Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Wine

Starting point is 00:00:00 For thousands of years, wine has been one of the most important beverages in the world. It's been consumed by common folk and by emperors, and it can be made in a surprisingly wide variety of geographies. It can be made by backyard ventures, as well as by mega corporations. It's so important that it plays a central role in some religions, yet it's completely banned by others. Learn more about the history of wine and winemaking and how it changed over the centuries on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

Starting point is 00:00:51 It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Before I get into a discussion of wine and its history, it would probably be worthwhile to provide a brief definition of exactly what it was. wine is. Today, wine is considered to be an alcoholic beverage created by the fermentation of the juice of grapes. Technically, you can make wine from the juice of any fruit. A simple search of the internet will come up with wines made from a wide variety of fruits, including cherries, apples, watermelons, pears, plums, blackberries, blueberries, and many more. However, historically and still

Starting point is 00:01:35 today, the vast majority of wines come from grapes. The association with grapes and wines is so strong that, absent some additional adjectives, it's assumed that anything called wine comes from grape juice. For the rest of this episode, unless otherwise noted, when I talk about wine, you can assume that I'm talking about wine made from grapes. The earliest evidence of something that you could broadly call wine comes from a place that isn't usually associated with wine, China. At the archaeological site of Jiahu in central China, 9,000-year-old pottery shards have been discovered with traces of a rice-honey wine still on them. Hawthorne berries or a local wild grape may have been used in the creation of this wine. It isn't known where wine-making was discovered,

Starting point is 00:02:20 but in all probability it was discovered accidentally in multiple places. Someone crushed some fruit, ate some juice, and then it accidentally fermented. In this respect, the origins of wine are probably similar to the origins of cheese. Eventually, people figure out how to replicate this accident and then began doing it on purpose. The earliest evidence of intentional wine-making with grapes, something that most of us would recognize as wine, dates back about 7,400 years. It was found in Haji Faru's Tepe, a Neolithic village in Iran's northern Zagros Mountains. There, the bottoms of amphorei were found with sediments of tannin and tartrate crystals, something that's only found naturally in large amounts of grapes. The pottery shards also contained resin from the Terabinth

Starting point is 00:03:05 tree, which according to Pliny the Elder was used as a preservative in wine, which indicates that wine production here was intentional. Moving beyond trace molecules found on pottery shards, the first evidence of a dedicated winemaking facility was found in Armenia. Dating back about 6,000 years, the Arrini One Cave Complex shows evidence of crushing grapes and then moving the liquid into storage containers. What isn't known exactly is when grape domestication first took place. While we know people in this region were using grapes to make wine, we don't know when they began cultivating grapes. Evidence of grapes in the form of grape seeds go back at least 12,000 years with seeds found in caves, but those are most probably wild. Regardless of where and when

Starting point is 00:03:49 grape domestication took place, winemaking and grape cultivation spread rapidly throughout the near-east and eastern Mediterranean. By about 3,000 BC, winemaking was evident in Persia, Egypt, Greece, the Caucasus, and many other places. The importance of wine in these cultures can be seen in the stories which developed around the discovery of wine. The Hebrew Bible attributes the creation of wine to Noah after the Great Flood. The Greeks believed winemaking was taught to humans by the God Dionysus. In Persia, the legend holds that one of the wives of a legendary king tried to kill herself by drinking the remains of spoiled grapes marked as poison. Instead of dying, she quite enjoyed it and shared her discovery with the king. The Phoenicians traded in wine,

Starting point is 00:04:31 their extensive trade network in the Mediterranean. The Greeks greatly advanced the science of winemaking, including developing methods of wine production and preservation. But the ancient culture which did the most to advance winemaking and wine growing were undoubtedly the Romans. Their empire encompassed all of the area around the Mediterranean Sea, which is one of the best grape-growing regions in the world. They were able to export not just wine, but wine-growing knowledge all over their empire. And they were also able to adopt best practices from all the people they conquered, including the Greeks, Phoenicians, and Egyptians. Wine in Rome was central to their civilization. Wine was considered a democratic drink that was consumed by everyone from slaves to

Starting point is 00:05:11 emperors. The quality of the wine they drank may have been different, but everyone drank wine every day, save for very young children. The average amount of wine consumed by a person in the Roman Empire was estimated to be about half a liter per person per day, or about two-thirds of a modern bottle of wine. Roman consumption of wine was very different from how people drink wine today. In fact, even the most devoted wine enthusiasts would find Roman wine traditions to be very odd.

Starting point is 00:05:39 For starters, they almost never drank straight, undiluted wine like you would today. They would drink their wine diluted with water, which lowered the alcohol content and also made the wine go farther. Wine was usually diluted at a ratio of one-to-one. Sometimes seawater was used to give it a salty taste. They would also often add flavoring to their wines in the form of herbs and spices.

Starting point is 00:06:02 Lavender and thyme were popular additions to wine, and sometimes wines were put inside smokehouses to give them a smoky flavor and to accelerate the aging process. Honey was also a popular additive to give wines a sweet flavor. Amphoride were often lined with resins to give the wine a particular flavor as well. One variety of wine called Retsina was produced that way over 2,000 years ago, and it still produced that way today in Greece. The most prized wines in Rome were sweet white wines. A lower quality of wine was called Paska. Paska was a sour wine that hadn't quite yet turned to vinegar. It was the wine that

Starting point is 00:06:37 was served to Roman soldiers because of its low cost and low alcohol content. The lowest quality wine was called Laura. This was nothing more than water soaked in already pressed grapeskins and then pressed again. Laura was reserved for slaves and the poorest of the poor. When the Roman Empire eventually fell, wine production and wine consumption didn't fall with it. The late Roman Empire saw the rise of Christianity. In Christianity, Jesus performed a miracle, turning water into wine and drank wine with his apostles at the Last Supper. Wine was used in Christian religious ceremonies, which ensured that even in regions that didn't grow wine, at least some wine would be imported. The rise of Islam and its prohibition on the consumption of alcohol

Starting point is 00:07:19 saw a decrease in wine cultivation in the Levant and other areas under Muslim control. However, it never entirely disappeared as many people continued to drink wine in private, and limited production was allowed. During the Golden Age of Islam, from the 8th to the 13th century, scholars and alchemists did experiment with wine and wine distillation as both a medicine and for use in perfumes. In the Middle Ages, wine continued to be the primary beverage for people from all walks of life in southern Europe. In northern Europe, people tended to consume beer and ale. Grape varietals greatly expanded during this period allowing for the creation of different types of wine from different tasting grapes.

Starting point is 00:07:56 Many vineyards during this period were operated by monasteries that made both sacramental wine and wine for general consumption. The 15th century saw the first Appalachian system developed in Portugal. Appalachian refers to the type of grapes and the region grapes are grown in to define a type of wine. Appalachian still exists today in the form of strict legal rules for what can be called certain types of wine, such as Bordeaux, reasling or champagne. The biggest thing to happen to wine in the 15th and 16th centuries was the attempt to bring viticulture and winemaking to lands outside of the old world. When the Spanish arrived in Mexico, they assumed that it would make for excellent wine growing, and it wasn't an unreasonable assumption. In certain places, the climate was warm and not too dissimilar from what could

Starting point is 00:08:40 be found around the Mediterranean. However, they were never able to make the same quality of wines as they could in Europe. The problem with the quality of wines in places like Mexico and Columbia was that European grapes simply didn't adapt well. There were diseases and pests that didn't exist in Europe, plus the climate wasn't exactly the same. There were, however, some areas where European grapes did do well, in particular, Argentina, Chile, and Peru. These regions could produce enough wine that Spanish colonists who live there didn't have to import wine from Spain. Today, Peru isn't known as a major wine-producing region. Peruvian wine production began to decline after a major earthquake in 1887 destroyed much of the wine-producing infrastructure. And when the Jesuits were expelled

Starting point is 00:09:24 in 1767, they were forced to sell their vineyards in Peru and the expertise in wine growing that went with them. Great finds were brought to South Africa with the founding of Cape Town in 1659. Wine quality in South Africa was considered to be much higher than that of the Americas for decades. By the late 18th century, wine from the Constantia region outside of Cape Town became a favorite of European royalty. Vine cuttings from South Africa were brought to Australia with the first fleet that arrived in 1788. These first vines failed, but by 1820, a fledgling wine industry had already developed in Australia. The first vineyard in New Zealand was established in 1836 by James Busby, who had also helped establish wine regions in Australia.

Starting point is 00:10:06 Wine in the United States was considered a failed experiment for decades. Despite many attempts by people, nobody was able to produce a quality wine. It wasn't until the settlement of California in the 19th century that a region was found that was suitable for wine production. European grapes were able to grow there and produce wines that couldn't be made elsewhere in the United States. The late 19th century saw a crisis in European wine production. The phyloxera-louse infected vineyards all over Europe, an almost microscopic insect that's native to eastern North America. Phyloxera attacks the roots of grape vines and European vines were produced. particularly susceptible. For a while, it looked like the entire European wine industry would be

Starting point is 00:10:47 destroyed. The eventual solution was to graft European vines onto the roots of native gray plants from the Americas. A side effect of the phloxera outbreak was the development of the modern wine industry in Europe. Some native varietals were lost, some vineyards were repurposed, and some wine regions, such as Champagne and Bordeaux, develop mixtures of wine that still define their wine regions today. A major development in wine production took place after the Second World War. The fermentation process in wine requires yeast, and natural yeast were always used, and this resulted in very uneven quality. In the 50s and 60s, starter yeast began to be used in wine production around the world. This resulted in more consistent quality, even at higher rates of production. Despite the

Starting point is 00:11:31 phyloxera outbreak and the growth of wine-producing regions in the new world, it was generally considered that European wines, known as old world wines, were superior. However, in 1976, at an event known as the Judgment of Paris, on which I've done a previous episode, a panel of wine experts gave California wines top prize in a blind tasting of both white and red wines. The judgment of Paris opened the eyes of wine enthusiasts around the world

Starting point is 00:11:54 to the quality not only of wines from California, but from other new world wine growing countries as well. Today, wine is big business. The worldwide wine industry is estimated to be over $260 billion annually. The largest wine-producing countries in the world are still areas where the Romans once grew wine, Italy, France, and Spain. Following them are the New World wine-growing countries

Starting point is 00:12:18 of the United States, Australia, Chile, Argentina, and South Africa. There are thousands of different wine varietals grown in the world today, the vast majority of which have very small plantings. Most wine produced and consumed in the world only represents one or two dozen different types of grapes. The top wine grape varietals in the world by acreage are Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Temprenio, Chardonnay, Sarah, Grenache, and Seven Yong Blanc. The future for wine doesn't look that radically different from its past. It isn't the sort of thing that changes very much or for which there is much demand for change. The biggest changes are in new wine-producing region, such as China, Turkey, and India, as well as the development in storage such as the move to artificial corks, twist-off caps, and wine in a box.

Starting point is 00:13:05 Wine and the wine industry are one of the few things which have remained constant over the span of millennia. While the consumption and production of wine has changed, it remains an important part in the lives of millions of people. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today I have a special long-distance dedication. I was recently contacted on Twitter by Joanne from Singapore who wrote, Hi, my husband loves your podcast and makes us all listen to it in the car. It's definitely not easy to get an 8 and 12-year-old to be completely silent for 10 minutes,

Starting point is 00:13:42 but sometimes he is successful. He also loves to test them afterwards to see how much they absorbed. We'd love to get this run in your podcast to really surprise him. He's not an easy guy to impress. Thanks, Joanne. I want to give a big thank you to you, your husband Danand, and your children for listening to the show. I'm glad to hear that you're all enjoying it. And Singapore is one of my favorite cities in the world, and I think it's arguably the best food city in Asia.

Starting point is 00:14:05 Whether it's Laskah, chicken rice, or something from a neighborhood hawker stand, there's always something good to eat. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you two can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Wine

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