Lovers of wine and the vine can be found all over the world, in every known clime and every inhabited continent. Meanwhile, the places where wine can actually be produced are confined to two relatively narrow strips of our dear old Earth, positioned between about 30 and 50 degrees north and south latitudes, per the map above.
If, from these two slender bands, you subtract the millions of square miles of ocean, of bogs too damp, deserts too dry, mountains too altitudinous (or just too rocky) for viticulture, you will find your winey world greatly diminished. Eliminate the places where wine could be made, but never will be — either because the conditions aren’t conducive to quality or the effort required is frankly uneconomical — and you’re down to a very circumscribed area indeed.
Now take a further step and exclude from consideration all but those few places where wine has been a deeply embedded quotidian reality for a millennium at the very least — long enough for it to have functioned as a fundamental shaper of individual habit, collective mentality and, in the broadest sense, a way of life. Once you’ve done this, you’ve worked your way down to a kind of essence: wine’s tiny but persistently beating heart, rhythmically thumping along for something like 8000 years now, and showing no signs of sclerosis or cardiac weakness.
It’s not just that these civilizations were and are themselves thoroughly soaked in wine. They’ve served as models for those cultures whose histories can’t boast a centuries-long romance with the vine, but which nonetheless long to make a personal connection with its primordial magic and uniquely humanizing influence.
Here’s our rough list of the places that can be said to qualify as wine heartland: Georgia; Armenia; Italy; Greece; France; Spain; Portugal; Hungary; parts of Germany and Austria; bits of Switzerland. To these, we can add the Black Sea border states (present-day Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova) and the former Yugoslavia and Balkan states — all places where Ottoman rule proved periodically disruptive of wine use and practice but failed to destroy it.
To qualify for heartland status in our book, it’s not enough to find that elite, uniquely urban constituency for wine that exists pretty much everywhere. We need to see a consistent, millennia-long engagement with wine from the level of peasant producer-consumer up to courtly clientele, and everything in-between.
Our unbroken chain requirement disqualifies those places that may have had centuries of wine culture before being permanently transformed by world-historical events. Among these we might name pre-Islamic Persia (Iran), Anatolia (Turkey), Syria-Palestine, Lebanon and parts of North Africa.
Admittedly, these stringent prerequisites eliminate the entirety of wine’s New World domains. Regrets, then, North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. (We might be persuaded to make an exception for a place like Argentina where extensive Italian immigration has arguably had a transforming influence). Brits can always argue their long romances with claret, Port and Sherry — but only as consumers, not producers; Germany has always had a hybrid drinking culture; wine prevailing in those places where it has long been made; beer elsewhere.
The wine vine is currently undergoing an emigration wave of its own, with plantings in east and southeast Asia where anomalous local conditions permit. Could these be new heartlands in the first stages of formation? It’s most unlikely. In our multicultural, globalized world, there are just too many drinks on offer for any one of them to have the kind of powerful, culture-determining long-term effects that is wine’s brilliant legacy. Marketing, no matter how pervasive and well-capitalized, can never do the work of fundamental, organic, historical process.
That’s the heart part of heartland.