Dominic Sandbrook

The different flavours that it gives you.

And actually, it does taste different.

It's got a very clay-y and actually not unpleasant taste at all.

And that's what most, I guess, most people in human history would have tasted when they drank wine.

The taste of the clay amphora.

Because it's a giant wine.

That is an unexpected dimension.

So by the time Pliny is writing, what did we say?

The first century AD, was it?

Yeah, first century AD.

The Roman kind of wine world encompasses quite a lot of the areas that we now associate with wine.

So you mentioned you've got Greece.

I mean, Greece is not a massive wine powerhouse now, although there are some nice wines from Greece.

The Becker Valley in Lebanon, there's some very nice wines made in Lebanon.

Wine has spread into France.

So it's already in Burgundy, the Loire,

the moselle and the rhine for example so those areas that are kind of slightly on the periphery of the roman world but above all italy by the time augustus tiberius and co are in charge italy is the home and the heartland of wine isn't it's taken over from greece and indeed from georgia yeah uh so greek winemakers are basically basically kind of artisanal winemakers right the romans are doing it on an industrial scale i mean they got all these slaves for instance

Well, beer is easier to produce.

You don't need such a sophisticated system to produce beer.

Isn't the point that wine then, as now, is a marker of sophistication?