A Short History

Posted on July 29, 2010

The Romans sometimes finished their wines in a smoke-filled fumentarium and grew grapes up the side of trees, the Greeks plugged up their amphorae with pitch, and the Egyptians pressed wine in large canvas sheets that they twisted like they were wringing out a towel.

The French developed a taste for wine stored in a barrel and knew that burning sulfur in the barrels helped clean them. Despite the fact that wine was significant in most ancient religions and important in both the Old and New Testament, attempts to restrict and regulate its consumption have been consistent ever since Medieval monks tried to sober up their members.

Wine is now produced seriously in most of the world’s temperate regions and global consumption has continued to grow despite phylloxera, prohibition, and war, to its greatest amount in history.

This is an even more concise history of wine than the one I finished reading recently, Rod Phillips’s A Short History of Wine. The book itself was good. It was easy to read and covered most of the big events in wine history. A lot of the sections were anecdotal, which is what one might expect in a book not called The Entire History of Wine. He connects it together but it’s obvious that he’s leaving a few things out.

The book does better covering the olden days before good records. No one knows what wine tasted like back then, and there was no real discussion of quality beyond good, bad, sweet, dry, old, or young. In modern times wine is subjected much more harshly to recorded criticism. The Greeks and Romans didn’t sit down and write descriptors or scores and they had no scientific measures to speak of, so they probably just enjoyed it more. Viticultural recommendations were simpler—don’t crop it too high, plant it toward the sun, and pick it at the right time—these were the main words of advice of the theorists.

Now we’ve entered an enlightenment in which sophistication thrives well. To understand the transition from monasteries to sommeliers one would have to reach for a different tome. But at IPNC I was asking Thibaud Mandet and Steve Doerner about vine spacing, and Steve said that it used to be the width of a monk’s ass, then changed to the width of a horse’s ass, then changed to the width of a tractor, and each measure works fairly well to make great wine. I have to thank Steve for making sure we don’t get too sophisticated.

Illahe Vineyards and Winery 3275 Ballard Road Dallas, OR 97338 phone : 503.831.1248 fax : 503.831.1237