Like every other product, practice, trade or cultural artifact, wine has a history — and it’s quite a long one. Evidence of fruit-based fermentations reaches back well into the murky depths of prehistory, several thousand years before the invention of writing, or the rise of the kind of urbanized civilizations that large-scale agriculture would later make possible.
The earliest known winemaking facility from this era, found in Armenia in 2011, consists of a series of terra cotta pots set into the floor of a mountain cave. It’s not large enough to have served as a production facility of any sort of scale. The evidence points instead to a site set apart for the performance of fertility rituals, including human sacrifice, in which wine played an important, if now little understood, role. What seems most worthy of notice is that the origins of wine were not gastronomic, but magical; spontaneous fermentation an inexplicable, but reliably repeatable miracle.
Wine did eventually make a momentous leap from cave floor to dinner table, but it took centuries for the vine to migrate from its ancestral homelands in the Caucasus mountains to the Black Sea borderlands and eventually the Mediterranean rim where wine embedded itself as an economic and dietary staple and an important marker of what came to be thought of as civilization.
Although we have abundant references to wine’s important place in the ancient, and by now literate, world, we have less information than we could wish about what it actually tasted like. It will perhaps never be clear why, for example, Roman tavern goers considered it appropriate to mix their wine with water rather than take it straight up.
This practice seems to have lost its appeal as the advancing Roman Empire took the vine into Europe’s northern heartlands. There, shorter summers and slanting light made a lighter, drier, brisker sort of wine. Roman physicians thought it healthier than rich, old-style Mediterranean cuvées. They described its character as austere. Wine was not only on the move again geographically — the very notion of what quality wine should be was in flux.
The historic trajectory of wine is one of mobility and change, although, rather than describing this process as some sort of arc, it looks more like periods of relative stasis punctuated by rather dramatic quantum jumps. The catalysts for these sudden shifts being sometimes social, sometimes political, sometimes technological, sometimes pathological.
While it would be tedious to attempt to itemize these decisive moments, we could point to the rise of monastic orders in the Middle Ages as centers of winemaking R&D in both field and cellar; the early seventeenth century burst of creativity when new types of wine — among them Port, Sherry and intentionally sparkling Champagne — were developed and gained robust markets; the eighteenth century bottle and cork revolution; the establishment of Bordeaux chateaux vineyards by what we would today call private equity to service a burgeoning wealthy urban clientèle.
To these, we could add the great European vine disease outbreak of the late nineteenth century; the creation of controlled designation of origin systems of the 1930’s; the rise of New World wines to global prominence in the 1970’s. We could likewise cite the recent effort to return winemaking to its roots as the product of farms rather than factories and to an aesthetic more in tune with natural processes and outcomes.
In every case, these tectonic shifts changed both the character of wine and our notions of what constitutes quality, drinkability and value, and in the process created more than a few nano-scale culture wars.
What might be next for wine? Well, climate change is already driving some serious rethinking about what kind of wine will be possible, where, and by what means in the decades ahead. A second northerly migration of planting (per above) may well be in store; new clones of familiar varieties are a sure bet; heretofore underutilized or entirely new hybrid cultivars better suited to new environments are waiting in the wings. Be prepared. Each will pose its own challenge to our sensibilities, critical judgment and ingrained habits.
I can’t even speculate what things will be like, wine-wise, a hundred or a thousand years from now, but it’s my fervent hope that no future generation will ever be in a position to ask the question “What was wine, anyway?”