipping underneath our feet.
Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday,
Why fret about them if today be sweet.