This entry is a subtopic of Wine.
In the more than two thousand years between the Classical period and the nineteenth century, wine underwent changes in almost every respect. The geographical extent of viticulture (the cultivation of grapes), vine cultivation, wine making, trade, and the culture of wine consumption were all transformed as part of broader political, social, economic, and cultural transformations.
Wine-Making in Ancient Greece
The beginnings of wine-making in Greece by about 1000 B.C.E. were an important step in the history of wine. Until that point, wine had been a marginal product, made in relatively small volumes and consumed only by social elites. This had been the case in ancient societies like Mesopotamia and Egypt. In Greece, however, vineyards expanded rapidly from their initial sites near main population centers and markets to more distant islands like Thasos, Lesbos, and Chios, and by the third century B.C.E. there was a veritable wine industry in the region.
Wine was consumed at all levels of society and it became, along with oil and grain, one of the three main products of Mediterranean agriculture and commerce. Greek wine could be found in locations as diverse as France, Egypt, around the Black Sea, and in the Danube region. Moreover, the Greeks introduced viticulture to France (with limited plantings near modern Marseilles), southern Italy, and Sicily.
The extent of the Greek wine trade is evident in the many wrecked ships along the Mediterranean coast. One ship carried an astonishing ten thousand amphoras (sixto seven-gallon earthenware jars) that would have contained as much as 66,000 gallons of wine, or 400,000 standard modern bottles. It is estimated that 2.2 million gallons of Greek wine were shipped to France each year through the port that is now Marseilles.
The Greeks not only supplied foreign markets with wine, but they also consumed vast quantities domestically. Far from being an elite beverage, wine was consumed at all levels of society. This was an example of an egalitarian approach to drinking expressed by Euripides, who wrote that Dionysus (the Greek god of wine) had given "the simple gift of wine, the gladness of the grape" to "rich and poor" alike. Yet there were significant variations in the quantity and quality of wine consumed at different social levels. The affluent drank wine that was described as quite full-bodied and sweet. The poor drank a thin, low-alcohol, bitter solution made by soaking the skins, seeds, and stalks left over after the final pressing of the grapes.
Greek males of the upper social strata developed a specific institution for consuming wine: the symposium, meaning "drinking together." A dozen or more men, all wearing garlands on their heads, reclined on couches and drank diluted wine while conversing, being entertained by young men and women, and playing games that often involved wine. Symposia were idealized as occasions for elevated discussion and cultural activities, but often they were merely boisterous drinking sessions. Greek wine cups were often decorated with scenes of drunkenness and sexual activities at symposia.
Women were excluded from symposia (except as servers, entertainers, and prostitutes) and there is evidence in Greek writings of male anxiety about women drinking wine. Women were believed to become intoxicated more quickly than men and to behave immorally once in that state. These became persistent themes in Western culture, and they underpinned lower consumption rates of all forms of alcohol by women.
Although it was apparently a not uncommon occurrence in symposia, drunkenness was generally frowned upon in ancient Greece. Homer highlighted the dangers of drunkenness in the Odyssey, in which several characters meet their deaths in accidents caused by drunken men. Yet moderate consumption of wine was viewed as beneficial. Hippocrates, regarded as the founder of Western medicine, wrote extensively on the effects of different types of wine on the digestion. He criticized "dark and harsh" wines as difficult for the body to digest and expel, but praised "soft dark wines . . . they are flatulent and pass better by stool."
As for wine production, the Greeks paid serious attention to viticulture and wine-making. They adopted techniques of growing vines along trellises and up stakes to make the grapes more accessible during harvest. Vine-dressers, who were responsible for the vital pruning operations in the vineyard, became a recognized profession. It was the Romans, however, whose empire superseded that of the Greeks, and it was they who left the most coherent documentation on wine in the Classical period.
Wine-Making in Ancient Rome
A host of writers, including Cicero, Pliny, and Cato, described viticultural and wine-making practices in Rome and wrote extensively about the wines available to them in the last centuries B.C.E. In about 65 C.E., Columella described the principles of viticulture, including the recommended density of vines, the importance of selecting appropriate sites for vineyards, and the economics of vine-growing. For his part, Cato stressed the importance of sunlight to grape-ripening and outlined the basic principles of canopy management.
Roman writers also focused on wine-making and gave recipes for wines that would appeal to Roman tastes. Unlike modern wine-making methods, where additives are minimal, Roman wine was a grape-based concoction that might include sea-water, honey, and all kinds of herbs and spices. Additional flavors might be contributed by the pitch and resin sometimes used to seal the insides of earthenware jars, and sweetness could be added by boiling the grape juice in a lead vessel. Lead not only sweetened wine, but it also preserved it by killing some bacteria. (Lead's potential toxicity was recognized but was largely ignored until the seventeenth century.)
Roman wine writers paid attention to the quality of wines. They gave particular value to color, body, and sweetness, but they also noted wines that they believed had special medical properties. Athenaeus praised wines from Alexandria, which he thought were excellent, fragrant, not likely to go to the head, and which had diuretic effects. Strabo gave high marks to wines from Turkey and Aegean islands like Cos, Chios, and Lesbos. In the first century C.E., Pliny the Elder provided a catalogue of wines from various parts of the empire: ninety-one varieties of wine, fifty kinds of quality wine, and thirty-eight varieties of foreign wine. His list is notable for its stress on varieties rather than just provenance.
The engine of the Roman wine industry was Rome itself, which grew from 300,000 to over one million inhabitants between 300 B.C.E. and the beginning of the first century C.E. By that time, Romans were consuming an estimated 39.6 million gallons of wine a year, which was about seventeen fluid ounces a day for every inhabitant. Not only did the region around Rome provide this wine, but many other parts of the Italian peninsula shipped it as well.
The prominence of wine in the Roman diet was threatened when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E., burying the wine port of Pompeii and destroying many vineyards and two vintages of wine (one in warehouses, the other still on the vines). The immediate shortage of wine led to such a rush to plant new vineyards that there was a glut several years later. The Emperor Domitian tried unsuccessfully to limit the land under viticulture in Italy and to reduce vineyards in Rome's overseas provinces such as Gaul. The ostensible reason for the policy was that vineyards were taking over land needed for grain production, but it is thought that Domitian was as much concerned with protecting Roman wine producers from competition.
Despite any pressure there might have been from wine producers in Italy who wanted to protect their export business, the Romans extended viticulture throughout Europe as their empire expanded. By the first century C.E., most of the famous French wine regions (including Bordeaux, the Rhône, and Burgundy) had been planted, as had areas in England, Germany, Hungary, and other parts of southeastern Europe. The Romans were thus responsible for the beginnings of the European wine industry.
As was the case in Greece, Rome's wine culture was generally inclusive, and everyone from the elites to slaves consumed wine. Cato proposed that slaves in chains should receive about 1.3 gallons of wine a week—not for pleasure but to give them strength to work. (The ration allotted to a sick slave was half that of a healthy, working slave.) Also as in Greece, in Rome there were vast differences in the quality of the wine consumed by different social groups.
In Rome there was also concern about wine consumption by women. One myth told of a husband who beat his wife to death with a stick for drinking wine, a punishment said to have been praised by Romulus, one of Rome's founders. For a brief time, Roman law allowed a man to divorce his wife for drinking wine, and women were associated with the cults centered on Bacchus, the Roman god of wine. The authorities concocted stories of wild, drunken orgies (Bacchanalia) in order to suppress the cults, which had become implicated in opposition to the government.
Drunkenness, whether on the part of women or men, was broadly condemned by Roman commentators. Cicero frequently labeled his opponents drunkards and alleged that his main rival, Mark Antony, started drinking early each morning. Others cautioned against excessive drinking for a variety of physical and mental reasons. Lucretius argued that wine could disturb the soul and weaken the body, while Seneca wrote that wine revealed and magnified character defects. Pliny the Elder praised quality wines, but he warned that many of the truths spoken under the influence of wine were better not expressed.
On the other hand, Classical medical opinion generally held that wine, alone or with other substances, had curative properties, particularly for gastric and urological ailments. Cato recommended certain flowers soaked in wine as effective for snakebite, constipation, gout, indigestion, and diarrhea.
If wine had achieved a privileged status at the center of the Roman Empire, some non-Roman populations on the margins of Roman control carved out their own relationship with the beverage. For Jews, wine was a powerful expression of divine power. When Moses sent out scouts to survey the Promised Land, they returned with a bunch of grapes so massive that it took two men to carry it. Grapes and wine were such important signs of the bounty provided by God to the Jews that the Old Testament frequently threatens that God will make the vines barren if Jews disobey God's word.
This intense symbolism of wine carried over to Christianity. The first miracle performed by Christ was to turn water to wine at the wedding at Cana. Wine became an integral part of Christian theology, ritual, and tradition. In the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, wine represents the blood of Christ, and there are many representations of "Christ in the wine press," where Christ's blood, flowing from wounds inflicted during the crucifixion, mixes with the red juice flowing from the grapes as they are crushed.
Because the Eucharist required wine, Christianity and wine became so intimately connected that in the first centuries C.E., conversion from beer to wine became a sign of conversion from paganism to the new religion. Many religious houses had their own vineyards. Monasteries were centers of learning, not only in theology but also in the practical sciences, and for hundreds of years religious orders were at the forefront in developing new techniques in viticulture and wine-making.
Wine-Making in the Middle Ages
The invasion of the western region of the Roman Empire by tribes from central and eastern Europe from the fifth century C.E. did not affect European viticulture as dramatically as once thought. It is possible that some vineyards were abandoned, but overall it seems that Europe's new rulers were as interested in protecting viticulture as the Romans had been. What did suffer was the wine trade, as the single Roman Empire was broken up into smaller political units, each dominated by one of the invading tribes.
It is a mistake, then, to think of a Dark Ages of wine, and certainly misleading to suggest, as some scholars have done, that viticulture survived only because of the vineyards owned by the Christian Church and various religious houses. They were undoubtedly important and some were extensive: the Abbey of St.-Germain-des-Prés near Paris had 1–1.5 square miles of vineyards in 814 C.E. The Church also sponsored the expansion of vineyards in the important Rhine region and in Austria and Switzerland. Even so, many vineyards had secular owners, and viticulture and wine was not particularly threatened in this period. However, with a decline in trade, many regions began to cultivate their own grapes.
The real threat to wine (and alcoholic beverages generally) emerged not in Europe, but in the Middle East, the birthplace of wine. There the Islamic religion took hold in the seventh century, and within a hundred years it had extended its control across northern Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and, for a short time, parts of southwestern France. The Prophet Muhammad forbade his followers the consumption of alcohol. Although he acknowledged that wine could make people happy and sociable, he believed that its threats to social order and morality were so great that alcohol should be banned. Wine production practically dried up in many parts of the Islamic empire, but in some parts (like Spain) it was generally tolerated and even acknowledged in so far as it was taxed by Muslim authorities.
Wine production and trade in Christian Europe began to boom around the year 1000 C.E. One reason was the creation of a large political unit in Europe under the Emperor Charlemagne. This not only encouraged commerce, but Charlemagne himself encouraged wine production. He is said to have given the hill of Corton (in Burgundy) to the Abbey of Saulieu; the wines from this estate are known as Corton-Charlemagne.
A further reason for the expansion of wine production from 1000 was the growth of population, cities, and trade that took place in Europe between 1000 and 1300. In northern Europe, northern Italy, and elsewhere, new urban middle classes of entrepreneurs and merchants emerged, all with a thirst for wine. Wine regions close to these new urban markets (like those in Tuscany and other regions of northern Italy) prospered. However, many of the new cities were in areas unsuitable for viticulture, and wine trade routes developed to serve them. Among the most important were the sea route from southwestern France (now the Bordeaux region) to England and the northern European ports, and the wine trade down the Rhine River from the vineyards of central and southern Germany to the North Sea and Baltic ports.
This boom period for the medieval wine industry ended with the Black Death that struck Europe from the mid-fourteenth century. The European population declined by as much as a third, and as markets contracted and vineyard workers died or fled the plague, many vineyards were abandoned. Production and trade began to recover as population and markets grew again in the sixteenth century. There were slight setbacks in this period, when religious reformers like Calvin and Luther accused the Church of Rome of being morally lax, including being tolerant of drunkenness. The Protestant religions tended to be hostile to social drinking, and it is interesting that the only European wine region to become Protestant was Switzerland.
Wine-Making Advancements and Expansion
During the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, there were many varied developments in viticulture and winemaking. Lead was abandoned as a means of sweetening wine, and adding sugar to raise the alcohol level of wine became a common practice. (It was later known as chaptalization, after Napoleon's minister of the interior, Chaptal, who recommended it to compensate for grapes that did not ripen fully.)
New styles of wine emerged, too. The technique of making sparkling wine evolved, and bottles and stoppers developed so that it could be conserved more reliably. Starting in the late seventeenth century there was increasing recognition of the individuality of wines from specific estates. The first wine to be marketed as an estate wine was Haut Brion from Bordeaux, which appeared on the London market in the 1660s.
Wine was, in this period, part of the daily diet in many parts of Europe. Reliable statistics on per capita consumption are hard to come by (because the information was not collected) but common estimates range from 17–101 fluid ounces a day. The impact of these volumes depends on the alcohol content of the wine, which was often diluted with water.
Wine was also part of some people's income or entitlement. Artisans employed by the Duke of Lorraine received an allotment of wine as part of their daily wages, and wine was a standard element in military rations. In 1406, the six men who guarded the Château de Custines each received two liters of wine a day.
It was during this period, too, that Europeans extended viticulture beyond Europe itself. The first major advance was the invasion of Central and South America by Spain in the sixteenth century. Vines were planted in Mexico in the 1520s, and viticulture rapidly spread down the west coast of South America in the wake of the invading Spanish armies and Jesuit missionaries. As mission stations were established, vineyards were planted, and the connection was so strong that the grape commonly planted became known as the Mission variety. By the 1550s, major vineyards had been established in Peru, Chile, and Argentina. During the 1600s, the Dutch established vineyards in what is now South Africa, and in 1788 the first vines were planted in Australia.
Viticulture in North America was far less successful. Settlers tried to make wine from native grapes from the 1600s and later tried unsuccessfully to grow European varieties. A combination of climate and disease condemned most of these attempts to failure, and even though Franciscan missionaries established vineyards in California in the eighteenth century, it was not until the nineteenth century that wine was produced in America in meaningful volumes.
The nineteenth century was a turning point for wine, in many respects. From the 1860s onwards, vineyards throughout Europe and other parts of the world were devastated by a North American aphid called Phylloxera vastatrix. Unable to eradicate the pest, vine-growers began to graft their vines onto the roots of native American vines that were tolerant of the aphid. The Phylloxera disaster affected European wine production for several decades, but it gave a boost to production elsewhere. California vineyards, which had expanded after the end of the Gold Rush, grew rapidly as producers eyed the disaster in Europe and imagined California taking over the world wine market.
The advent of the railroad was a boon to production in many countries. It made eastern markets available to California wine and enabled producers in the south of France to get their inexpensive wine to France's northern industrial cities.
At this same time, a wave of anti-alcohol sentiment swept across many countries. Temperance and abstinence movements had varying success in having alcohol laws tightened, and some American states introduced Prohibition. These movements were reinforced by the discovery (some scholars refer to it as the construction) of alcoholism in the mid-nineteenth century, which seemed to confirm the dangers of drinking any alcohol, including wine.
During the two millennia that separated the Classical period from the end of the nineteenth century, wine had changed from being an elite beverage to one shared by all sectors of many societies. It had spread globally, and it had sensitively reflected broad shifts in economies, societies, and culture. There were also continuities. Voices across this long period spoke to the dangers of excessive drinking, and others praised the health benefits of wine. The experience of wine in this period confirms the importance of understanding wine in its historical and cultural contexts.
Bibliography
Brennan, Thomas, Burgundy to Champagne: The Wine Trade in Early Modern France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Johnson, Hugh. The Story of Wine. London: Mitchell Beazley, 1989.
Phillips, Rod. A Short History of Wine. New York: Harper-Collins, 2001.
Pinney, Thomas. A History of Wine in America from the Beginnings to Prohibition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Seward, Desmond. Monks and Wine. New York: Crown, 1979.
Unwin, Tim. Wine and the Vine: A Historical Geography of Viticulture and the Wine Trade. London: Routledge, 1991.
—Rod Phillips
