Most people know that Jesus turned water into wine sometime in the early years A.D., and some people may even know that Dionysus/Bacchus, the ancient Roman/Greek god was the god of wine, but that only gets us back to 1000-2000 years B.C. I’d wager that most people don’t know that wine originated a few thousand years before that. The best guess is that sometime between 5000 and 8000 B.C. wine became a staple for the people living in what is present day Georgia (Middle East Georgia, not “Devil Went Down to Georgia” Georgia). From some evidence there, and from some found in Greece and Macedonia, it is likely that wine first made/seen in Europe maybe a thousand years later.
From there, it is pretty easy to connect the dots to see how wine because a staple in life across the world. We have the Greeks and Romans to thank for the first real effective barrels for storing wine and the first wine presses. We have the Romans to thank for our confusing wine classification systems. As far as I know, they were the first to create appellations as they discovered that certain regions produced better wine than others.
As you move from ancient times, into the dark ages wine became a staple in much of Europe. While wine was common across much of Europe at this point, it was probably around this time that many of the famous varietals from Europe found their modern homes. Think Champagne, Bordeaux, Tempranillo, Riesling, and likely others. Wine in Europe thrived for a few hundred years until the mid-1800s.
In 1855 wine’s greatest tragedy struck much of Europe. Phylloxera (little bugs that eat and kill grape wines) descended upon the wine industry and destroyed nearly all of the vines in Europe. From what I’ve read, we can blame an English scientist for bringing the bug from America. Because of the different resistances and genetic structures of the grape vines in America and Europe, the American vines had a defense for the bug and the European vines didn’t. So, if you’re keeping score, Europe brought diseases to the new world that killed people, and, a few centuries after that, the new world gave European wine a disease and sent them back to square one.
Also in 1855, France instituted their classification system for Bordeaux, ranking producers of wine in different tiers. While many things about many of the vineyards ranked in this classification have changed, the tiers have remained nearly identical, opting for tradition and consistency over movement up and down the ladder based on merit.
By the end of the 1800s, European growers began to graft their native vines to the bug resistant vines from the new world and they were back in business. Flash forward to the 1970s (this part will be familiar to you if you’re seen “Bottle Shock”), an English wine connoisseur living in France organized a competition between California and France to see who had the best wine. California beat France in both the red and white competition. While the results of that competition are undisputedly significant, on the whole, France was still producing higher quality wine on the whole. In the states, we had our “good stuff,” but we were still mostly drowning in the cheap stuff that was horrible.
Moving along to today… wine is made in every corner of the planet. More wine is being produced by more different countries than ever before. What’s next for wine? I’ve written some about that (see posts on wine marketing, Chardonnay vs. Riesling, Parker’s downfall, etc.), but for the most part, the wine world’s next great thing is still out there waiting to be discovered. I hope you enjoyed this very brief history on wine. I know I ran through 10,000 years in just a few paragraphs, but hopefully some of this was interesting, and I'm hoping that I didn't miss anything too important.
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