“Wine is the most civilized thing in the world.”
-Ernest Hemingway
Wine…no other beverage brings so much history, passion, variety, taste, joy, rapture, and desire. Wine is as old as civilization itself. It can be an easy, simplistic drink of fermented grapes or as pretentious and multifarious as tasting the actual terroir itself. Wine has served as a multi-purpose beverage for thousands of years. Wine has transformed itself from drinking beverage to ceremonial, celebratory, medicinal, gift-giving, social, cultural identity, and sustenance purposes.
“If penicillin can cure those that are ill, Spanish sherry can bring the dead back to life.”
-Sir Alexander Fleming
Finding it origins in the ancient lands of Georgia, Armenia, and Iran, it quickly spread across Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world. The Egyptians made wine ceremonial. Tomb walls are covered with images of grape growing, harvest and the production of wine. Pharaohs were buried with jars of wine and embalmers used it for its antiseptic properties. Even in Mesopotamia, wine was a topic mentioned in Hammurabi’s famous code of laws. The Greeks developed wine culture and painted wine scenes on their famous pottery. As the Roman Army conquered much of the known world, it brought its vines and knowledge of wine making with them. Planting vineyards in a majority of its conquered and occupied lands, Romans ensured continual wine production across Europe. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church almost single handedly ensured the continuation of the grape industry by its ceremonial uses and the missionaries who brought grapes to the New World.
“Wine in itself is an excellent thing.”
-Pope Pius XII Airen
So, the next time you sip a glass of your favorite wine, remember you join the thousands of wine lovers before you who conceived the idea that grapes had an inner soul of wine buried deep in its core.
“In Vino Veritas” (In wine there is Truth)
-Pliny the Elder