Rod Phillips

Canada’s Wine Market: A Complicated Mosaic

2024-06-20T13:06:00Z

Canada is a midrange wine market, where wine is second to beer as a choice of alcoholic beverage: beer accounts for 36% of total alcohol sales, with wine at 31%. Per capita (15 years of age and older) wine consumption in Canada is about 15 liters, a ...(read more)

The Myths of French Wine History

2016-10-17T12:30:00Z

Editor's note: For more on this subject, check out Rod Phillips’ new book, French Wine: A History. UC Press is graciously offering GuildSomm readers a discount. Order online using the code 16M4197 for 30% off.

France occupies a special place in the world of wine. Only one wine is a household name globally, and it’s French: Champagne. There’s still a widespread belief that the best French wines are the world’s best; no vintage in the world gets nearly as much attention as that of Bordeaux. And French wine regions remain benchmarks for winemakers everywhere. How many times have you been told that this Pinot Noir or that Chardonnay is made in a “Burgundian style”?

I’m an aficionado of French wines, and I have been since I was a teenager in New Zealand in the 1960s. Since then, I’ve lived in France several times and I go two or three times a year, I’ve visited scores of French appellations and hundreds of producers, and I’ve drunk more than my share of French wine (if per capita figures of consumption mean anything). So it was a pleasure to write a history of French wine, and if I often discuss the myths embedded in its narratives, it is not because I want to diminish its status. It’s because I am a historian and adopt a critical view of evidence—and because the stature of French wine stands without the myths.

Some of the myths associated with French wine are specific and explicit but relatively unimportant to the big picture. Very few people still believe that Dom Pérignon was blind, or the first person to make sparkling wine. But the demolition of the carefully constructed myths surrounding Dom Pérignon is hardly seismic in significance. It doesn’t materially affect the history of Champagne, and it certainly doesn’t stop tourists taking selfies with his statue outside Moët & Chandon.

Overall, claims to be “first” in the world of wine—whether Dom Pérignon in Champagne or the varied figures credited with first producing wine—are very suspect and all but impossible to verify. We’re better to be agnostics in these things than to embrace some spurious claim that might well be proven bogus. But some issues associated with French wine could do with serious scrutiny.

Reconsidering the Role of Monasteries

One is the role of monasteries more generally (not only Dom Pérignon’s Abbé de Hautvillers) in the development of wine in France. Although monastic orders played an undeniably important role in spreading viticulture and winemaking in the early years of the Christian era, there’s no solid evidence that monks were as innovative as is often claimed.

Although the Church and its various entities, such as abbeys, owned vast tracts of vineyards in France by the Middle Ages, so did secular owners. Aristocratic owners became dominant in Bordeaux, while religious orders (especially the Cistercians) owned much of Burgundy. Elsewhere, wine was made by tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, of small-scale vignerons, with larger estates owned by nobles, the Church, and wealthy non-noble proprietors. The proportion of viticultural land owned by the Church and by lay landowners is unknown, partly because most vines were grown among other crops until the 19th century.

If it seems that monastic vineyards were dominant, it’s because we have more records of them—monasteries tended to own larger parcels of vines, and they kept continuous records of their land holdings—and these records have survived because they were carefully archived. Records this extensive and high in quality simply don’t exist for secular owners. In England, less than a third of vineyards were owned by the Church in the 11th century (according to the Domesday Book); maybe it was similar in France. In the ninth century, on the massive estate of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés near Paris, less than half the vineyards were cultivated by the monks themselves.

It’s also important to note that when monks recorded vineyard and winemaking practices, there’s no evidence that they were the innovators. We know that monastic cultivators mulched foliage for compost and used fish bladder to fine their wines, but for all we know, they were simply following common practice. They certainly didn’t claim to be the leading edge of change, and the first person to record a practice is not necessarily the first to adopt it.

This is also the case with accounts of monks identifying terroirs by tasting (eating) the dirt. There are indeed accounts of “tasting terroir,” but they are more associated with secular agronomists. It’s like the story of Dom Pérignon, much of which was invented in the 1820s: at some point these stories were made up, then repeated in so many places that they became accepted as true. But repetition doesn’t make them true, and they need to be regarded with healthy skepticism until there is good documentary evidence to support them.

An Accurate History of Terroir

The history of terroir itself is often misrepresented. It has not been the basis of French wine for centuries, and it wasn’t discovered by monks who noticed that the wines from one vineyard were different from those in another vineyard. For most of its life, terroir was associated only marginally with food and wine, and more with human character and language.

The earth and air in specific locations were believed to produce certain kinds of people who spoke particular languages. In general, the Île-de-France (the area around Paris) was thought to be free of terroir; people there were cultured and intellectually lively and spoke a pure language, the language that eventually became the basis of standard French. In contrast, the terroir of the provinces was blamed for their inhabitants being rustic and coarse, and their languages crude. (It wasn’t until the late 1800s that French became the language of most French people.)

When applied to wine, terroir was a similarly negative reference for centuries, and consumers were advised to avoid what are now approvingly called “terroir-driven” wines. In the 18th century, for example, Champagne was praised as terroir free, while Burgundy was condemned as reeking of terroir. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that the modern sense of terroir—the physical environment that vines grow in—emerged fully, and then it was constructed to give French wines a boost as they recovered from nearly a century of disasters: phylloxera, overproduction, widespread fraud, economic depression, and two world wars.

Even as the definition evolved, terroir was believed to be specific to France: French wines were unequalled because they were made from vines growing in French terroir. There was never any intention that terroir, as an explanation for the excellence of some wines, would extend beyond the borders of France. When French agronomists and winemakers visited New World wine regions in the 1960s and 1970s, they made it clear that these regions had no terroir—not that they had inferior terroir, but that they had no terroir. By that time, having no terroir was a bad thing.

Coming to Terms with Discontinuity

Advertisements often tell us that a producer has vineyards that go back to the 14th century and has been making wine for 12 generations. This is good marketing because it implies a clear continuity over time. It appeals to our sense of lineage, stability, and tradition, all powerful and positive associations.

Yet, as the history of the concept of terroir demonstrates, there have been anything but continuities. French vineyards have been replanted over and over, not only in the replacement of dead or unproductive vines, but also in broad and sometimes near universal terms that entailed both creating and abandoning vineyards and introducing new varieties to replace others.

Vineyards in many French regions were devastated by the Black Death from the mid-1300s and the Hundred Years’ War to the mid-1400s, and by the frigid winters of 1693 and especially 1709. The countrywide ravages of phylloxera are well known. Then, there were hundreds of regional disasters resulting from war, weather, and diseases. In all these cases, decisions were made about creating, replanting, and abandoning vineyards, and about which grape varieties to replant, abandon, and introduce.

There was a lot of uncertainty about grape varieties until the 19th century, as many regions and smaller localities had their own names for each variety. There were abortive attempts in the 18th century to categorize varieties, but these met with limited success until the late 19th and 20th centuries. Until then, the great majority of France’s vineyards were planted haphazardly, rather than in rows, and were interplanted with several varieties. As a result, until vineyards were replanted after phylloxera, French wines were almost invariably field blends—even in Burgundy, where Pinot Noir was dominant but was interplanted and vinified with white grapes.

Patterns of viticulture like these undermine the frequent claim that one reason why the French have been so successful with wine is that they’ve had centuries to match varieties with locations. They have had centuries, it’s true (like Spain, Italy, and other countries), but for the most part they settled on their current pairings of varieties and sites only when they replanted after the phylloxera period—sometimes as late as the 1950s.

You might argue (and I suggest in my book) that despite more than 2,000 years of developing a wine industry and wine culture, French producers settled on varieties and locations as recently as many New World producers. Perhaps that’s an overstatement, but it does draw attention to the fact that many facets of French viticulture and winemaking are far more recent developments than often thought. Certainly, the idea of an uninterrupted narrative, linking modern French wine to the distant past, is on very shaky ground.

French Wine Stands Without the Myths

It’s often said that stories draw consumers to wine. French wine is imbued with stories of noble vignerons tending their vines and making rustic, honest wine, of noble proprietors drinking the fine wines of Bordeaux and Champagne at banquets, of monks laboring to make the best wine they could with the fruit that God gave them. These stories evoke images that many people want to believe are true.

But they ignore the fact that until recently, French wines were field blends, made from several varieties picked simultaneously so that the grapes were variously green, ripe, overripe, and rotten. They were crushed and vinified together, the must was fermented in open tanks for weeks, and the wine was stored in dirty barrels. Marketers would be well advised not to claim their wines are made in a “traditional” way. These wines satisfied the nutritional and sensory needs of earlier generations, but they wouldn’t do now.

The history of French wine is interesting enough without the myths that have been embedded in it. It’s a story of battles against myriad challenges, including wars, vine diseases, political upheavals, production-consumption imbalances, climate, and trade embargoes. It’s a story of the successful creation of regional brands and the national brand. And it more than stands up without the help of myths.

Rod Phillips is professor of history at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. His books include French Wine: A History (2016), Alcohol: A History (2014), and A Short History of Wine (2000, revised and updated as 9000 Years of Wine: A Global History, forthcoming in 2017). He also writes a weekly wine column for the main Ottawa daily newspaper, contributes to media such as The World of Fine Wine, judges in wine competitions, and regularly visits wine regions around the world.

The Murky Origins of Sparkling Wine

2012-03-29T09:58:00Z

The story of Dom Pérignon and champagne – the blind monk who accidentally made sparkling wine and cried, “Come quickly! I am drinking the stars!” – is well known, as are the problems with the story. Although many wine drinkers accept it at face value, there’s no evidence that Dom Pérignon was blind, no evidence that he had a heightened sense of smell or taste, and – very important – no evidence that he was the first person to taste sparkling wine.

The problem with the history of sparkling wine is that it’s so murky – as murky as modern sparkling wines are limpid and bright. It’s easy to highlight the problems with the many claims to have made the first bubbly: the records are either incomplete, ambiguous or unclear, or they refer to one batch of wine that had bubbles or effervescence, but not to the continuous production of sparkling wine.

What we can say is that sparkling wine began to be produced systematically some time in the 1500s or 1600s. The method of production is a matter of debate, but we do know that it had to have happened as a result of a second or re-started (the distinction is important) fermentation in the bottle. There was no equivalent of the cuvée close or other methods used today. But there was a forerunner of the méthode champenoise, as we shall see.

The generally accepted explanation of the bubbles that Dom Pérignon ‘discovered’ is that the wine he was drinking had been bottled and sealed in the mistaken belief that the fermentation was complete. In fact, the explanation goes, the fermentation had merely stalled, because the cellar temperature in early winter dropped to the point that the yeasts stopped working. In the spring, as the temperature rose, the fermentation started again, this time in a sealed bottle. The carbon dioxide produced by this re-started fermentation dissolved in the wine, and became bubbles when the wine was opened.

There’s limited logic to that explanation, but not a lot of credibility when it comes to the role of Dom Pérignon. Yes, he existed, and he was cellar master at the Abbey of Hautvilliers. But there’s no evidence he was blind, and it’s unlikely he could have carried out his tasks if he were. Moreover, although some non-sighted people concentrate on using their other senses more carefully, there’s no automatic compensation for the loss of a sense by the enhancing of the others.

Other parts of the story just don’t ring true. It’s unlikely that a disciplined Benedictine monk, even if he were surprised by a mouthful of mousse, would shout, “I’m drinking the stars!” as if experiencing a divine revelation. Although the Benedictine order did not follow a rule of silence, there were set times of strict silence, and at other times the monks were expected to be silent unless talking was necessary.

Moreover, if the wine Dom Pérignon made had not finished fermenting when it was bottled – and thus had some residual sugar – he ought to have noticed that it was unusually sweet when he tasted it before bottling. If there were enough residual sugar that the second fermentation produced such stellar bubbles, the wine might have been very sweet – and definitely perceptible to the cellar master.

We might also wonder why the temperature of the cellar at the Abbey of Hautvilliers fluctuated so much that yeasts would go dormant in winter and be reactivated in spring. Cellars generally have fairly constant cool temperatures, which is why they are preferred to above-ground facilities that reflect the greater ambient temperature range.

The Dom Pérignon story, with all its flaws, seems to have been written from scratch in the early 1820s, more than a century after he was supposed to have discovered the bubbles in wine. Around the 1820s, champagne was undergoing a revival. La Veuve Clicquot developed the technique of riddling sometime between 1810 and 1820, and the méthode champenoise was born.

At the very same time, the Catholic Church in France needed to rebuild its reputation. Its prestige and power had taken big hits from the French Revolution (1789-99) and Napoleon (1799-1815). What better way to help restore its reputation than to hitch itself to champagne, whose popularity among the rich and powerful of Europe was growing by leaps and bounds: in 1800, champagne production was about 300,000 bottles; by 1850 it was 20 million.

So the creation of the Dom Pérignon story in the 1820s was well timed. Dom Grossard, who had been a monk at Hautvilliers before the Revolution, wrote the story in 1821 as part of a general history of the abbey that was clearly designed to raise its status – and perhaps his own, as he was reduced to being a simple parish priest after the Revolution.

Dom Grossard might simply have fabricated the Dom Pérignon story, but it might equally well have been an account passed down from one generation of monks to the next, and embellished at each telling. It’s easy to imagine that stories of Dom Pérignon doing a blind tasting (dégustation à l’aveugle) of grapes – it was said that he could tell which vineyard a grape came from, just by tasting it – evolved into a belief that Dom Pérignon was blind (aveugle).

The story was embraced by the champagne industry, which spent much of the nineteenth century inventing a history and traditions appropriate to its social status. In 1889, the Syndicat de Commerce declared that Dom Pérignon was the father of champagne. Seven years later, it published a pamphlet that declared, ambiguously, that Dom Pérignon had “discovered” champagne by following “ancient traditions.”

Over time, as the essential part of the story came into question, Dom Pérignon was credited with different, more limited contributions to champagne, such as insisting on low crop yields, and giving priority to pinot noir. He is also sometimes said, contradictorily, to have worked on ways of preventing a secondary fermentation in the bottle, and to have urged the production of stronger bottles for sparkling wine, as many of the ordinary bottles burst under the pressure of the carbon dioxide.

There’s a question mark about bottles themselves. Bottles were rarely used for keeping wine in the late 1600s. Wine was not only stored in barrels, but shipped in barrels and kept in the same barrels until it was ready for drinking. The wine cellars of wealthy wine-consumers at this time were more likely to contain barrels than bottles, and the wine was decanted into bottles or other vessels, just before it was consumed. When well-off consumers purchased wine in small quantities, they would take their own bottles to their wine merchant to have them filled. In the late 1600s, the English diarist, Samuel Pepys, wrote about his pleasure in getting monogrammed bottles for this purpose.

So why was Dom Pérignon bottling his wine? This was intended to be still wine, so it didn’t need to be in a bottle. Bottles were expensive, and it’s hard to see why Benedictine monks would go to the great expense of buying so many bottles for cellaring, when they needed only a few for serving at meals – and even then, many depictions of monks at table show wine and beer being served from pitchers. An inventory of the Abbey’s wines from 1713, two years before Dom Pérignon died, not only shows that most of the wines were red, but that they were in barrels, not bottles.

It’s unlikely that we’ll ever understand Dom Pérignon’s role in the creation of champagne, but it’s clear he wasn’t the founding father of fizz. It was a style that almost certainly existed elsewhere before his arrival at the Abbey of Hautvilliers, although it’s not easy to decide which of the contenders for the first sparkling wine has the most merit.

One is Limoux, in Languedoc. As early as 1531 – almost a century and a half before Dom Pérignon arrived at Hautvilliers – Benedictine monks at the Abbey of Saint-Hilaire, near Limoux, wrote about Blanquette de Limoux, which seems to have been a sparkling white wine that had undergone a re-started fermentation in a flask.

There are suggestions that Dom Pérignon visited the Abbey of Saint-Hilaire while on a pilgrimage, and learned the technique of making sparkling wine while there. Perhaps he did, and these were the “ancient traditions” that enabled him to “discover” champagne. But if Dom Pérignon had tasted sparkling wine at Saint-Hilaire, he should not have been so surprised when he tasted it again at Hautvilliers, that he had to shout about drinking the stars.

A little to the north, in Gaillac and in Die, wines were made that were effervescent, if not sparkling, although the imprecision of the records makes it impossible to distinguish between sparkling, pétillant, perlant, and the various other degrees of fizz we’re familiar with today. Some regions, like Gaillac, are said to have produced sparkling wine as far back as the Middle Ages. Some of the production methods are still known by names that give an impression of a long history, like methode ancestrale and methode rurale. But it’s worth bearing in mind that the méthode champenoise was known as méthode traditionelle the moment it was developed, an excellent example of an instant tradition.

France is not the only claimant to being first with sparkling wine. The Italian region of Franciacorta, which has DOCG status for its sparkling wines, claims to have produced sparkling wine in the 1500s. If it did – and the evidence is very ambiguous – it wasn’t popular enough to last, and it disappeared until revived about 20 years ago.

But perhaps the origins of sparkling wine are even more banal. In the 1660s, an English scientist, Christopher Merret, presented a paper on wine to the Royal Society, in London. It included a demonstration that adding sugar to wine in a bottle, and then sealing it, produced a second fermentation in the bottle and resulted in bubbles when the wine was opened. Merret’s scientific research areas and publications included glass-making (hence a link to bottles) and tree-bark (a link to cork). This second fermentation in the bottle is essentially the méthode champenoise.

It’s possible that Merret’s was a chance finding. Sugar was just becoming popular among wealthy Europeans in the 1600s, and they began to sweeten everything in sight – including coffee, tea and chocolate, which had not been sweetened where they were originally consumed outside Europe. The English began to add sugar to wine, as Fynes Moryson observed in 1617: “Gentlemen carouse only with wine, with which many mix sugar... And because the taste of the English is thus delighted with sweetness, the wines in taverns (for I speak not of merchants’ or gentlemen’s cellars) are commonly mixed at the filling thereof, to make them pleasant.”

It’s conceivable that, instead of putting a teaspoon of sugar in each glass, as with tea and coffee, some gentlemen added it to the bottles they brought home from their wine merchants, then sealed them for drinking a week, a month, or several months later. They might have found, when they opened the bottles, that their wine was dry and sparkling, rather than sweet and still.

It’s possible then, that early sparkling wines – and perhaps the earliest made by the méthode champenoise were made, not in the mysterious and romantic ambience of a monastery cellar, but in the cellars of London gentlemen who were simply trying to sugar up their wines to appeal to taste-preferences of the day.

Rod Phillips is a historian and wine writer who lives in Ottawa, Canada. He is a professor of history at Carleton University, where he teaches European history and the history of food, drink and alcohol. His books include A Short History of Wine (2000 and widely translated) and his book on the global history of alcohol will appear in 2012. Rod has contributed entries on wine and alcohol to many encyclopedias, and he also writes on current wines for wine magazines, including The World of Fine Wine (UK). He writes a weekly wine column for Ottawa’s main daily newspaper, reviews wines, and judges in wine competitions in Canada and overseas.

Ancient Wine: Then and Now

2011-10-20T11:53:00Z

Winemaking can be traced back thousands of years to ancient societies in China and the Middle East, and that has given rise to a lot of romantic ideas and myths about wine. There’s the general idea that wine is a “civilized” beverage, in part because one of its origins was the ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean societies – like Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome – that are often thought of as the basis of Western Civilization. There are even arguments that wine was somehow essential to the development of “civilization,” even though all social classes in many of these societies drank far more beer than wine.

The link between wine and civilization is reinforced by the fact that every Roman who could write seems to have come up with a saying that associated wine with virtue and civility. There’s the well-known “In vino veritas,” which suggests that people speak honestly when they drink wine. Others include “We are brought by the gentle persuasion of wine to a happier mood,” (Socrates) and “Where there is no wine, love perishes, and everything else that is pleasant to man” (Euripides).

Ancient wine must have been amazing stuff to achieve all these good things. Ancient wine writers (many were doctors who stressed the health and medicinal benefits of wine) pointed to particular wines as superior, including the wines of some Greek islands and northern Egypt. And who hasn’t heard of Falernian, the fine Italian wine that’s mentioned in a number of Roman texts?

But the reality is a lot messier. Ancient wine would scarcely be recognizable to us as wine. Yes, it was made from the fermented juice of grapes, but what Egyptians, Romans, Greeks and others drank, was not wine as we know it. For a start, it wasn’t clear and bright, like most modern wine, but heavy in sediment and suspended matter: grape skins, twigs, seeds, insects and other vegetal and animal material caught in the bunches of grapes when they were crushed or attracted to the must.

Then, wine was seldom drunk straight. The Greeks regarded anyone who drank wine straight as Barbarians and, at the very least, they themselves diluted wine with water. At symposia, the drinking gatherings of upper-class Greek men, the wine was diluted until it was between 25 and 40 per cent of the beverage. The aim was to drink all night, and to get tipsy or somewhat intoxicated, but not to get so drunk that you fell asleep or vomited. It didn’t always work.

Throughout the ancient world where there is evidence of wine – in China, the Middle East or the Mediterranean region – wine was drunk as a cocktail. It was mixed variously with beer, fruit and berry wines, herbs, spices, sea-water, and other substances. At a royal banquet in Turkey, about 700 BC, the guests drank a beverage composed of grape wine, barley beer and honey mead, all mixed together.

But for all that ancient wine needs to be demystified and de-romanticized, certain categories and styles emerged over the centuries, and some have echoes in modern wines. Here are a few of them and the stories behind them:

Retsina

Retsina is commonly associated with Greece, and is simply white (sometimes rosé) wine flavored by adding pine resin during fermentation. Resin contributes pungent, sometimes bitter, aromas and flavors variously described as ‘pine’, ‘turpentine’, and ‘cough syrup’ to the wine. The intensity varies according to the amount of resin used in the winemaking. Modern Greek wine law specifies the minimum and maximum amounts of resin that can be used, so that the aromas and flavors are perceptible but not overwhelming.

Resin was originally used not to flavor wine, but to conserve it. One of the great challenges to ancient winemakers was to make wine that would last at least at least 12 months – that is, until the following vintage. This was not always easy, given the instability of the wine and the high temperatures at some times of the year in the Middle East and Mediterranean regions. Making the clay containers and amphoras airtight was a major challenge, and tree resin was often used as a seal. In some cases, resin was added directly to wine; it covered the surface with an oily film that gave some protection from oxygen, much like a gas.

Although archaeologists have found resin residue in wine jars three or four thousand years old, the use of resin was first discussed by the Roman writer, Columella, in the first century B.C. He set out the various kinds of pine resin that could be used, and recommended using trees from the hills, rather than from the lowlands, as their resin had better aromas. But Columella clearly wasn’t a big fan of the stuff. He recommended against using resin in the best wines because of the flavor it imparted.

The pungency and strength of the resin clearly added to the flavour of wine and, over time, Greeks began to think of it as the normal flavor. When clay jars and amphoras fell out of favor for shipping and storing wine, and were replaced by wooden barrels, many consumers must have felt something was missing from their wine. Perhaps there was a reaction against resin-less wine that was similar to the revolt when Coca-Cola tried to change its recipe in the 1985. Just as Coca-Cola gave in and created Coke Classic, Greek winemakers began to add pieces of resin to the wine during fermentation, thus creating retsina (Retsina Classic?). Retsina was now a particular category of wine, rather than the normal, default style.

In the past, wine seems to have been quite heavily resinated, and concentrations of more than five per cent resin might have been common. Today, Greek wine law limits resin to a maximum of one per cent (and a minimum of 0.15 per cent), and also sets out specified levels of acidity and alcohol, all with the purpose of ensuring balance among the components.

For much of the twentieth century, “Greek wine” meant retsina, and it was especially popular from the 1960s, when Greece became a destination for millions of tourists every year,

It isn’t everyone’s favourite wine, but it has an honest lineage back to the earliest days of winemaking. It’s a reminder that wine was generally flavoured in some way. And, of course, there’s no real difference, in principle, between flavouring wine with resin and flavouring it with oak.

DOC Passito di Pantelleria

One of the winemaking techniques practised in the ancient world was drying grapes so as to concentrate their flavor and sugars. In the eighth century BC, Hesiod writes of picking the grapes in bunches, “and bring your harvest home. Expose them to the sun ten days and nights, then shadow them for five, and on the sixth, pour into jars glad Dionysus’s gift.” (Dionysus was the Greek god of wine.)

Cato recommended drying grapes for two to three days, while on the island of Thasos, they were dried in the sun for five days, and on the sixth were plunged into a mixture of boiled grape juice and salt water. After being pressed and fermented, the wine was then blended with more boiled must. Another method of reaching the same result was the Cretan practise of twisting the stalks of the bunches, so that the grapes were deprived of water and nutrients, but leaving them on the vine in the sun so that their sugar content rose.

These various approaches all had the aim of producing wines that were relatively high in alcohol and intense in flavour, and they were the forerunners of several modern styles of wine from the Mediterranean region.

Perhaps the best-known is Amarone della Valpolicella, which is made in the Valpolicella region from the corvina, rondinella and molinara varieties. The grapes are picked fully ripe, with preference given to looser bunches that allow more air flow between the grapes. Drying was originally done on straw mats exposed to the sun, but producers have tended to adopt drying chambers, which permit greater control over the process. Drying generally takes about four months, during which the grapes lose about two-thirds of their weight. They are then pressed and the juice fermented dry. In some cases the fermentation is halted to leave some residual sugar, and the resulting wine is called Recioto.

Another wine made (partially) from dried grapes is Passito di Pantelleria, from the volcanic island of Pantelleria, which lies between Sicily and Tunisia. Passito di Pantelleria is made from the zibibbo variety, the local name for muscat of Alexandria. To make Passito, some of the grapes are picked in mid-August and then dried for 20 to 30 days on wooden grates that are exposed to Pantelleria’s scorching sun and constant, vigorous winds. In September, other grapes are picked and pressed, and while that juice is fermenting, the dried grapes – which are now a quarter of their original size – are added. Fermentation is long – it usually runs to November – and the result is a rich, sweet and sometimes viscous dessert wine that delivers pungent and complex flavours. Needless to say, it is no longer diluted with salt water or anything else.

AOC Gaillac

Although it was the Greeks who first introduced wine to France – it was one market in their extensive Mediterranean wine trade – it was the Romans who began to foster viticulture there on a commercial scale. In a way, it ran against their own financial interests, because Roman merchants also exported wine to Gaul (as they referred to what became France). The Gauls were beer-drinkers, but Romans often commented on their appetite for wine; it was said that a Gaul would exchange a slave for a barrel of wine – a trade that was assumed to be very unequal and foolish, because a slave’s long-term economic value was much higher than the cost of a barrel of wine.

One of the first French sites to be planted with vines (in the first century A.D., about 2,000 years ago), was near the town of Gaillac, which lies on the river Tarn, just north-east of Toulouse. The location might well have been chosen because, at that point, the Tarn is close to the river Garonne, which facilitated the shipping of wine to the town of Bordeaux. Wines from Gaillac and nearby areas (such as Cahors) were later shipped through Bordeaux in serious volumes, and made up some of the first exports from Aquitaine to the important English market.

But Gaillac’s status declined in the 12^th century, when Bordeaux’s own vineyards expanded. As the region’s own lucrative wine trade (mainly in claret) with England began, Bordeaux’s wine merchants adopted protectionist policies that gave local wines a clear edge: in effect, wines from places like Gaillac could not be shipped from Bordeaux until after the Bordeaux wines had been sold and exported. From that time until quite recently, the wines of Gaillac slipped into relative obscurity and sold mostly in local and regional markets.

More recently, Gaillac wines (the reds earned AOC status in 1970) have gained more prominence and producers are harking back to the region’s status as one of France’s first vineyards, planted by the Romans. Gaillac’s red wines are the most impressive, and although some international varieties, like cabernet franc, merlot and cabernet sauvignon are permitted, two indigenous varieties – duras and braucol (also known as fer) – give the wines their distinctive weight and edginess. Despite their dilution by international varieties, they are a reminder of the dark wines that Aquitaine first vineyards provided for the English market, before they were replaced by the lighter Bordeaux reds.

DOC Falerno del Massico

One of the great wines of Rome – it is mentioned in many of the most prominent texts and poems – was Falernum, which came from Campania, near the border with Latium. There are many references to the exquisite quality of the wine and especially to the spectacular vintage of 121 BC, which was known as Opimian, after Opimius, who was Consul in that year. Opimian wine was clearly a byword for connoisseurs – a Roman Robert Parker would have given it VC, if not C points out of C. In his Satyricon, Petronius has his banquet host bring out bottles labelled, “Falernian. Consul Opimius. One hundred years old.”

So good was Falernian wine that writers proposed drinking it straight, rather than diluted with water or must, or flavored with herbs and spices. As Martial demanded of someone who had mixed Falernian wine with grape juice, “What satisfaction do you get out of mixing must stored in old Vatican jars with old Falernian?... It’s a crime to murder Falernian... Maybe your guests deserved to perish, but so costly a jar did not deserve to die.”

In the bar of Hedonus, one of the many drinking-places in ill-fated Pompeii, which was buried in the ashes of Mount Vesuvius, Falernum wine sold for four times the price of ordinary wine and twice the price of the “best wine.” This is a significant differential, though not a great one, compared to the range separating ordinary from iconic wines today. (Think of the price of Yellow Tail and the price of Pétrus.) But at a time where there were no controls on production, shipping and labeling, expensive wine fraudulently described as Falernum must often have passed down gullible Roman throats.

The modern incarnation of Falernian wine is Falerno del Massico, named for Mount Massico, where the Roman wine god Bacchus is said to have appeared in human form to an old farmer, Falernus. The farmer gave Bacchus milk, fruit and honey and, as a reward for his kindness, Bacchus turned his milk into delectable wine.

Falerno del Massico has not garnered the attention of modern critics in the same way as its forerunner did two thousand years ago, but it is a respected wine that gained DOC status in 1989. The white is made from falanghina, while the red is predominantly aglianico (60-80%), piedirosso (20-40%) and barbera or primitivo (20% maximum).