Alicia Steffann

And throughout this time, there had been little interest in distinguishing one wine from another.

Of note, the first recorded mention of a certain wine coming from a particular area was in Greece.

In the 7th century BCE, the poet Alcman praised a wine called Findis from the western foothills of Mount Taitos in Messenia as being flowery-scented.

That comment was a hint of what was to come.

The Romans began favoring wines of some regions over others.

One of the most popular wines among the Romans, which was made from dried grapes and was incredibly thick, sweet, and potent, was a product called Falernian.

We don't know exactly how Falernian tasted, but Pliny the Elder said admiringly of this drink that it was the only wine that took a light when flame was applied to it.

Among the Falernians, the most sought-after was the Opemian vintage of 121 BCE.

No other wine has a higher rank, Pliny gushed.

Whether or not modern wine drinkers would agree, the most important thing to notice about this worship of the Opimian vintage is that it marks a moment in time when vintages and varietals began to matter.

Whether or not the notice was warranted,

This particular batch of Valerian set the stage for the next phase of the history of wine.

In other words, views on wine were evolving to a state where the vintner made choices that affected his product, and those were important.

Now, very popular indeed, all this alcohol eventually resulted in a rise of excessive drunkenness.

At some point, the average Roman was consuming roughly a bottle of wine per day.

In 92 CE, to counteract this, the emperor Domitian passed the first wine laws on record, banning the planting of new vineyards and decreeing that many should be torn up.

In the provinces, half of the vineyards were to be sacrificed and turned over to the production of grains.

However, the wine laws were reportedly widely ignored, and the love affair of the Romans with wine continued.

They took viticulture everywhere they went, establishing what are now the major wine-producing areas in Western Europe.

As Hodgson so humorously put it in his documentary, wine was to the Romans what cargo shorts are to Americans.