Any attempt at documenting the history of a subject so expansive as wine involves selection. This general history, which traces wine from its earliest origins through the mid-19th century, focuses on such important topics as the spread of production, patterns of consumption, the emergence of recognized wine regions, the wine trade, and regulations. While a wide geographical area is discussed, most of the text relates to Europe; for the most part, non-European winemaking regions did not become significant until the 1800s or 1900s.
We will never know who made the first wine, any more than we will ever know who baked the first loaf of bread or poached the first egg. These events took place perhaps tens of thousands of years before the written word, and although there are cave drawings that depict humans hunting and other scenes of daily prehistoric life, none yet discovered show figures treading grapes or drinking what might have been wine. Knowledge of the earliest wines comes instead from the research of archaeologists, chemists, linguists, and other specialists, who have discovered the remains of wine in the form of grape material and residues that point to wine: tartaric acid, which is concentrated in grapes, and malvidin, an anthocyanin that occurs in dark-skinned grapes and only a few other berries and flowers.
The earliest evidence of this kind has been unearthed in northern China and in the region of Western Asia now occupied by Georgia, eastern Turkey, Armenia, Iraq, and Iran. In some cases, the evidence takes the form of vessels containing botanical and chemical evidence of wine. In both China and Western Asia, such vessels have often been found at burial sites or close to luxury items such as jewelry, suggesting that wine was associated with religious ceremonies and key life events, and with the better-off members of society. In other cases, the evidence is of winemaking facilities where fermentation vats contain seeds, skins, stems, and chemical residues.
Although knowledge of the earliest wines expands every year, it is unlikely that wine’s historical depth will ever be traced much further than the 9,000 years of the earliest evidence, which dates to about 7000 BCE in China. It was only at about this time, in the early phase of the Neolithic Era, that humans began to live in settled communities, to farm livestock and cultivate crops (including, perhaps, vines), and to make pottery vessels—all virtual preconditions of winemaking on a continual basis and in such a way that would leave evidence modern researchers might discover.
While it might not be possible to date wine much earlier than this, many cultures have created narratives to explain its origins. They generally fall into two categories: that wine was a gift of the gods or that it was discovered by accident. Examples of the first include the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian accounts that either wine was given to humans directly by a god or a god was in some way associated with the first wine. The Greek and Roman gods of wine, Dionysus and Bacchus, are well known. Meanwhile, the Torah (the Jewish holy book that contains the first five books of the Christian Old Testament) states that as soon as the great flood subsided, the first tasks Noah undertook were to plant vines and make wine. If the vines had been on the ark, then the suggestion is that winemaking was known earlier—and some Jewish texts do portray Noah tending vines before the flood. Either way, viticulture was privileged by being shown as the first human activity in the new world washed clean by water—the first New World wine, as it were.
These and other religious narratives were important supports for the high status attributed to wine in some cultures. But the belief that wine had divine origins did not prevent Muhammad from forbidding the faithful to drink wine (and other alcoholic beverages) when he found that they were abusing it and that wine had harmful effects on morals and the social order. Wine was also in no way exceptional in having religious associations; many products in the ancient world, including grain and beer, had their own gods. But some religions, like Christianity, elevated wine to special status.
As for accounts that have the accidental discovery of wine at their center, one Persian story tells that a servant of King Jamshid, suffering a severe headache, drank some grape juice that she thought had gone bad in the hope that it would kill her and end her suffering. But the “spoiled” juice had simply fermented, and instead of killing her, the wine cleared up her headache. The servant recounted the story, and from that point on, grape juice was allowed to “spoil,” and wine became a staple beverage of the royal household. This story had no religious overtones, but it did contribute to the persistent belief that wine had medicinal properties. Such colorful stories might have been convincing in the past, but modern research has come up with more prosaic explanations of wine that satisfy secular minds. For example, it is plausible that the earliest wine and alcohol were first produced when grapes, and other fruit, ripened to the point that they split their skins, exposed their sugar-rich flesh to ambient yeasts, and enabled the process of alcoholic fermentation to begin without human intervention or participation.
The result was not so much wine as alcohol-infused berries and other fruit, but even though any alcohol produced this way was not in liquid form, when grapes were involved, the process basically satisfied the modern technical definition of wine: the fermented juice of fresh grapes. Birds and animals—including pre-human primates and eventually pre-historic humans—must have eaten the alcoholic berries and fruit at each “vintage” or “harvest,” when the overripe fruit fell from trees and vines. These occasions would have been the earliest episodes of humans consuming alcohol.
In the thousands of years between these events and about 7000 BCE, the period of the earliest evidence of deliberately made alcoholic beverages, humans learned how to make wine. The mechanisms are unknown, but it is likely that humans not only consumed fermenting overripe grapes but also began to collect grapes when they were ripe and sweet for eating fresh. If they were piled into a container, even one as simple as an indentation in a rock, the grapes on the bottom would have been crushed by the weight of those on top. As the juice pooled, it would have attracted ambient yeasts that began the fermentation process. When humans drank the juice, they enjoyed its flavor and, perhaps more importantly, the alcohol’s effects.
Over time, they refined their methods. Instead of letting some grapes break open under the weight of others, they crushed them all, by hand or foot or rocks, to produce as much juice as possible. Eventually, grapes were collected specifically for wine. Wine could be made this way by nomadic peoples, as long as they encountered wild grapes at the point of ripeness.
This narrative of the origins of wine is simply speculation, of course. It could be that archaeologists, chemists, linguists, and others who trace the origins of alcohol will find evidence confirming it or pointing to another explanation. What is known is that about 9,000 years ago, in eastern China, the rich and powerful were drinking a fermented beverage made from several products. Chemical analysis of the residues, found in the village of Jiahu in Henan province, indicates that they included rice, honey, and either haws (the fruit of the hawthorn tree) or grapes. These products were either fermented separately and blended or co-fermented, and the honey might have been included to attract indigenous yeasts or to sweeten the final product. Later evidence from the same region suggests that alcoholic beverages were consumed on religious or spiritual occasions, such as funerals—a pattern found in other parts of the ancient world—and at celebrations that included the end of hunting expeditions.
If grapes were indeed part of this 7000 BCE blended alcoholic beverage, China would have the longest continuous history of wine production in the world. But Georgia has a somewhat stronger claim to this title. Verifiable winemaking facilities dating to 6000 BCE were discovered in the Caucasus region in the south of the country. Archaeologists have suggested that the grapes processed in this facility were harvested from vines growing wild in the nearby hills and brought to the vats for crushing. This evidence identifies Georgia as the likely source of the earliest-known wine and the region with the longest continuous history of winemaking.
That find was announced in 2017, as was the discovery of 4000 BCE wine residues in a ceramic jar found in a cave at Monte Kronio, in southwest Sicily. Before the discovery and evaluation of these Chinese, Georgian, and Sicilian examples, the most ancient wine had been identified in the Zagros Mountains on the current border of Iran and Iraq, where wine residue in vessels dated to about 3500 BCE. But the prohibition on alcohol imposed by Muhammad in the seventh century CE means that there is known production in that region for only about 4,000 years, whereas China and Georgia can claim continuous production from the earliest evidence up to today.
The wine-drinking elites of Mesopotamia and Egypt were not wine snobs because, like most of the population, they also drank beer. For the wine snobs of the ancient world, one must look to Greece and Rome, whose populations, from the wealthiest to the poorest, including slaves, drank virtually nothing but wine. There was no beer in Greece and Rome, and their attitudes toward it were overwhelmingly negative.
The first Greek reference to beer, specifically to beer drinking by Thracians, likened their practice of drinking it through straws (to avoid ingesting the chaff and other debris that floated on top of the beer) to a woman performing fellatio. From the fifth century BCE, Greeks began to refer to beer as making men effeminate—possibly because in the humoral system, the main paradigm for understanding the human body, beer was classified as cold, as were women, while wine and men were classified as warm.
Like the Greeks, the Romans considered wine a civilized beverage, which they contrasted with the beer consumed by peoples they considered barbarians. It was not only the beer itself that Greeks and Romans thought problematic, but the way the “barbarians” drank—guzzling beverages in such a way that they spilled them down their chins and clothes.
Unlike Mesopotamia and Egypt, where grapevines grew in only a few regions, viticulture proved possible throughout the Greek mainland and on the islands of the Aegean and Ionian Seas. Extensive vineyards were first planted near the main population centers, and by the fifth and sixth centuries BCE, growing demand led to the spread of viticulture and winemaking much farther afield.
Gradually, in the earliest-known winemaking regions of the ancient world, vines were cultivated and grape varieties were selected for their suitability for making wine. Perhaps this meant selecting bigger, fleshier grape varieties that gave more juice and therefore more wine—low yields would certainly not have been a priority—and the grapes were trained up trees or along the ground as they were found in their wild state. It is likely that they were cultivated side-by-side with other crops. When knowledge of viticulture and winemaking was transferred from one culture to another, the recipient culture undoubtedly adopted the existing grape varieties and growing techniques before, over time, adapting them to their own conditions and requirements.
It is not known whether wine production in China and the Western Asian regions occurred independently or whether, for example, the knowledge was transferred from one region to the other along the networks of trading routes collectively known as the Silk Road. But either way, Western Asia became critically more important to the global history of wine. China might well have been the origin of broader East Asian wine production (wine has also been made in Japan for thousands of years, for example), but Western Asia was the point from which knowledge of viticulture, winemaking, and wine consumption was transferred to the eastern Mediterranean and then to Egypt, Crete, Greece, and Italy, before being transferred to Europe more generally at the beginning of the Common Era, a little more than 2,000 years ago. From Europe, viticulture was extended to the Americas, southern Africa, and Australasia.
Of the various regions where there is evidence of ancient winemaking, the best evidence of wine consumption comes from Mesopotamia, now Iraq, where vines were cultivated and wine was made in the northern mountains and shipped down the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to the towns in the south. The small volumes and the cost of shipping alone priced wine beyond the means of most people, who drank beer instead. Yet although wine had a higher cultural value than beer because of its scarcity and cost, the elites drank both wine and beer. There were no disparaging comments about beer by wine drinkers until the Greeks—the original wine snobs—began to insist that beer was a barbaric beverage.
The pattern of consumption where people of all classes drank beer, with the elites drinking wine as well, also prevailed in Ancient Egypt, which provides the most comprehensive evidence of viticulture, winemaking, and wine consumption before the Greeks. Vines were grown in gardens in the cooler Nile Delta region and at some of the oases upstream, and all seem to have been owned by priests, pharaohs, and others in the more well-off strata of Egyptian society. Wall paintings show slaves harvesting and stomping grapes and wine being poured into clay vessels for fermentation. These vessels, forerunners of Greek amphorae, were sealed only when fermentation was complete, to prevent the buildup of carbon dioxide. The wine was then stored in cellars and brought out to be consumed in small ceramic cups.
Egyptian wall paintings show wine being served at festivities of all kinds, and they are not shy about depicting consumers vomiting or being carried away, unconscious. Egyptian sages warned of the consequences of excessive drinking of beer or wine, and the danger of intoxication was an early and persistent theme of writing about wine. On the other hand, wine was attributed therapeutic and medicinal properties by Egyptian and other Arab physicians—although more medicines were based on beer than wine because it was more widely consumed. Still, wine was portrayed as generally good for digestion, and it was the liquid base of many medicines that employed plants, roots, and herbs, as well as less common—and less palatable—ingredients such as dog hair and bird dung.
From Egypt, knowledge of viticulture and winemaking was transferred to Crete and then to the Greek mainland and islands. Although there were notable elite wine cultures in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, Greece represented a major step forward in the social broadening of wine consumption, because although beer was made on Crete, it was not made in Greece for many centuries. By and large, the Greeks drank only wine (and a little mead) apart from water, and when they first encountered beer in other societies, they wrote about it as an unfamiliar product. On the other hand, they made wine central to their culture, where it was an object of veneration and a marker of social distinction.
For elite Greek males, the essence of wine was expressed in the symposium, an all-night affair of drinking and entertainment that followed an evening meal. Some symposia were clearly little more than drinking parties, but the ideal symposium was a soberer affair, where the wine was well diluted with water and participants were warned not to drink to the point of behaving foolishly or immorally. At the same time, the games that were played—such as balancing on an inflated pigskin and aiming wine dregs to sink saucers floating in a pool of water—stressed skills of accuracy and balance. The point of these games seems to have been to display one’s ability to perform despite drinking, the winners effectively demonstrating that they could hold their wine. This is far from the many historic displays of manliness that were based simply on getting intoxicated.
The symposium also represented wine as a civilized beverage. Participants were expected to discuss topics such as politics, literature, and the arts while sipping their wine, and they might be entertained by poets and singers, and sometimes by prostitutes. Wine was a means of facilitating the exchange of ideas, and the Greeks thought that wine promoted honesty and truth so that participants in a symposium would not behave deceptively. It was summed up in the Latin saying in vino veritas, or “in wine there is truth”—although this dictum was often qualified, as in the suggestion that there are some truths better left unsaid. Wine, then, became integral to the Greek sense of culture and civility, and the Roman historian Justin later wrote that wine, along with urban life and constitutional government, was one of the greatest benefits of civilization that the Greeks conferred on the barbarian inhabitants of France when they established colonies there.
Under Greek sponsorship, wine became one of the three main commodities (along with grain and olive oil) of Mediterranean commerce. The range of the Greek wine trade is shown by the tens of thousands of amphorae—ceramic jars holding between 25 and 40 liters of wine—that have been found, intact or in pieces, throughout Europe. Others are located on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, often near coasts, where they attest to ships blown ashore or sunk during storms. The Greek wine trade with other parts of Europe followed the great rivers, such as the Rhône and the Danube, because transportation by water was far easier and less expensive than by land, which remained true until the coming of the railroads in the mid-19th century.
The Greeks not only traded wine—for land, mines, metals, and other goods—but also extended viticulture wherever they went. They began to plant vines in southern Italy, which they called Oenotria, “the land of wine”; extended viticulture in Egypt when they dominated that region; and, possibly, introduced grapevines to Spain. They were not, however, responsible for sponsoring wine production by the Etruscans, the inhabitants of what is now Tuscany. The credit for that goes to the Phoenicians of the eastern Mediterranean.
The Etruscans were also traders and began exporting their wine to the Mediterranean coast of France, where they established warehousing facilities at Lattara (now known as Lattes, where the Vins de Pays d’Oc association has its headquarters). The Celtic inhabitants of ancient France were beer drinkers and, it seems, had never tried to make wine from the grapes that grew wild in their territory. But they were receptive to wine, and the Etruscan trade with ancient France was substantial: one shipwreck off the coast of Toulon contains amphorae that would have held some 40,000 liters of wine, about 50,000 standard modern bottles. But the Etruscan wine trade with France was soon eclipsed by the Greeks. They established a settlement at Massalia, now Marseilles, and imported wine for consumption by the settlers and to serve as a trading commodity. It has been estimated that by about 500 BCE, Greek merchants were shipping more than 2.5 million liters of wine to France each year through Massalia alone. Some of it was consumed there, but most of it was trans-shipped to Celtic towns along the coast and up rivers such as the Rhône and Saône.
By this time, Etruscan and Greek colonists had begun to plant vineyards near their French settlements, establishing the Languedoc-Roussillon and Southern Rhône regions as the cradles of French viticulture. Wine was thus implanted in the culture of the beer-drinking Celts who inhabited France. Undoubtedly, the Celtic elites began to emulate the behavior of the newcomers, including their preference for wine. Striking evidence is the massive Greek krater, a vessel used by the Greeks for mixing wine and water at a symposium, found in the burial chamber of a princess of the Celtic Vix lineage. Now on display in a museum in Châtillon-sur-Seine, in Burgundy, this krater was clearly designed for decorative rather than functional purposes, as it holds more than 1,000 liters.
If the Greeks introduced viticulture to some southern regions of ancient France, the Romans continued, intensified, and completed the project. They extended vineyards not only throughout France as far north as the Paris region and Alsace but also into any part of Europe and the Mediterranean area where vines would grow—and undoubtedly into some regions where vines failed. By the second century CE, about 2,000 years ago, wine was being made throughout most of the Roman Empire, from England in the north to the northern coast of Africa in the south, and from Portugal in the west to Poland in the east.
As the Romans extended viticulture throughout France in the first centuries of the Common Era, they planted vines in some of the country’s best-known regions, possibly including Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, the Loire Valley, and the Rhône Valley, as well as the Rhine and Mosel Valleys in Germany. Just as they were doing so, the early Christian church began to extend its missions throughout France and Europe more generally, giving further impetus to the spread of viticulture, since Christianity embraced wine as no religion had before. There were wine gods in the religions of many ancient wine-producing societies, and wine was symbolically important in Judaism, but Christianity made wine central to its doctrines and rituals. For pre-Reformation Christians and post-Reformation Catholics, the wine sipped at Communion was considered transformed, by a process called transubstantiation, into the blood of Christ. The equivalence of wine and Christ’s blood was made clear in a genre of paintings called “Christ in the wine-press,” where Christ is shown treading grapes while bleeding from the wounds inflicted by the crown of thorns and the crucifixion. This blood flows into the vat of grapes, and the liquid that flows out to be fermented into wine is an undifferentiated blend of Christ’s blood and grape must. And Jesus’s first miracle, as recounted in the New Testament, was to turn water into wine at the wedding at Cana.
During this period, then, viticulture and winemaking were extended by the Roman settlers and Christians—first by missionary priests and later by monks. The Romans planted vineyards as part of their civilizing mission and to provide local supplies so that they were less dependent on the ever-longer supply routes from Italy, while priests planted vineyards so that they would have wine for Communion as well as for their personal consumption and for sale on the market. By 816, the Council of Aachen required every cathedral to plant a vineyard and make wine.
The beer-drinking Celts and other indigenous European populations had gods of other products and commodities but no wine god, since they did not drink wine until the Romans and Christians introduced it. As wine became more widely available and consumed, they likely looked upon Christ as a wine god—a logical conclusion, as he was the god with wine running through his veins.
For thousands of years, wine was fermented and stored in fired clay vessels. Some were of apparently random size and shape, but by the time of evidenced wine production in Egypt, their design was formalized. Greek amphorae were of the same basic shape—wide at the top with two handles and pointed at the base—but each region produced amphorae of distinct size, proportions, and decorative design. It took two people to move an amphora, and while amphorae could not be stood upright because of their pointed bases, which made them easy to pivot, they could be leaned against one another. When they were shipped, they were placed in wooden frames or planted securely in soil or sand in the holds of ships, where they provided good ballast.
About 2,000 years ago, wooden barrels began to replace amphorae. Barrels had many advantages. They could hold much greater volumes of wine; amphorae usually held no more than 40 liters, whereas barrels could hold hundreds and, later, thousands of liters. The wine-to-barrel weight ratio was more advantageous for shipping. Barrels were round and could be rolled, and because they were wider at the center than at the ends, they could be pivoted, and all this by a single person (in principle, at least).
To this extent, barrels were more efficient than amphorae, even if they had some disadvantages: when they were full, they were very heavy, making them difficult to move if they could not be rolled; they allowed some evaporation; and they could leak. Yet barrels were clearly considered preferable, because they replaced amphorae quickly. It was a remarkably rapid shift in technology that involved the exploitation of new materials, the development of new production methods, and the emergence of a new artisan, the cooper.
It is worth noting that until the later 20th century, wooden barrels were used only for storage and shipping—not to impart character to wine. Barrels were used until they were too old and began to leak, so almost all wine would have spent many months in inert barrels. It is not clear exactly when winemakers began to think of barrel aging as a way to give wine flavor and texture.
The only ancient wine to have survived in liquid form came from China and dated to about 200 BCE. It was in bronze containers sealed so effectively that the wine could not evaporate. But once the vessels were opened, the wine broke down almost instantly; those present could attest only to fleeting aromas of sweetness. Today, though many substances can be added to wine, it is essentially fermented grape juice, defined that way by law. But in many parts of the ancient world, “wine” covered a wide range of beverages, with substances added throughout and after the winemaking process.
As well as lauding the benefits of drinking wine, Greek and Roman wine writers commonly condemned drinking to excess. The Greeks wrote off whole peoples, such as the Thracians, Scythians, and Macedonians, because they drank wine and beer immoderately. The Greek comic poet Alexis contrasted the Greek way of drinking moderately with the drinking practices of others that he described as “drenching, not drinking.” Philip of Macedonia was said to drink like a sponge even before going into battle, while his son, Alexander the Great, was alleged to have been perpetually drunk and to have killed his best friend in a drunken rage. Greek literature abounds with warnings against excessive drinking. Homer wrote that Eleanor, one of Ulysses’s companions, fell from a roof while intoxicated and died.
Roman commentators followed in the same vein. The poet Lucretius argued that too much wine disturbed the soul, weakened the body, and provoked quarrels, while the philosopher Seneca wrote that excessive wine drinking revealed and magnified defects in the character of the drinker. Roman politicians sometimes attacked their rivals by alleging that they were drunks. Cicero accused Mark Antony of starting to drink wine early in the morning and claimed he had vomited in the Senate.
These writers demonstrate that it was not just wine but the manner of consuming it that distinguished Greeks and Romans from other peoples. Excessive drinking was not simply a matter of personal health and morality. It extended to the fundamental sense that these cultures had of themselves as more civilized than those around them.
Resin from trees, especially pines, was an important additive combined with the must during fermentation or used to cover the inside walls of amphorae to make them impermeable. Either way, it contributed to the flavor of wine and was a preservative, and it established the practice of adding resin as a flavoring, as it is in the Retsina wines that are still popular today in Greece. Water, either fresh or saltwater from the sea, was another common additive, and it could be added during winemaking or just before the wine was consumed, as at Greek symposia. Some wines were made with sun-dried grapes, the forerunner of the appassimento method, with alcohol, body, and flavor that tolerated being diluted without becoming insipid and bland.
Other frequent additives included honey, roots, herbs of various kinds, and ashes. Honey was commonly added to wine after fermentation, not to boost the potential alcohol level of the finished wine as with the later practice of chaptalization, but simply to add sweetness. Before sugar reached Europe, honey was the sweetest commodity, and some wines were described as “honey-sweet”—as indeed they might have been, because some recipes called for as much honey as wine in the blend. Sweet wines were highly valued by the Greeks and Romans, and they were all likely to have been made by adding honey, as there is no mention in descriptions of winemaking of stopping fermentation to leave some sugars unfermented.
But these were the wines consumed by the wealthy. The poor of Greece and Rome drank wines with much less color, body, and alcohol. Some were made by adding water to the grape residue remaining after good quality wine had been made. Other wine was made from water mixed with sour wine. The Roman statesman Cato provided a recipe for wine suitable for farmhands. It included fresh and boiled must, sharp vinegar, fresh water, and old seawater, with the must accounting for only about a fifth of the total volume. These alternative wines, destined for soldiers, workers, and slaves, must have been sour, almost flavorless, pale in color, thin in texture, and very low in alcohol.
It is no surprise, then, that these wines did not figure in the inventories of quality wines that Greek and Roman commentators—the earliest wine writers—drew up. Writers such as Pliny the Elder provided lists of wines from various parts of the Mediterranean area, including Italy, Greece, Egypt, North Africa, and southern Gaul (France). Some they condemned as undrinkable; others they praised for their quality and character. There were no fruit and spice descriptors here, but spare references to sweetness, smokiness (from added ashes), and sometimes to body and weight: many wines were described, positively, as thin.
In a great number of cases, writers on wine, many of whom were physicians, drew attention to the medicinal properties of specific wines. Some were diuretic, some were laxative, others broadly good for the digestion. In fact, for the most part, wine was treated more as a therapeutic beverage than as an enjoyable one. Cato described the way to produce wine with laxative properties: treat the roots of the vine with black hellebore (a flowering plant), old manure, and old ashes.
Viticulture was spread throughout Europe by Romans, and initially only Roman citizens were permitted to own vineyards. But the Roman state extended citizenship to more and more of its subject peoples as a way of gaining their loyalty—something that became increasingly important as the Central and Eastern Europeans (even now widely referred to as barbarians, the word the Romans used) began to press on the frontiers of the Roman Empire. At the same time, the church established vineyards for its own religious and secular purposes. As a result, by the early Middle Ages, vineyards in many parts of Europe were owned variously by the families and descendants of Roman settlers, by local indigenous landowners, and by the church.
Although it is not known what proportion of vineyards or vineyard land was owned by each of these, it is important to recognize the different categories of ownership because historians have tended to focus almost exclusively on vineyards owned by the church—by parishes, cathedrals, or religious houses. The image of the monk tending his vines and barrels has become entrenched in literature as representing early-to-late medieval viticulture and winemaking, but the reality was that many vineyards, and quite possibly most vineyards in most regions, were owned by secular proprietors. The Domesday Book, a 1086 survey of agricultural property in England, identified a total of 42 vineyards, of which only 12 were in monastic hands, while the rest were the property of secular owners. Yet it is not known how representative that was of Europe.
The fastidious records of the monasteries, which have generally survived better than those of secular owners, have given the impression that vineyard ownership was dominated by the church. It is often said that history is written by the winners, but it is also true that the historical record is written by those who can write. The clergy were a literate group (clerical is derived from clergy) whose religious calling led them to document the ways they looked after the resources they believed were entrusted to them by God. This was especially important in the case of wine due to its privileged place in Christian doctrine and ritual.
In contrast to church-owned vineyards, which had continuous ownership, vineyards owned by secular proprietors changed hands at each generation, and their records are much more likely to have been lost over time. Even so, evidence of many of them entered the written record when they were given to the church—common from the 6th to the 18th century—in exchange for masses to be held and prayers to be said for salvation. In the sixth or seventh century, for example, a Paris noble gave vineyards to several churches, and by 864, a monastery near Heidelberg had received more than 100 vineyard donations from local secular landowners.
Overall, however, from about 500 to 1000 CE, the years following the fall of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, there is limited information about wine. The invasion of the Western Roman Empire by the migrating populations from Central and Eastern Europe disrupted the existing political organization and the complex trade patterns of Western Europe. But although the wine trade did not recover until about 1000 CE, there is no evidence that wine production declined. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that Europe’s new rulers protected existing vineyards; many of them enacted laws to punish anyone who damaged or destroyed a vineyard, and there is ample evidence that the new elites embraced wine as much as ale.
Nor were the existing owners dispossessed of their vineyards, and many monasteries maintained extensive areas under vine. In the 800s, one near Paris had between 300 and 400 hectares of vines planted as scores of small vineyards, some cultivated by the monastery and the remainder by peasant sharecroppers who kept half the produce. But most vineyard holdings throughout Europe seem to have been small, whether they were owned by the church or secular proprietors.
Between 500 and 1000 CE, the number of vineyards increased steadily. In the area to the north of Frankfurt, for example, the number of wine-producing villages rose from 40 to 400 between the seventh and ninth centuries, and the number of vineyards also increased in Alsace and in the Rhine Valley. It is likely that Europe’s vineyard area increased even more from about 1000 CE when there was a period of urbanization, population growth, and climate warming, which favored viticulture in more northerly regions of Europe. The relatively well-off middle classes of the new and growing towns—merchants, bureaucrats, lawyers, and professionals of all kinds—created a new and expanding market for wine. In northern Italy, especially Tuscany, vineyards expanded to supply towns such as Milan, Genoa, Florence, Siena, and Venice. The Florentine agronomist Michelangiolo Tanaglia summed up the spirit when he wrote, “Now is the time…on the open hills, to never tire of planting vines.”
In other regions of urbanization where viticulture was either marginal or impossible—such as southern England (London), the Low Countries (Ghent, Bruges, and Brussels), and towns on the North Sea and in the Baltic region (such as Hamburg, St. Petersburg, and Stockholm)—wine was supplied by short- and long-distance trade routes. Some wine was traded to England and the Low Countries from Alsace and the increasingly important Paris wine region, while northern German and Baltic-area towns were supplied by vineyards along the Rhine.
The main paradigm used by physicians to understand the human body and mind from ancient Greece to the early 19th century was the humoral system. It taught that the human body and individual temperament were governed by four humors: black and yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. These humors were said to exist on two axes, moist-dry and cold-hot. Blood, for example, was moist and warm, while black bile was dry and cold. Each humor contributed its character to the overall composition of the human body and each person’s physical health and emotional temperament.
A person with a healthy body and stable mental state was someone whose humors were balanced, and the onset of illness meant that the humors had become unbalanced. The humors also determined a person’s basic temperament: blood promoted a happy and optimistic character while yellow bile, also known as choler, led people to be ill-tempered. The axis of temperature also related to sexuality. Warmth, which was particularly related to youth, was associated with sexual passion. These humoral notions have not been abandoned entirely, evidenced by terms like ill- and good-humored, warm- and cold-hearted, and choleric, and the description of animals going into heat.
Faced with an ailing patient whose humors were unbalanced, a physician had to rebalance them, and the main method was diet. For this purpose, all foods and beverages were given a value on the warm-cold and moist-dry spectrums, not because the foods and beverages in question had these qualities in physical terms, but because they were believed to boost them. Water was considered cold and moist, and wine was classified as warm and dry. Thus, a patient who was shivering and clammy would be advised to drink wine to counteract the symptoms.
Both blood and wine were classified as warm and dry, and this underlined two common beliefs. The first was a convergence of wine and blood, as represented in long-held medical teachings that wine was transformed into blood when it was ingested. In later centuries, as the humoral system was challenged, a more modest claim was made: wine “strengthened” the blood. This medical association of wine and blood would have made the Christian notion of transubstantiation quite reasonable to people who lived by the humoral system. Another, more secular association of wine and blood is that wine makes the drinker sanguine, or happy and optimistic.
Wine was privileged in the humoral system because while other foods and drinks were attributed a single temperature, wines were placed on a spectrum of warmth. Some wines were warm in the first degree; others, being warmer, were warm in the second degree, and so on. This meant that wine could be used as a remedy in more nuanced ways than other commodities.
It is believed that the first vines were planted near the city of Bordeaux around the year 40 CE. But it was beginning in the early 1200s that Bordeaux began to come into its own as the prime source of wine for Northern Europe. Initially, the wines exported through the port of Bordeaux were not from the Bordeaux region as it is now known, but from the high country further inland to the east and south—the modern Southwest France region. Wine producers around towns such as Cahors, Gaillac, and Moissac shipped wine on barges down the Lot, Dordogne, and Garonne Rivers to Bordeaux, where merchants consolidated shipments and sent them through the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel to London, Bristol, Hull, and other English ports, as well as ports in Ireland and Scotland, and along the coastal waters of the North and Baltic Seas to cities in Northern Europe and Scandinavia.
Impressive volumes of wine were exported through Bordeaux. In 1243 alone, England’s King Henry III bought 1,445 casks of wine, and if they were the standard English tun, the purchase amounted to 1.5 million liters. Almost 1,000 casks were described as top-quality wine, and the rest as mediocre and poor quality. By the early 1300s, Bordeaux was exporting 10,000 to 15,000 barrels of wine each year. Royal purchases gave additional cachet to Bordeaux wines, and by the end of the 1300s, about three-quarters of Bordeaux’s exports were going to England, with the rest to Spain, Flanders, Germany, and other parts of France. The scope of this trade stimulated the planting of vineyards, mainly in the region immediately around the city of Bordeaux and the Graves and Entre-Deux-Mers districts. (The Médoc area and much of the Right Bank were not extensively planted until much later.)
Soon these expanded vineyards near the town of Bordeaux could fill foreign orders for wine, and the merchants of the city took steps to give their wines a commercial advantage over the wines from the high country. Wines from Cahors, Gaillac, and other areas of the interior were forbidden from arriving in Bordeaux until a date fixed each year, between mid-November and Christmas, that ensured that the wines from the regions near Bordeaux would be sold and shipped first. Bordeaux’s wine merchants sent agents to the main export markets, and they sold their wines before the high-country wines arrived. Over the long term, the vineyards in such districts as Cahors and Gaillac went into decline, largely because of these restrictive practices by the new Bordeaux wine industry.
The wine exported from Bordeaux was young, shipped mere weeks after fermentation was complete, and it was mainly the red wine known in France as clairet and in England as claret. It was generally made as a field blend from both red and white grapes that were co-fermented, and it was a light, translucent red in color. Darker red wine, the sort now called simply red, was known as black wine. Color was clearly important, for there are records of winemakers achieving the “right” hue by adding black wine to deepen the color of claret or white wine to lighten it.
The arrival of each vintage of this wine was eagerly anticipated at the destination markets, but the wine had a relatively short shelf life, and much of it was noticeably spoiling before the next vintage arrived. Wine must have oxidized, as the use of barrels for storage meant that wine was exposed to increasing volumes of air as it was drawn off. Moreover, given the state of barrel hygiene in the Middle Ages, many casks must have been infected with Brettanomyces. Even in an age when many odors and flavors that would now be considered unpleasant or disgusting were normal, or at least tolerable, there was awareness that spoiled wine did not smell or taste like good wine. There is extensive literature from the Middle Ages and early modern period on “correcting” spoiled wine, evidence that consumers and tavern-keepers were reluctant simply to throw away bad wine. The Earl of Northumberland had his “brokyn” wine made into vinegar, but others literally tried to make the best of theirs.
One 14th-century work, Le Ménagier de Paris, possibly written by a knight in the service of the Duke of Berry, purports to advise a wife on various household tasks, including fixing spoiled wine. It suggested that sour wine could be made drinkable by adding fresh grapes to the barrel; wine that smelled bad could be improved by adding elder wood and powdered cardamom; muddy wine could be clarified by hanging in the barrel egg whites that had been boiled and then fried; and unwanted color in white wine could be removed by adding holly leaves to the barrel. There were no regulations against such practices by individuals, but retailers were held to higher standards.
Bordeaux’s wine trade was one part of a broader commerce in wine that developed in Europe beginning in the 13th century. Most wine was shipped by water because it was far cheaper than transporting it by land, and so many trade routes followed rivers or coasts. Wine was shipped down the Rhine River to German ports and then trans-shipped to other towns on the North Sea and the Baltic coasts, while more wine traveled the Rhône, Danube, and Dnieper Rivers. These were the international and long-distance routes, but most wine was traded regionally and locally, not least because sourcing from nearby producers was less expensive. Paris, for example, sourced the bulk of its wine from the extensive regional vineyards around the city, which went into decline only in the early 1800s and for the most part were not replanted after the phylloxera epidemic later in the century.
Clairet appears to have been the default wine of France from the Middle Ages until the 18th century. This was a field blend, since varieties were not planted in discrete parcels in vineyards. Until replanting took place after phylloxera, vines were generally not planted in rows but haphazardly, like trees in a natural forest, and they were often propagated by provignage—burying the cane of one vine so that it developed roots and grew a new vine. All grapes were harvested at the same time so that, depending on the varieties in the vineyard, some grapes were unripe, some were ripe, and some were overripe. The weather in each vintage determined the proportion of each. The grapes were briefly macerated and pressed, they fermented in open vats or barrels, color was corrected if necessary, and the final product was shipped in barrels. It was unstable, and much of it must have reached its destination in poor shape, while the rest did not last that much longer. The retail price of wine fell as it aged.
During the Middle Ages, in July and August of each year, as the wines from Bordeaux were starting to degrade, wine arrived in England and Northern Europe from Italy, Greece, and other parts of the Mediterranean. The wines included sweet Muscat wines from Candia, a sweet wine known as Romania from Corfu, and various wines called Vernaccia (and known as Vernage in England) from central and northern Italy. These wines were shipped in much smaller volumes than those from the merchants of Bordeaux, but they helped fill the gap between the time the 9- or 10-month-old Bordeaux wines began to spoil and the arrival of the next Bordeaux vintage. The Mediterranean wines were often shipped alongside silks and spices, and the ships returned to the Mediterranean loaded with English wool for Italy’s textile mills.
The medieval long-distance wine trade generally involved shipping wine from wine-producing regions to markets that did not have a local supply. Shipping added measurably to the final cost of wine, making it a beverage that could be consumed only by the wealthy in many Northern European societies. The rest of these populations drank ale, supplemented in some regions by cider and mead. As for the poor, they might drink the cheapest alcohol, usually ale, on festive occasions, but for the most part, they had no choice but to drink water. In the Middle Ages, that was generally not problematic, but from the 1600s, physicians began to advise against it, and there was a broad cultural anxiety about the safety of existing water supplies.
The vineyard area of Bordeaux expanded in response to export demand, and it is likely that vineyards expanded everywhere to cater to growing demand as the population of Europe rose when, between 1000 and the mid-1300s, it very likely doubled. Religious houses probably did well during the Crusades (about 1100 to 1300), as noble families gave them vineyards in exchange for prayers in case their crusading husbands and sons died in far-off, non-Christian lands. Almost every house of the important Cistercian Order received at least one vineyard during the 12th century, and the main house, the famous Abbey of Cîteaux in Burgundy, was given dozens of small vineyards in the community of Vougeot. By 1336, they totaled 50 hectares of vines—by far the biggest single vineyard in the region. When a stone wall was built around it, it became known as the Clos de Vougeot.
The wines made by the monks of Cîteaux became so highly regarded that the order was granted additional land and privileges. The pope and the French king exempted the Cistercians from paying taxes and duties normally levied on the shipping and sale of wine. This must have angered other Burgundy producers, who likely expressed their unhappiness, because the pope later threatened to excommunicate anyone who challenged the exemptions.
Cistercian monks from Burgundy founded the Kloster Eberbach Monastery in the Rhine district in 1136, and it, too, became well known for wine. The monks quickly realized that the red grapes, mainly Gamay and Pinot Noir, that had flourished in their vineyards in Burgundy did not perform well near the Rhine, and they planted white varieties. By the end of the Middle Ages, Kloster Eberbach owned more than 700 hectares of vines, making it Europe’s biggest vineyard owner.
Sources suggest that there were many variations in technique when it came to medieval viticulture. Vines were trained up trellises, poles, and trees; each vineyard contained several varieties; and vineyard work was intensive. The charter of the Abbey of Muri, in Switzerland, described essential activities such as loosening the soil at the base of the vine so that rainwater soaked in easily, fertilizing with manure, pruning, tying up shoots, and removing leaves that shaded bunches of grapes from the sun. But once the grapes were picked, the winemaking process was straightforward. The grapes were crushed by foot and then pressed, and the must was transferred to barrels for fermentation and later shipping.
The expansion of European vineyards from 1000 onward speaks to an overall increase in production to match population growth and demand. But these trends ended in the 1300s under the impact of war and disease. The Hundred Years' War, fought sporadically from 1337 to 1453, devastated vineyards in many parts of Europe, and it had no sooner begun than the Black Death struck Europe in the 1340s. This epidemic wiped out as much as a third of Europe’s population, disrupted economies and trade, and reduced demand for goods, such as wine, and labor, including vineyard labor. Many vineyards were simply abandoned, as there was no one to tend them and no market for their wine.
It is interesting to speculate whether people in some time periods drank more or less alcohol than in others. There are general figures of per capita consumption for the 20th and 21st centuries, but figures for earlier periods can only be estimated. Wine production was not controlled, and although wine was taxed during transit, it was also frequently smuggled. As for population size, censuses of any community larger than a small town tended to be unreliable until the 19th century.
“Per capita consumption” is also misleading, because it implies that everyone in a population drank the same volume of wine. Of course, this is not so in any population; some abstain and the rest drink in varying quantities. In the wine-producing regions of early modern Europe, the poor—easily a third of the population—probably drank water, and better-off inhabitants drank wine. In regions where wine was imported, the poor drank water, the workers drank beer, and the wealthier drank beer and wine. Everywhere, women consumed less than men.
Further, what is measured by dividing total wine volume by the potential consumer base is not consumption but the availability of wine on a per capita basis. Ultimately, thinking of per capita consumption in the conventional way makes it very difficult to meaningfully compare consumption over time. For example, per capita wine consumption in France has fallen from more than 100 liters in the 1970s to under 45 liters today. It suggests, as many commentators have put it, that the French “are drinking less, but better.” While this might be true, the figures don’t explain if all demographics in France are drinking less or if some demographics are drinking as much as ever while others have stopped drinking entirely. Either scenario could give the same result expressed in per capita terms. As such, per capita figures of wine consumption do not fully illuminate patterns of wine consumption in the past or in the present.
This was the context in which Duke Philip of Burgundy famously tried to rid his region’s vineyards of Gamay. By the 14th century, Burgundy, which had been in the shadow of Bordeaux in terms of reputation, was becoming known for wines made from Pinot Noir, commonly known in Burgundy as Noirien. But some vineyard owners began to extend their plantings of Gamay because it was easier to grow, ripened earlier, and produced two to four times the yield of Pinot Noir. Rival producers who stuck to Pinot Noir objected that Gamay was undermining Burgundy’s growing reputation for fine wine, and in July 1395, Philip, who happened to own vineyards planted with Pinot Noir, declared Gamay “a very bad” and “disloyal” variety that produced bitter wine. He ordered all Gamay vines to be cut down within a month—a drastic move as in July they would have been laden with grapes—and to be ripped out completely by the following Easter.
This famous (or infamous) edict led to the widespread planting of Gamay to the south, in Beaujolais, which is now an integral part of greater Burgundy. What is less known is that the 1395 edict against Gamay had to be reissued several times, once by Duke Philip’s successor, which suggests that it was not observed by all of Burgundy’s vignerons. Indeed, Gamay remained an important grape throughout Burgundy until the early 20th century, when vineyards were replanted after the phylloxera crisis.
The later Middle Ages saw the emergence of defined regions whose wines had earned distinct reputations. In France, they included Bordeaux, Auxerrois, Beaune, and parts of the Loire Valley, and consumers were also becoming aware of the Rhine Valley and Tuscany. In 1398, the name Chianti was attached to a wine—a white wine—for the first time. The consumers who sought out wines from these regions were, of course, the well-off of their societies, those who could afford to buy wines whose retail price was inflated by shipping costs and by reputation. Some regions benefited from big local markets—Tuscany supplied several cities, especially Florence, whose population had swelled from 6,000 to 90,000 between 1000 and 1300—while in other cases, quality was such that consumers were willing to pay the high price of transportation. Beaune was one example, because even shipping wine to Paris involved an expensive combination of methods that included loading barrels onto oxen-drawn carts for the trip to the Yonne River, then onto barges for transfer to the Seine.
Close to the Rhône River, a new region emerged in the early 1300s when a schism within the Catholic Church produced two popes, one residing in Rome and the other in Avignon, which was papal territory within southeast France. The massive retinue and bureaucracy that accompanied the Avignon pope boosted demand for wine in the lower Rhône region, and when a rural residence for the pope was established about 15 kilometers north of Avignon, it was later named Châteauneuf-du-Pape, or “the pope’s new château.” Vineyards were planted near the château, but it took time for the wine produced there to be known by that name. At first it was called simply vin d’Avignon (“Avignon wine”), but it was eventually renamed Châteauneuf-du-Pape to draw cachet from its association with the papacy.
Exactly how much the Avignon popes boosted local demand for wine is not clear, but it was probably substantial. As a general historical rule, adults drank (and drink) more than children, and men drank (and drink) more than women, so the numerous staff that served the pope—nearly all adult males—belonged to the demographic that consumed the greatest volumes of wine. (For the same reason, the Vatican City has the highest per capita rate of wine consumption today.)
In a more general sense, it is not known how much wine people drank during the Middle Ages, but clearly it depended upon means and status. Soldiers from wine-producing regions generally had a daily wine ration, and the kings of England sometimes provided wine for their ale-drinking soldiers; in 1316, Edward II ordered 4,000 barrels of wine for his army campaigning in Scotland. Monks and nuns drank wine regularly, as did the elites throughout Europe. In 1415, the Earl of Northumberland’s English household went through 7,000 liters of wine, though it’s unknown how many people shared it or how it was apportioned. Although it is possible to find many examples of wine consumption, rates cannot be generalized in any meaningful way. In the few cases where consumption by individuals can be measured, they show a wide range, from a quarter liter to two liters a day.
As wine production grew during and after the Middle Ages, despite the setbacks of wars and plagues, a wine industry emerged. Rules for production, shipping, and sales were established, and more systematic taxing protocols show that governments at all levels were realizing the revenues they could take in from wine. In Burgundy, the ban de vendange, the date at which the harvest could begin in each district, was established, initially to give noble vineyard owners access to labor before non-noble proprietors, and later to protect grapes from predatory winemakers in vineyards where vines had many owners. Elsewhere, guilds of wine merchants were set up, such as London’s Vintners' Company in 1363, to regulate the wine trade.
The price of wine was fixed in some parts of Europe, and wine began to be taxed everywhere. Foreign wine shippers had to give the English monarchy two casks of wine from every shipment of more than 21 casks, and from 1302 had to pay butlerage, a tax of two shillings per cask. Throughout Europe, wine was taxed as it crossed provincial borders and as it entered towns, and many municipalities came to rely on this income. More than two-thirds of the revenues of Bruges, in Flanders, was derived from taxes on wine by the 1330s. The town council of Krakow, Poland, taxed all wine sold by merchants. Regulations and taxes such as these speak to the institutionalization and standardization that distinguish a formalized industry from an unorganized pattern of production and distribution.
Merchants often tried to “correct” degrading wines with sugar, pitch, wax, gum, stronger wines, or coloring agents, but the London authorities acted multiple times in the 1400s in response to such practices. The Lord Mayor ordered the destruction of 150 barrels of wine from Lombardy when it was discovered they had been adulterated, and the city introduced regulations forbidding the mixing of wines from different regions. The poet William Chaucer, whose father was a wine merchant, wrote that wines advertised as coming from Spain were often blends from “neighboring regions.”
Wine fraud takes various forms, but it is generally a matter of adulterating wine by adding forbidden substances or of representing a wine as coming from a more prestigious region or producer than it really does. Although fraud has undoubtedly been part of the wine business for centuries, it is difficult to pin it down because its meaning has changed over time. What is not permitted at one time might have been permitted at another. In Greece and Rome, when wine was significantly modified by additives, the resulting beverages were still considered wine. But even then, there were limits. Pliny the Elder condemned the winemakers of southern France, especially those around Narbonne, for adding colorants—specifically, plants of the aloe family—to their wines.
Regulations as to adulteration and provenance began to appear in the Middle Ages, when guilds of wine merchants drew up rules that included bans on diluting wine with water and adulterating it to change the flavor or texture. Because it was impossible to analyze wine chemically, evidence might come from supplies of adulterants in a wine merchant’s cellar. There was also sensory evidence. The guild of wine merchants in Paris employed expert tasters to taste wine from barrels and ascertain whether it had been adulterated. In one 18th-century case, these tasters decided that 10 barrels of wine in a merchant’s cellar had been diluted with water and adulterated with pear Brandy. The merchant was banned from selling wine for a year, his premises were boarded up, his wine was poured into a nearby stream, his barrels were burned, and his bottles were smashed.
Yet some additives remained permitted, even though they were controversial. Chaptalization, or adding sugar to must to raise the potential alcohol in the finished wine, was widespread by the 1700s, well before Jean-Antoine Chaptal promoted it in his 1801 book and the technique became associated with his name. Chaptalization was originally used when grapes failed to ripen, but producers from warm regions who did not have to chaptalize regarded it as a kind of fraud. In the 1800s, producers in the Rhine Valley advertised their wines as “natural” and condemned the chaptalized wines of the Mosel Valley as “industrial” or “fraudulent.”
By the 19th century, as health and quality standards were being imposed on foodstuffs generally, wine became defined in law as the fermented juice of fresh grapes. As regional and national wine laws were elaborated in the 20th century, permitted additives were defined, making the definition of wine fraud clearer.
By the end of the Middle Ages, in the 1500s, Europe’s population began to rebound from the losses caused by wars and epidemics. Vineyards were replanted, and production rose to meet growing demand. The Protestant Reformation, which divided Europe into two religious camps, had little impact on wine. Protestantism was generally successful in regions of Europe not known for wine production—notably Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England, and Scotland—although it did succeed in northern Germany and in Switzerland, both important viticultural areas. In France, there were large Protestant populations in an arc of the southwest, from Bordeaux to Languedoc-Roussillon, and in Nîmes, in the Southern Rhône Valley.
Although some Protestants, notably John Calvin, who was an important influence on the Puritans, were wary of wine and other alcohol because drinking could lead to immorality, only a handful of Protestant theologians, all of them minor, favored total abstinence. Calvin introduced regulations to stop social drinking in taverns—there was to be no treating friends to a glass of wine or drinking to one another’s health—and he ordered a Bible placed in public drinking places to remind drinkers of morality and to deter blasphemy. But by the 1500s, alcohol was nonetheless an integral part of the diet for many European men.
It has become commonly accepted that from the Middle Ages onward, people in Europe drank some form of fermented alcohol, usually wine or beer, because it was safer to drink than the available water, which was often polluted by human, animal, and industrial waste. This is true only to a point. First, there is little evidence of concern about water quality until the later 1500s. There are earlier examples, such as the Romans bringing water to the city through aqueducts when the Tiber River became so polluted its water was undrinkable, and concern about the “filthiness” of the Thames in the Middle Ages. But more general warnings and a consensus among physicians that water was not safe to drink emerged only in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Second, although it is unknown what proportion of the European population drank alcohol from the 1500s to the 1800s, it is likely that most people drank water, not alcohol. Demographics, cultural behavior, and economics lead to this conclusion. European populations were heavily weighted toward young people, and as far as we know, children did not drink alcohol or did so only rarely. On the other hand, childhood ended earlier, and children were expected to carry an adult workload from the age of 12 or 13 years. Boys might well have begun drinking then, too. As for adults, women drank alcohol, but there were male cultural anxieties about women drinking, for fear they would lose their sense of morality. Women were excluded from public drinking places and expected to drink less than men, if at all. As such, adult men were the key demographic for regular alcohol consumption. But because this was a young population, adult men might have represented a good deal less than a quarter of the population.
Drinking patterns were also influenced by social class. The indigent and working poor probably accounted for at least a quarter and as much as a third of Europe’s population between the 1500s and 1900s, and that fraction expanded in times when the economy was bad, or when food prices rose. The poor simply could not afford alcohol. The adult male population able to drink any alcoholic beverage was therefore that much smaller; perhaps only one in six of a total population could drink alcohol regularly.
Overall, then, the generalization that people in early modern Europe drank wine and beer to avoid drinking water needs to be highly qualified. But that does not mean there was no anxiety about water. Physicians were generally quite clear that water was to be avoided if possible and that wine and beer were far preferable, but they were speaking to a middle- and upper-class male audience. When the Puritans arrived in New England in the 1620s, they panicked when their beer and wine supplies ran out and they had no choice but to drink water. They were very pleasantly surprised and much relieved to discover that the local springs and streams offered clean, safe water, unlike the water they had left behind in England.
From the 1600s, the introduction of tea, coffee, and chocolate (consumed only in liquid form until the 19th century), provided some variation from water, and because the water used in their preparation was boiled, these beverages were generally safe. But until the 1800s, when the price of tea and coffee fell to levels affordable by the working classes, they cannot have had a massive impact. Only from the mid-1800s, when major public works began to supply reliably clean, potable water to cities in Europe, North America, and Asia, could people again drink water without fear.
The 16th- through mid-18th centuries were critical for the development of wine in Europe, not least because they saw the emergence and delineation of wine regions recognized for quality and the accompanying research on wine quality. Until this period, wine tended to be known by style rather than by provenance even though, as Chaucer’s warning about inter-regional blends attests, higher value was placed on some wines from Spain, Portugal, and Bordeaux. Awareness of regions also appears in the so-called “Battles of Wines” of the late Middle Ages. These were fictional comparisons of wines that pitted wines from parts of Europe as varied as Bordeaux and Cyprus against one another. For this to have a cultural resonance, they must have been based on knowledge of the sensory properties of the wines involved. There is no suggestion that the wines that won were superior because they came from wine regions that were superior, but they were recognized by provenance, not producer or grape.
There is a good reason for that. First, there was little certainty about grape varieties until the 19th century. Grapes were known by different names in different regions, as most are today, but in the early modern period, there was no clarity at all as to how many varieties were known by the multitude of names and which names were synonyms for others. Moreover, because vineyards were planted with many different grapes, variety was unimportant when describing wine. That was true even in Burgundy, where it is arguable that more attention was paid to varieties than elsewhere—to planting Gamay, Pinot Noir, and Chardonnay, and keeping Gamay separate from Pinot Noir.
As for identifying wines by producer, that seems not to have been important, either. Wines were purchased by merchants who blended them and sold them as undifferentiated lots. Even though some of these négociants began to attach their names to their wines in the 1700s, this does not appear to have been a practice during most of the early modern period. For the most part, wines were known primarily by color, and most books describing wines subcategorized them by style and by medicinal value. It was rare for wine descriptions to mention aromas or flavors.
This does not mean there was no sense of quality. As far back as the Greeks and Romans, some wines were rated more highly than others, sometimes explicitly because they came from areas with reputations for quality but often for reasons that are not clear. In the Middle Ages, wines from Bordeaux were broadly distinguished as “best quality,” “good quality,” and the rest, but again the criteria are unknown. It might have been that barrels were tasted individually and that some were simply judged better than others, as in modern barrel selections. There might have been no consistent underlying factor to explain quality, especially when wines were blended by merchants.
Different quality levels of wine had therefore been recognized for many centuries, but in the early modern period, the beginnings of systematic distinctions by provenance emerge as some regions were recognized as consistent sources for distinctive wines of superior quality. Perhaps the very earliest defined viticultural area was Burgundy, although it was a very general definition. It came about because the first wines known on the Paris market as Burgundy wines came from Auxerre, in the northern part of the Duchy, where vineyards grew close to the Seine and Yonne Rivers that gave them easy access to Paris. When wines from the Côte d’Or entered the market in the 1300s, competition between the two regions led Côte d’Or producers to petition to have only their wines legally identified as wines from Burgundy. The issue was decided by King Charles VI in 1415, when he declared that “Burgundy wines” were those coming from south of the bridge at Sens, an area that included both Auxerre and the Côte d’Or. This ruling, which vaguely defined Burgundy for viticultural purposes, did not set out clear boundaries but did settle the dispute.
In the 1600s, several districts (later AOCs) in Bordeaux came to prominence, and by the end of that century, wines from specific producers were fetching higher prices than run-of-the mill claret. The best-known is Haut-Brion, because Samuel Pepys drank it in April 1663 and described it in his famous diary as having “a good and most particular taste I never met with.” It is a frustratingly imprecise tasting note, leaving readers wondering what was distinctive about what was probably the 1662 vintage.
Fifty years later, by the early 1700s, the names of the most prestigious Bordeaux estates were already well known to wealthy wine consumers. They included Haut-Brion, Lafite, Latour, and Margaux. These names were repeated in various classifications dating back to the 1700s and, of course, they led the list in the famous 1855 Bordeaux Classification.
Districts of Bordeaux were not the only areas in France to attract the attention of wine connoisseurs. The sparkling wines of Champagne won appreciation, as did the wines of several districts in Burgundy, notably Vougeot, Chambertin, Beaune, and Nuits. But the prestigious districts of Bordeaux earned higher status, if status is measured by price. Wines from Haut-Brion, Lafite, Margaux, and a few other estates fetched prices that were twice or more the price of ordinary claret from Bordeaux, but the wines from the most prestigious districts of Burgundy sold for a premium of only a third to a half more than ordinary Burgundy wines. Although these French wines were sold in France and throughout much of Europe, the English wine market was particularly important, and English demand was crucial for the development of wines as varied as claret, Champagne, Sherry, and Port. England had a relatively small population (it was only a quarter the size of France’s in the early 1700s), but it was relatively prosperous, with a growing middle class. The mass of the population drank beer and water, but wine—sparkling, still, and fortified—was the choice of the aristocracy and the expanding professional and commercial classes. Because there were very few vineyards in England, wine had to be imported, and from the 1200s to the late 1600s, French wine dominated these imports.
The origins of sparkling wine are not at all clear. Histories of wine generally dwell on the origin of the Champagne method, also known as the traditional or classic method, where the wine goes through a second fermentation in the bottle. But it is just as likely that the first sparkling wine was made in a manner resembling the ancestral method, where the wine is bottled before fermentation is complete. In both methods, fermentation in a sealed bottle leads to the dissolution of carbon dioxide and its emergence as bubbles of gas when the bottle is unsealed.
It seems intuitive that if sparkling wine was first made accidentally, it was more likely to have been a result of premature bottling, with a winemaker thinking fermentation was complete and bottling the wine, when in fact the fermentation had only paused, perhaps because the ambient temperature had fallen below the tolerance of the yeasts. When the temperature rose, the fermentation would have restarted and the resulting carbon dioxide would have dissolved under pressure, emerging as bubbles when the bottles were opened.
Although there is some earlier evidence from Limoux, this is the story often told to explain how still wine became sparkling wine in the cellar of the Abbey of Hautvillers in Champagne, where the Benedictine monk Dom Pérignon worked from 1668 until his death in 1715. While Dom Pérignon has long been falsely attributed to having “invented” sparkling wine, he more likely observed a situation like this one.
While the Limoux and Champagne accounts involve monks, an important figure in the story of sparkling wine is Christopher Merrett, an English scientist who in the 1660s presented a paper on wine to the Royal Society in London. It included a demonstration that adding sugar to wine and then sealing it in a bottle produced bubbles in the wine when it was opened. It is possible that Merrett discovered this by chance because the English had begun to add sugar to their wine. The travel writer Fynes Moryson noted 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 is possible that some wine merchants or consumers decided to add sugar to bottles of wine as they were filled from a barrel, rather than to individual glasses of wine. Perhaps they found, on opening the bottles of sugared wine, that it was sparkling, rather than sweet. This is a more plausible, if prosaic, explanation of the development of sparkling wine than the romantic tale of the blind monk in his cellar.
The outbreak of wars between England and France from the 1680s to early 1700s interrupted their wine trade, and other countries stepped in to fill the gap. One was Portugal, which began to export large volumes of Port. At that time, Port was a dry, red wine that was fortified with Brandy following fermentation (rather than during fermentation, as it is now), and it had become the favorite drink of English middle-class men. Demand for Port was such that its producers in the Douro Valley could not keep up with demand, and some in the Port business turned to fraudulent practices to fill their order books. Some of these practices were carried out by local producers, who blended their own wine with inferior Portuguese and Spanish wines and added adulterants to give color and flavor. But some of the fraud took place in England, where Port merchants adulterated and stretched the Port they received (some of it already adulterated), and even created “Port” from scratch by blending wines or making wines from Turkish raisins and flavoring them with additives.
When these practices became known, drinkers turned away from Port, the price on the English market plummeted, and Port imports fell. The Portuguese government stepped in to protect this important export and in 1756 created the General Company of Agriculture of the Vineyards of the Upper Douro and defined the area where grapes destined for Port could be grown (the Douro Delimited Region). The government also set out the rules for Port production and banned the use of certain additives, such as elderberries that had been used to give fabricated Port a deeper color.
The creation of a designated region (which included the estates of nobles, gentry, and religious houses, and excluded those of poorer producers) and the introduction of regulations for production were designed to restore consumer confidence in Port. The strategy worked. Prices rose, imports to England increased, and, for other reasons, Port became the preferred beverage not only of middle-class English men, but also of males of the English aristocracy. Quality was clearly implicated in the creation of a designated viticultural area for Port, but in a more complicated way than in many other cases. In 1788, the area that had been defined for Port production in 1756 was expanded to meet growing demand. Although there were nominal attempts to maintain quality, volume was the driving force, and even though the expansion of the Port region was meant to be a temporary measure, it became permanent.
Tuscany also benefited from the decline of French imports to England. Various regulations to improve and protect wine quality were adopted in Tuscany during the late 1600s, including prohibitions on blending mediocre wine with superior wine and blending imported wine with local wine. Even though Italian wine in general suffered from a poor reputation and there was little outside interest in it, there was a ban on exporting Tuscan wine. But it was repealed in 1698 so that Tuscan producers could take advantage of demand in England. Within a few years, Tuscan wine accounted for almost 10% of English wine imports, and it also found markets in other parts of Europe.
It was this trade that led to the delimitation of the Chianti region in 1716. The initial wave of Tuscan wines that reached England, all called Chianti, came from the estates of large landowners such as the Antinori and Frescobaldi families. These wines were considered high quality partly because they suited English tastes and partly because they successfully survived the voyage from Italy to England, which was substantially longer and riskier to wine than the voyage from Bordeaux. As a result, the wines fetched high prices, and that encouraged other Tuscan producers to export their wines. Many of them referred to their wines as Chianti, even though they came from other parts of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.
To protect the reputation and market value of Chianti wines, Duke Cosimo III ordered in 1716 that only wines produced in the regions of Castellina, Gaiole, Radda, and Greve could be sold as Chianti wines—a move that disadvantaged wine produced in the region of Siena, Florence’s trading rival. Later, a board (the precursor of today’s consorzio) was established to control the production of Chianti and its trade. In the following centuries, further regulations expanded the boundaries of the Chianti region, defined the grape varieties that could be used, and established quality tiers.
The legal definitions given to wine regions and the evidence that some were considered particularly prestigious attest to the growing importance of provenance in the valuation of wine, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries. They laid the foundation for the appellation systems that were introduced in the 1900s. But it is important to note that the earliest defined wine areas largely resulted from a determination to safeguard quality as a way of maximizing value, and that they rested on protectionist impulses. In the case of Burgundy, there was an attempt to restrict the appellation to the Côte d’Or and to exclude the allegedly inferior wines of Auxerre. In the case of Bordeaux, much earlier, producers near the city ensured that they had a commercial advantage over producers further inland, and effectively redefined which wines were deemed “Bordeaux.” In the case of Port, the delimited area favored wealthy producers, and in the case of Chianti, the Florentine aristocracy enacted rules that disadvantaged their rivals.
Quality was a concern in these decisions, but it was far from the only criterion. Nor is it particularly useful to think of the boundaries of these delimited regions in terms of terroir. In all these examples, the boundaries of wine regions were established according to principles that had far more to do with politics and power. Even though there were general claims that wines from one region were superior to wines from another, there was no serious discussion of distinctive quality and style. Uppermost were considerations of trade advantage and profit, and the protagonists had little compunction about being forthright about it.
The word terroir has attracted many definitions, and that has made it a slippery concept open to much confusion and debate. Aside from considering the merits of the notion, it is important to recognize its long narrative within the history of wine—and beyond it. Montaigne, the 16th-century French diarist, wrote that “the very form of our being—not only our color, build, complexion, and behavior, but our mental faculties as well—depends upon our native air, climate, and terroir.” He went on to liken humans to animals and plants in the way they related to terroir: “Then men must vary as flora and fauna do: whether they are more warlike, just, equable, clever or dull, depends on where they were born.” Humans were thought to be influenced by gases that emanated from the earth and bore the qualities of a given place.
From these perspectives, terroir could have positive or negative effect, but for centuries, there was a tendency to think of it as negative. Terroir was thought to imprint itself on speech, as a 17th-century text noted: “Each language seems to be influenced by the nature of the terroir where those who speak it live, such that the Gascon and the Provençal have a lively and amusing jargon, whereas the Norman and the Picard possess something of a rude drawl.” Jargon literally means “a corrupted language.” In contrast to these examples, the language spoken in the region around Paris, which was to become standard French, was considered terroir-free.
In the same way, the wines of Burgundy were looked down upon because they were influenced by terroir. Unlike the wines of Champagne, which were said to be lively, effervescent, and free of earthly influences, wines from Burgundy, according to a physician from Reims in the 17th century, gave off “a burnt exhalation that injures the organ and which smells of the reddish, mineral dirt of the land.”
This application of the term presupposed that some regions possessed terroir, which was bad, and that others did not, which was good. This is the reverse of notions ascribed to some French viticulturists in the 20th century: that only France had terroir, which made French wines superior. The strictly environmental definition common today is largely neutral, but to call a wine “terroir-driven” is generally understood as positive.
Perhaps the earliest expressions of the modern idea emerged in the 18th century. The Encyclopédie, that century’s compilation of knowledge in France, noted that wines should reflect the place they came from and that people should not seek wines that were pure and perfect in some disembodied way. In 1776, Adam Smith wrote, “The vine is more affected by the difference of soils than any other fruit tree,” and explained that soils give flavor to grapes.
Many myths about terroir focus on Burgundy, often considered the heart of terroir. Not only were wines from Burgundy long said to be more influenced by terroir than those from other regions, but the modern concept of terroir that includes the human input emerged from Burgundy in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, the region’s signature red grape variety, Pinot Noir, is often said to “express terroir” more sensitively than other grapes.
Some myths concern monks, who were far more active in Burgundy than in other French wine regions. There is no evidence that medieval monks, in Burgundy or elsewhere, carefully separated grapes from one tiny plot of vines because they made distinctive wine. This practice would have been financially irrational. Further, vineyards were planted with a range of grape varieties and wines were field blends. It would have been impossible to distinguish the effects of terroir from the different blend that each vineyard produced. Nor is there any direct evidence that monks chewed the dirt. They may have—some agricultural books from the 1600s onward suggest that farmers taste the dirt in their fields—but if that’s the case, it was likely a practice shared by farmers and secular vineyard owners as well.
Although Burgundy’s vineyards were divided into many small plots, or climats, there is no evidence that they were based on notions of terroir. Many vineyards owned by the church were donated by lay landowners. Sometimes they were maintained as separate parcels, and at other times, as in the Clos de Vougeot, they were merged. Their formation evolved over time according to transfers of ownership and, following the French Revolution, the vagaries of inheritance.
The demythologizing of terroir and its complicated history need have no bearing on attitudes today. But a historical story often gives weight to current arguments, and it is worth considering that modern ideas of terroir are just that: modern.
The first European explorers and colonizers of the non-European world were wine drinkers—Spaniards, Italians, and Portuguese, and later the French, Dutch, and British. Once colonization and settlement became policies, the Europeans set about recreating, as much as possible, their original homelands in their new territories, which they often gave the same names, such as New Spain, New England, and New France. Recreating Europe outside Europe was impossible, of course, but the colonists did what they could, and their efforts included transplanting European plants and animals and attempting to replicate their European diets. It is in this context that the Spanish extended viticulture to Central and South America in the first half of the 16th century and that the British attempted the same on the eastern seaboard of North America in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The church was involved in the spread of vineyards and winemaking as Spanish armies extended their control of territory from Mexico to Peru, Chile, and Argentina. Missionaries traveled with the Spanish armies as they swept south and identified vineyard sites, planted vines, and made the earliest wines. But the wine requirements of the church were minuscule, because from the 13th century, only the priest sipped wine at Communion, while the congregation was limited to the bread or wafer. The tiny volume of wine needed for religious rituals, then, cannot explain the massive vineyards that were planted in regions such as Peru and Chile, and it was clearly quite secular needs—the demand for wine by Spanish settlers as part of their daily diet—that drove the spread of viticulture in Latin America.
That process was astonishingly rapid. There were unsuccessful attempts to grow vines around Mexico City in the 1520s, but by the 1560s, extensive vineyards were producing wine on the western side of South America as far south as modern Santiago. Compare those three or four decades to the three or four millennia it took viticulture to be transferred over the much shorter distance from Western Asia to Western Europe! There aren’t good statistics on the vineyard areas in colonial South America, but by the 1700s, many thousands of hectares of vines were planted there, especially in regions that are now in Peru, Chile, and Argentina.
The main grape variety the Spanish planted in most of South America was Listán Prieto, later named País in Chile, Criolla in Argentina, and Mission in Mexico and California. This red, thin-skinned Spanish variety probably produced light-colored wine in the claret style popular throughout Europe, which was rustic in taste and mediocre in quality. The big advantage of Listán Prieto was that it grew easily, was very tolerant to drought, and produced high yields, thus giving plentiful results for relatively little care. Under the name País, Listán Prieto remained the most widely planted variety in Chile until the mid-19th century, and it still accounts for about one-eighth of the country’s vineyard area. It is often used to make undistinguished bulk wine, but some producers in Chile and Argentina are leveraging its status as a historic variety and producing wines of quality.
Viticulture and winemaking in South America took off quickly in the 1500s, to the chagrin of wine producers in Spain. They had expected the new overseas settlements to become markets for their own wines, and as they saw local wine production growing, they began to lobby for restrictions on colonial viticulture. Under pressure from Spanish vineyard owners, King Philip II issued an edict in the 1590s ordering a halt to new plantings in the Americas, but the order was widely ignored and eventually abandoned. By the 1700s, Peru was producing so much wine that much of it was distilled into Brandy that was sold to Spanish settlers and to indigenous workers in the silver mines that contributed to the prosperity of Spain’s economy.
The Spanish success with wine in Latin America inspired the British, who saw their colonies in North America as opportunities to free themselves from dependence on French wine by producing their own. They also planned to grow olive trees there to make olive oil. From the beginning of English settlement in Virginia and New England in the early 1600s, there were attempts to grow grapes and make wine, and in Virginia, settlers were provided with a manual, written by a native of the Languedoc living in England, and ordered to plant vines. In New England, settlers were provided with incentives, such as land for vineyards.
Most of the vines, primarily imported from France and Spain, died within a couple of years of planting. Virginia later proved more hospitable to tobacco, and grapegrowing ventures were suspended for some decades. The failure is generally attributed to the cold winters of the eastern seaboard and vine diseases, including phylloxera, to which the Vitis vinifera varieties had no immunity. But vineyards were successfully planted in Virginia and other eastern colonies in the late 1700s in similar conditions; it is not exactly clear why the vines planted before that period failed so consistently.
The word traditional is widely used in wine writing and marketing to suggest that there is a timeless quality to winemaking. While it’s a culturally powerful term, historians shy away from it because it lacks a specific meaning. “Traditional winemaking” might denote using no chemicals, fermenting with wild yeast, and intervening minimally during vinification. That might have been the way wine was made in some periods. But in ancient times, though enzymes and micro-oxygenation were unavailable, many substances were added to wine, seawater, tree resin, honey, and spices among them. From the 18th century, chaptalization has been common. In the 19th century, the use of sugar, water, plaster, and colorants was widespread. Which of these is the “traditional” method? Because practices evolve, there is no one traditional way of doing anything.
Perceptions that wine has become a manipulated, commercial commodity have led to a yearning for wines made as people imagine they were in former times. But wines deemed “traditional” today may not necessarily be grounded in the practices of the past.
From the early 1600s, there were persistent attempts to make wine from the grapes that grew wild in these and other regions of eastern North America. In some cases, they were used for Communion, where only a sip was necessary, and occasionally drinkers judged that these wines were very good. In the mid-1600s, French missionaries reported from the north shore of Lake Superior, now in Ontario, Canada, that they had exhausted the small barrel of wine they had brought from Quebec but had made very acceptable Communion wine from local grapes. In contrast, another missionary, this time on the north shore of Lake Erie, wrote that he had been unable to celebrate Communion for months because of a lack of wine.
Experiments with native grape varieties were very mixed. Some were reported to be excellent, others undrinkable. Even so, wines made from Vitis labrusca varieties, and later of French hybrid varieties, were the mainstay of wine regions in New York and Ontario until well into the 20th century. But generally, the wines made from native varieties were judged mediocre at best.
In this period, viticulture was also extended to Southern Africa and Australia. In the 1650s, a Dutch physician, Jan van Riebeeck, planted vines in the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope for strategic purposes. The Dutch East India Company carried out a long-distance trade, mainly in spices, with colonies in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), a voyage that could take six months each way. Such distances stretched supplies, and van Riebeeck’s plan was to provide wine that could be taken on board at the Cape, halfway through the voyage each way. Although there were some false starts, the vineyards were soon producing wine.
At the end of the next century, British settlers brought vines to Australia, and while the first vintages were failures, wine was being produced in commercial volumes by the early 1800s. And so, by this time, wine was made in small or large volumes in the New World countries that are notable today. The main exceptions were New Zealand and Canada, where viticulture did not begin on a significant commercial basis until the mid- or late 1800s.
During the 18th century, there was notable interest in many aspects of wine, thanks to the Agricultural Revolution, which had implications for viticulture; the Scientific Revolution, which focused attention on winemaking; and the Enlightenment, which sought to bring a more rational approach to then-accepted methods of production. This era saw the beginning of a long phase of population growth, which ran from the early 1700s to the mid-1900s. As population grew, the number of larger towns and cities increased and the urban middle classes of professionals and merchants expanded. This relatively prosperous group increased the demand for wine—particularly quality wine, which distinguished them from their social inferiors, as did coffee, tea, and chocolate. The lion’s share of these beverages was consumed by a tiny minority of the population.
The introduction of coffee, tea, and chocolate, most sweetened with sugar, and the growing consumption of fortified wines and stronger beers probably led to changes in taste preferences in wine, too. It would be surprising if people accustomed to drinking a range of stronger alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages would happily consume wine that was as weak and insipid as much claret must have been. The result was a migration from claret to more robust and flavorful styles of wine (such as Port in England) or to distilled spirits and other beverages.
There was also new interest in improving the quality of wine. This is indicated by essay competitions sponsored by many of the provincial academies in France. For example, the Academy of Dijon invited essays responding to the question, “What are the best ways of achieving quality in the wines of Burgundy?” In 1756, the Academy of Bordeaux held a competition for essays addressing “the best way of making, clarifying, and conserving wines,” and in 1766 the Academy of Limoges gave a prize to an essay on methods of fermentation.
On a practical basis, there were efforts to extend the life of wine. At this time, it was generally understood that “new wine” was wine that had aged two to four months, “middle-aged wine” had aged four months but less than a year, and “old wine” was over a year old. That wine should still be thought of in these terms—the wine writers of Ancient Greece and Rome described the ages of wine in much the same way—invited ideas for improving its conservation. German and Dutch shippers began to sterilize the insides of barrels by burning sulfur in them and by topping the wine up to reduce oxidation. They also treated the wine itself by racking it off its lees and fining it with egg whites or fish bladder.
There is no evidence that people paid much attention to pairing wine and food until the last 50 years at the most. This is not to say that people did not care; it is simply to say that there are few indications that they thought it was important. In fact, most written works on wine do not mention food. In some cases, it is clear why. Greek symposia, for example, took place after the evening meal, and food was not served at them. In contrast, the Roman equivalent, the convivium, was an event at which both wine and food were served, but records of actual dishes are few and far between.
For centuries, the mass of European populations lived at or just above subsistence levels, and so they ate and drank what they had. Only in the 19th and 20th centuries might meaningful numbers of people in the Western world have had the variety in their diets and the financial means to make choices about food and wine. Before the 1800s, there are sporadic literary references to or artistic depictions of common pairings, such as oysters with sparkling or white wine, but they do not make up a critical mass.
Where food and wine are mentioned together, the food is more likely than the wine to be described in detail. In his 17th-century diary, Samuel Pepys often recorded meals, but in frustratingly vague terms. In one case, he wrote, “I had for them a barrel of oysters, a dish of neat’s [beef] tongues, and a dish of anchovies, wine of all sorts, and Northdown ale.” While Pepys recorded the wines in his and other people’s cellars, his references to wine at meals took the form of “many wines” or “wines of all sorts.” If he gave any thought to pairing wines to the food, there is no mention of it in the diary.
In the 19th century, wine and food pairings became more frequent, though far from common. When Mrs. Beeton set out elaborate menus in her book on household management, she did not mention wine or beverages at all. But she did suggest that courses ought to start with the “most substantial” and proceed to the lightest, while wines should proceed “from the mildest to the most foamy and most perfumed.” This seems to suggest that the lightest wines should be served with the heaviest dishes, with sparkling and sweet wines toward the end of the meal.
Vague food and wine pairings such as this were the rule right through the 1800s and most of the 1900s. It is only in the last few decades that wine and food pairing has become a more widely considered topic.
Some of the more expensive wines from France began to be exported in bottles rather than barrels to reduce exposure to air. Champagne was, of course, already shipped in bottles, providing a useful model. Shipping wine in bottle was expensive, raising the cost at the destination market and ensuring that these wines could be purchased only by the very wealthy. But the practice was affected by a ban on imported bottled wine that was imposed by the British government in 1728. Thereafter, all wine (except Champagne) could be imported to the key British market only in barrels and had to be bottled by wine merchants. This not only exposed wine to oxidation, but increased opportunities for adulteration at the time of bottling.
It is likely, too, that the 18th century saw an increase in chaptalization, although the technique was not given that name until the 1900s. A 1777 experiment purported to show that adding sugar to must made from underripe grapes produced wine that was as good as wine made from ripe grapes. (It might certainly have compensated for the sugar deficit in the green fruit, but one is entitled to wonder whether the flavors were as good.) The increasing use of sugar was to some extent dependent on its falling price, as more plentiful supplies began to arrive from the sugar plantations of Europe’s Caribbean colonies. But even then, the practice would have been too expensive to be embraced by the mass of Europe’s small wine producers.
Finally, the 18th century saw a movement toward the classification of species and varieties, which included increasing interest in identifying grape varieties. In the late 1700s, there were plans to plant nurseries in Bordeaux and the Languedoc with all grape varieties found in France to discover whether there really were as many grape varieties as the plethora of names suggested. These nurseries were not fully realized, and it remained for 19th-century ampelographers to classify grape varieties in a systematic and comprehensive way.
Efforts were made, then, to improve viticulture and winemaking, but the bulk of the wine produced throughout Europe was ordinary wine produced for the mass market of relatively undiscriminating consumers, and sold locally or regionally. This is not to say that the peasants, artisans, and workers who consumed most of the wine had no interest whatsoever in quality, but that they were more likely to be interested in securing the volumes they wanted at an affordable price. Most producers satisfied this market by planting high-yielding vines, which became even more important as demand rose with population increase during the 18th century.
Some wine producers might well have adopted some of the new techniques in the vineyard and winery that were encouraged by the academies and agricultural societies, but the great majority of them undoubtedly held to the methods their parents had used. Vineyards tended to be small holdings, and most owners lacked the resources to adopt new methods, to replant their vineyards, or to take the risks that experimentation often involved. Compared to the innovations in planting, pruning, grape selection, and winemaking that were reported from some prestigious estates, a description of winemaking from Toulouse in Southwest France in the 1700s makes chastening reading. There, the vines were not well planted or pruned, and the soil was cultivated only twice a year. The grapes were often picked too early, crushed by foot in large vats, left for months in the open air, then poured into dirty and usually unseasoned casks. The result was acidic and poor wine that was fit only for the local market.
The governments of the French Revolution (1789-1799) continued the 18th-century campaign of improving wine quality and combined it with their policy of making wine more accessible to the French population. The latter was largely achieved by reducing the taxes on wine and therefore its cost. Wine shipped across France typically crossed two or more provincial borders, and taxes were also imposed when wine passed through the gates in the walls around Paris, these duties adding to the final price of the wine. In 1789, the new government abolished the taxes that were levied when goods crossed borders within France and when they entered towns, leaving the indirect taxes imposed on many consumer goods as the only taxes on wine. This tax was abolished in 1791, making wine cheaper than ever and thereby broadening the market. In 1793, when consumer prices had risen, price controls were placed on many consumer goods, wine among them.
Less expensive wine, together with government purchases of wine for the French armies, which expanded in size dramatically during the Revolution to between 800,000 and 1,000,000 men, raised demand and created the conditions that might have led to high volumes of poor-quality wine. France’s vineyard area had expanded steadily during the 1700s to meet growing appetites, and the new pace of production needs during the Revolution led to further plantings, often in areas—in foothills and in the scrublands of southern France—that had been thought unsuitable for vines.
Perhaps the expansion of vineyards and increased wine production explain the efforts of the French government to ensure that wine quality did not fall. Government inspectors tasted wines at cafés and bars in Paris to ensure that adulteration was kept to a minimum, and prizes were awarded to vignerons who produced quality grapes. In 1799, for example, eight vignerons in the Burgundy village of Savigny were awarded prizes for achievements such as having “vines perfectly cultivated, with no diseased plants and with an abundant crop” and for being “an excellent grower, hard-working, and choosing his vines well.” It is seen here an attempt to bridge the gap that had grown during the 1700s between the high-quality wines made for the wealthy and the mediocre wines made for local and mass markets.
The Revolution brought about other important changes to French wine. In 1790, the government expropriated all property belonging to the church and, after setting aside what was necessary for the church’s purely spiritual functions, put the rest on the auction block. The purpose was to raise money to pay off the debts the Revolutionaries had inherited from the bankrupt monarchy. The land that went onto the market included the vineyards, cellars, wine presses, and other winery equipment owned by the church—by parishes, religious houses, cathedrals, and institutions such as church-owned hospitals and schools. Burgundy was more affected than other regions, because so much of its vineyard area was owned by the church, much of it by the Cistercian Order. Within a year or two, almost all the vineyards were sold to lay owners.
The long-term implications of this massive change in ownership were important because the Revolutionaries also reformed the law of inheritance. Instead of being able to leave property to one child, to keep family land intact generation after generation, a 1793 law provided for the mandatory division of property among all children, male and female, on an equal basis. This rule, often attributed to Napoleon, led to the division of property at each generation, so that children at each generation received a smaller and smaller piece of land. The result was the division of vineyards into continually shrinking parcels during the 19th century, a pattern now understood as typical of Burgundy. It is thought that one of the reasons that the French fertility rate fell during the 1800s is that rural landowners, including vignerons, tried to limit the number of children to minimize the breakup of family estates.
Finally, the French Revolution politicized wine. Wine was portrayed as the national beverage of France, a status it gained formally a century later, and the stress was on producing good-quality, honest wine for hard-working, loyal citizens—male citizens, in particular. But there was a reaction against fine wines, which were associated with the wealthy and nobility. The cellars of nobles and others who fled France when the Revolution began were confiscated, and the wine was sold to benefit the national treasury.
The catalog printed when the Romanée, later Romanée-Conti, vineyard was sold by auction in July 1794 provides a sense of attitudes toward fine wine. The vineyard was described as the source of excellent wines, perhaps the most excellent of all of France, and a wine that improved with age. Once the wine was properly aged, the catalog stated, “it is then a balm for the elderly, the feeble, and the disabled, and will restore life to the dying.” The hyperbole apart, it is notable that the catalog, written during the Reign of Terror, the most radical period of the Revolution, referred to disadvantaged consumers rather than the wealthy elite who had historically purchased this wine—it had previously fetched prices five or six times those of other prestigious wines from the Côte de Nuits.
In 1801, Jean Antoine Chaptal wrote in his book on improving wine quality that it was “scarcely a century since perceptible progress has been made in the famous [wine] estates of France.” His point was that the 1700s had seen the application of viticultural and winemaking techniques that broke with centuries-long practices. It is not as if there was no change in, say, the thousand years before 1700 that included the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Different varieties were planted, vineyards were configured in different ways, winemaking equipment had changed, and new wine styles had emerged. But there were also important continuities, such as the inter-planting of different varieties in vineyards, and their co-fermentation.
And if there were innovations in wine production, they were like innovations in cereal production and livestock rearing: they took place first on the estates of wealthy owners who could afford to replace one crop with another or one grape variety with another, and who could take the risks entailed in planting trial vineyards or by experimenting with new production techniques. The bulk of wine producers, not only in France but across and outside of Europe, were small landholders who lacked capital for investment and were averse to risk, and who therefore followed known and familiar methods. Although noting that small-scale vignerons were hard-working, Chaptal was pessimistic about the chances that they would read his work, even if they could, and he addressed his message to “well-off proprietors” who could be models for their poorer brethren to follow.
There is no reason to think that Chaptal was misrepresenting the state of wine in France and anywhere else at the beginning of the 19th century. In his Story of Wine, Hugh Johnson calls the decades around the middle of the 1800s a golden age of wine in France, and it might well have been in Burgundy and Bordeaux—although even in those regions, field blends were common and there were practices that would today be considered unacceptable, like blending in wines from other parts of France.
For the great bulk of wine, however, it was business as usual, making as much mediocre wine as possible for relatively nearby markets. The French novelist Honoré de Balzac put the prevailing view into the mouth of one of his vigneron characters in the late 1830s: “Listen, these gentlemen harvest seven, sometimes eight barrels to the hectare, and sell them at 60 francs a barrel, which makes at the most 400 francs a hectare in a good year. Me, I harvest 20 barrels at 30 francs, total 600 francs. So who are the fools? Quality, quality! What use is quality to me? They can keep their quality, the marquis and all. For me, quality is cash.”
Throughout the “golden age” of the early 1800s, then, the bulk of wine was low quality, while a tiny tranche of production, from the prestigious districts of notable regions, was high quality. In between were good-quality, bourgeois wines that satisfied the palates of the growing middle class of the industrializing societies. It is a worthwhile historical perspective, and it suggests the general rise in the quality of wine in the last 200 years.
It was the later 1800s, which are beyond the scope of this guide, that were critical to this process. One of the catalysts of change was the arrival of railroads beginning in the mid-century. It led to a general shift in the center of gravity of production in many countries. In the United States, it gave a boost to wines from California, while in France it favored southern regions, notably the Languedoc and Roussillon.
The phylloxera crisis, which devastated vineyards almost everywhere, forced the replanting of vines and encouraged more systematic practices in respect of vineyards. Vineyards in marginal regions, such as many around Paris, were not replanted, and this took many poor wines off the market. As they replanted, producers selected varieties, rather than continued to plant from cuttings from their existing vines. Instead of being interplanted with many varieties, vineyards might be planted with only one, and if two or more varieties were planted, they were carefully separated and harvested at different times. Because the new vines were planted on phylloxera-tolerant rootstock, propagation by provignage had to be abandoned. This in turn permitted vines to be planted in rows, rather than haphazardly. In short, many of the vineyard practices now taken for granted date back only little more than a century.
There is no easy way to summarize thousands of years of wine history. There are certainly long continuities, such as the mediocre quality of the great bulk of wine over this long period to the mid-1800s. But there are also important threads, such as the distinction between good-quality and poor-quality wines in all periods, even if we sometimes have little idea as to the criteria used to define quality. There is also, from the early modern period, a thread of research into how to grow superior grapes and make good-quality wine that kept well for a year or more.
Perhaps most importantly, this history gives a longer-term perspective to modern wine. Although there is much yearning for the past in today’s wine culture, modern wine has, to a large extent, been the creation of the post-phylloxera period. Only since then have vineyards been planted so consistently by variety, enabling producers to make varietal wines and verifiable blends. Provenance is guaranteed by appellation laws, and quality is safeguarded by wine laws and tasting panels. The range of permitted additives is extensive, but they are of a different order from the spices, herbs, and other products permitted in the past. Bottles have a profile they never had before the mid-20th century.
Beyond all that, the basics are the same. Wine is the fermented juice of grapes. That is the common thread that runs through the richly textured history of wine.
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Compiled by Rod Phillips (November 2018)
All very interesting, but Moldova is definitely not in Asia.