Alicia Steffann

Not only did corks solve the problem of stopper breakage, but they created a better watertight seal and prevented oxidation.

This allowed the wine to age better.

Further, these bottles were excellent for laying down wine on its side for horizontal transport and storage.

The 17th century offers another particularly interesting moment in the evolution of the wine business.

It was then that a French lord named Arnaud de Pontac began to leverage the popularity of one of the wines from his Burgundy vineyard.

The wine in question became a favorite of King Charles II, leading to Pontiac to market it specifically to the well-to-do English.

He named this claret after his estate, which was called Aubrion.

Notes about this wine from the cellar keeper for the king mentioned the wine by name.

Those, in combination with a similar mention in the diary of the famous Samuel Pepys, provide the first historical notes for a claret that is actually named after its vineyard.

The price of the bottle went up with the popularity of the wine, making de Pontac arguably one of the first people to invent wine marketing.

Today, bottles of O'Brien can average nearly $700 online.

By the 18th century, vines were being established in Baja, California.

Meanwhile, across oceans, grape vines were also being exported to Cape Province, one of the four original provinces in what is now South Africa.

They next made their way to New Zealand and Australia, where the first cuttings arrived from the Cape of Good Hope in 1788.

The Australian efforts didn't bear fruit immediately, but by the 19th century, the first vineyards had successfully been established down under.

Although the South African market was briefly the largest exporter of wine to Europe that century, it really took many years for these newer areas to get into the global wine business.

For a time, they mainly produced wines for more local consumption or other limited markets.

They would come into their own, however, a couple of centuries later.

Something else of note quietly happened during the 18th century.

Far away from the New World in Hungary, Finchners created the first wine classification system.