Chapter 1: What is the history of wine and its significance in human life?
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A simple glass of wine with dinner. A fun weekend of wine tasting at a vineyard. A dusty old cellar filled with bottles worth thousands of dollars. Wine has made its way into nearly every part of society and life. It spans the everyday to the most elite, the casual and the cultured. But how did this drink, made of fermented grapes, gain the status and popularity it enjoys today?
How were the first wines made? And how did clippings travel from continent to continent, helping to establish industries from Australia to South Africa and beyond? We'll delve into these questions and more tonight. So just relax and let your mind drift. as we explore the sleepy history of wine.
Benjamin Franklin once said, Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance. one thing that can be said for certain is that wine has been a part of human life for a very long time when it comes to recounting a history some topics are simpler than others wine is quite an ambitious subject we're going to walk you through our version of the history of wine
Now, it must be said upfront that this is a vast and sprawling story. It would be impossible for us to recognize every era, every region, and every interesting development on such a long and far-ranging trek.
rather than putting this story forth as a comprehensive history we ask you to view it as a primer we have attempted to include some of the most notable times and places while acknowledging that no story could ever possibly encompass them all
With that said, although there's no way to know for sure when humans first purposely made wine, it seems highly likely that nature had been doing it independently for thousands of years. This may sound like a bold claim, but the truth is that at its most basic level, wine making is an entirely natural process.
First, we should establish that while wine can be made from lots of different fruits, the most commonly accepted type is made with grapes. As such, experts will point out that winemaking probably dates back to the very earliest grapes that grew on Earth. The plant family that the grape belongs to has produced fossils and rocks dating back to about 50 million years ago.
Fermentation, which produces wine, is a natural process. Therefore, the earliest wine was probably an accidental affair. Fruit would have fallen from the vine and fermented on its own, even though nobody was there to find it. Grapes would have undergone a metabolic process in which they converted sugar into alcohol. Then pretty quickly, the liquid would have turned to vinegar.
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Chapter 2: How were the first wines made and what natural processes were involved?
Even before that, the product would have been very thick and even chunky. An early wine press discovered in Crete dates somewhere between 1600 and 1400 BCE. It consisted of a simple stone basin where people presumably stomped the grapes, letting the juice go down a drain. It's easy to imagine this would have produced a pretty inconsistent product.
Somewhere along the way, people figured out that they could extend the life of their wine by adding tree resin, which had antibacterial properties. While it certainly lengthened the shelf life of the wine, it also would have given the drink a sharp tang. In short, the wine probably tasted a lot more like tree sap than it did like grapes.
Nonetheless, according to Lou Katch's book, that practice lasted literally for millennia. Persisting across cultures all the way to the Romans, nobody in all that time found a better solution. At the outset of the Common Era, prolific writer Pliny the Elder noted, it is the peculiarity of wine among liquids to go moldy or else to turn into vinegar.
Although the Romans tried additives such as gypsum, lead, lime, lye ash, marble, dust, and myrrh, every wine would eventually go sour. This was an ongoing problem that was tough to resolve. Despite the sharp taste, wine consumption only increased during the era of the Romans As hard as this is for us to imagine, clean, fresh water was very scarce.
Adding wine to water in even small quantities made it safer to drink, as it neutralized impurities. Plutarch wrote that adding water in a ratio of two or three to one portion of wine would relieve the harsh and irregular motions of the soul and secure deep peace for it. In plain language, it prevented illnesses. For this, people were more than willing to suffer through the taste of tree sap.
As the common era grew nearer, an important shift occurred. Until that point, the making of wine had been viewed as a largely universal natural process. In short, wine was the gift of the gods or the gift of the earth. It was not a human made product. 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,
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