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Chapter 1: What historical significance does The Odyssey have regarding wine?
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No one can really doubt that some kinds of wine are simply better than others. Nor does it come as news to anyone that when wines are made from the same vat, one cask will often turn out to be superior to the other, either because of the material that the cask has been made from, or due to some other circumstance.
Nevertheless, even though there is a general consensus as to the best wines, one that's been arrived at after many years, there can be no accounting for personal taste. A famous story is told which illustrates this. One of the freedmen in the household of the deified Augustus, a man celebrated for his connoisseurship and his palate, accompanied Augustus on a visit to a house.
brought a local wine by the master of the house, he tasted it, and then delivered this verdict. "'This is not a wine that I have ever tasted before. I do not rate it. It is effectively vinegar. Caesar, however, will love it, and doubtless will insist on drinking it all the time.' So that was the very first wine snob in history. No lesser figure than Pliny the Elder.
And that story features in his enormous encyclopedia, which he wrote in the first century AD. And it's part of a long section of the encyclopedia, which is all about wine. And anyone who knows the work of Alan Partridge will know that Alan Partridge has a huge world book of wine.
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Chapter 2: How did Julius Caesar utilize wine in his conquests?
But we're not the rest is prehistory. Let's stick to the history. And of course, there is a lot of it because the history of wine spans at least 8000 years. So there's a lot to cover. We can't cover it all.
So I thought we could look at seven key moments in the history of wine, moments that will enable us to trace its emergence, its spread, its evolution into what it is now, which is basically a kind of $500 billion industry. You know, there are, as you said, wineries in California and in Australia and New Zealand and South Africa and all across the world. So it's a huge story. Where does it begin?
Well, let's turn for that answer to the Bible and the book of Genesis. So we are told in the book of Genesis, Noah, as in the ark, 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.
He let himself down.
He let himself very badly down. So anyone who's got paralytic may have some sympathies there for Noah.
Yeah.
Presumably, he planted his vineyard on Mount Ararat, which is where the Ark had come to rest. Ararat is part of this great range of mountains south of the Black Sea in the east of Turkey. You've got the Taurus Mountains, you've got the Caucasus, you've got the northern Zagros in Iran. It's this kind of area where the key development in the history of wine took place.
And Dominic, this kind of basically involves science. So it's the domestication of the Binafera grape, which is basically the grape from which all the great types of grape have descended today. And because I'm not entirely confident of my ability to sum up the science precisely, I'm going to quote from an excellent forthcoming book by Kathleen Burke, the great historian of America.
why in the global history uh which is coming out i think in september and i saw a preview of it um and it's fantastic and go and pre-order it and she writes wild grape vines are male or female i didn't know that 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 cross breeding either accidentally or by early man in order to create the hermaphroditic vine able to produce fruit by itself
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Chapter 3: What is the story behind the Judgement of Paris and its impact on wine?
And I think you're right that those verses do provide scope for those in the Islamic world who do want to have an occasional taste of wine. Yeah. among whom rank a large number of the caliphs. I mean, a lot of caliphs are very keen on wine. And the scope also for lawyers to do what lawyers do, which is always to try and get round legal prescriptions.
So one of the four legal schools in Sunni Islam, the Hanafis, they point out that the Quran has banned wine that has been made from grapes, but not from dates. And so they suggest that maybe if you make wine from dates, that would be fine. And they also rule that it's not the actual drinking of wine that annoys God. It's the getting drunk.
So basically, if you can drink wine but not get drunk, then you're okay. I'll quote from Sadakat Qadri in his wonderful book on Sharia law, Heaven on Earth. This, according to these jurists, meant that Muslims could legally drink as much wine as they liked, and I quote, until they became incapable of telling a slave girl from a beardless boy.
So bad news for lightweights, but good news for the rest of us.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I suppose the question that's left open is how do you become so inured to wine that you can drink four bottles and still tell a slave girl from a beardless boy apart?
If you know, you know. So we did an episode about the golden age of Baghdad, didn't we?
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Chapter 4: What role did the British Empire play in the development of the Australian wine industry?
And Baghdad at its peak, its kind of medieval peak, there are loads of taverns serving wine. But interestingly, they're run not by Muslims, but by Christians. So the wine trade is monopolized by Christians, right?
Yeah, because Christians need it for the mass. And so that's fine. And they're not kind of bound by Quranic prescriptions and legal prescriptions. Yes. And Harun al-Rashid, who is the caliph of the golden age of Baghdad, the caliph of lots of the stories in the Arabian Nights, he sponsored a famous poet called Abu Nawaz. So he of the dangling locks of hair.
And he was notoriously transgressive, very dissolute, very fond of wine. And he wrote a notorious poem. piece of poetry about the rivers of wine that flow in heaven according to the quran as for that which is forbidden whatever could be dafter a thing banned in this world yet abounds in the hereafter yeah amazing rhymes in english as well as arabic who knew yes
In other words, Islam is a kind of an amazingly rich civilization in which there are enormous shades of opinion and behavior. And by the 13th, by the 14th centuries, the tension in the attitudes to wine in the Islamic world have come to foster kind of very sophisticated cultures within the overall civilization of Islam. And there are two kind of representative figures of these cultures.
So the first, this is the guy who's not in favor of wine, is a bloke called Ibn Taymiyyah. He is a hardline Sunni reformist. He's trying to reform the Islamic world in the wake of the catastrophe of the Mongol invasions. And so he says, get rid of all this, you know, legal quibbling and attempts to soft soap the Koran and the hadiths.
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Chapter 5: How did wine culture evolve from ancient Jordan to the Vikings?
We've got to go back to basics. So he's. absolutely dogmatically opposed to wine he's also very opposed to a kind of hip new intoxicant that's appeared on the scene called hashish and um ibn tamir describes hashish as being to wine as feces are to urine so there's a marketing slogan
And he says that anyone who disagrees with his judgment is an apostate and therefore subject to the penalties of apostasy, which would include death. And Ibn Taymiyyah is basically, he's the godfather of Salafism, of kind of... Very hardcore, radical, jihadi Islam. Against that, there's a much more kind of hippie, 1960s friendly kind of Islam called Sufism.
And one of the great representative figures of Sufism is a Persian mystic and poet called Rumi, who was a massive bestseller throughout the 60s and 70s in America. And in Rumi's poetry, wine serves as a metaphor for the experience of divine love.
And so Rumi, in kind of poetry that is designed to seem shocking to its readers, says that the image of the soul that has opened itself up to the love of God is that of the drunk, someone who staggers around. He's so kind of overcome by intoxicants. This is not because Rumi is saying, it's brilliant, go and get drunk. He's not... offering this metaphor literally.
He doesn't seem to have drunk wine himself, but he's using it kind of to imply that wine is the best metaphor that believers have for how God should be experienced. And so he writes these famous lines, "'Before God and vine and grape were in the world, "'our soul was drunk with immortal wine.'" So wine is almost kind of, it's a platonic notion of wine, something that has always existed.
And he frames the spiritual path of the believer as being a journey back to the tasting of that primordial wine. So you can see why it would appeal to hippies, I guess, in the 60s, and why it appealed to lots of Muslims and has appealed to lots of Muslims throughout the course of Islamic history. Now, Ibn Taymiyyah obviously sees this as rubbish. He's very opposed to the Sufis.
He thinks they're basically not Muslim at all. And Rumi, in turn, he sees the sobriety of the conventionally pious people like Ibn Taymiyyah as a form of spiritual death, as not really being Islam at all. And I think that what this illustrates is that even when wine is banned, it can still have a kind of massive, massive cultural influence.
Yeah.
And of course, when it's not banned, well, the sky's the limit.
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