The Rest Is History - 666. Wine and the Birth of Civilisation

Episode Date: May 3, 2026

What does The Odyssey teach us about the history of wine in the ancient world? How did Julius Caesar use wine to conquer the world? And, why was The Judgement of Paris - when America took on France - the most controversial incident in the history of wine? Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the long history of wine; from ancient Jordan, to Bronze Age Greece, to the Vikings, and beyond… Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠restishistory.com⁠ To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠ _______ Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. _______ Pre-order your copy of A History of the World in 51 Heroes and Villains now: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/history-of-the-world-in-51-heroes-and-villains-9781037211546/ _______ Advertise with us: [e-mail] _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Lloyds, which has been backing British ambition for over 250 years. Now, when you think about it, every dynasty in history has boiled down to two important elements, aspiration and action. And a classic example of this from British history, the rise of the House of Wessex, the family of Alfred the Great and his heirs, who between them established the United Kingdom of England. Yeah, it's a great story, isn't it, Tom? Great lesson in leadership, I think, for anybody. So Alfred and his heirs, they marry idealism and pragmatism.

They're brilliant at alliances. They're brilliant at managing power. They're brilliant of course at managing their money, which is a key part of political leadership. And of course, we are all reaping the rewards of their wisdom and foresight. When it's time to make your next move, you can bank on Lloyd's to be ready when you are. Because from new businesses to new homes and new life chapters,

backed by generations of hope and ambition, you can see, Tom, why 14 million people trust Lloyds to help make their dreams a reality. Based on Lloyd's internal customer data from March 26. No one can really doubt that some kinds of why, are simply better than others. Nor does it come as news to anyone, that when wines are made from the same vat, one cask will often turn out to be superior to the other, either because of the material that the cask has been made from, or due to some other circumstance. Nevertheless,

even though there is a general consensus as to the best wines, one that's been arrived at after many years, there can be no accounting for personal taste. A famous story is told which illustrates this. One of the freedmen in the household of the deified Augustus, a man celebrated for his connoisseurship and his palate, accompanied Augustus on a visit to a house. Brought a local wine by the master of the house, he tasted it and then delivered this verdict. This is not a wine that I have ever tasted before. I do not rate it. It is effectively vinegar. Caesar, however, will love it, and doubtless will insist on drinking it all the time. So that was the very first wine snob in history.

No lesser figure than Pliny the Elder. And that story features in his enormous encyclopedia, which he wrote in the first century AD, and it's part of a long section of the encyclopedia, which is all about wine. And anyone who knows the work of Alan Partridge, will know that Alan Partridge has a huge world book of wine. and it sounds remarkably similar to Pliny's thing about wine,

because like Alan Partridge's World Book of Wine, Pliny the Elder catalogs it by region with great thoroughness and attention to detail. Pliny offers lists of all the great wines. He discusses viticulture, the different varieties of grapes, the influence of the soil, when you should drink a wine, when it should be young, old and so on and so forth, whether you should store it in clay or in wood or whatever.

and Tom, you will no doubt bring a lot of expertise to this discussion of wine, like your hero Pliny the Elder, because I have seen you sampling wines in the Napa Valley, in Sonoma, twice in the Barrosa Valley, in Australia. And I will never forget the occasion in the, I think it was the Sonoma Valley, when the guy doing the wine tour put down two wines, he said, Now, one of these is a very heavy, rich red, and the other is a very light Pino Noir. Please identify which is which. And unerringly, you chose the wrong one.

And it was a tremendous moment. But you're going to bring the same level of forensic expertise to this episode. Well, when I suggested doing this subject, I knew that you would feel in safe hands because you have an enormous respect for my knowledge of wine. You know that I have an incredible ability to taste and all of that. What was it? The man of the bloke said that you got it wrong because you were and I quote, well, you were a supertaster? I was a supertaster.

So a supertaster is somebody who unerringly will get it wrong every time. Is that right? No, I'm so right that I'm wrong. And in being wrong, I'm right. I think that's how it works. Because your taste buds are so overdeveloped. Yeah. That you don't taste as ordinary mortals. Correct. So somebody could give you a glass of the cheapest rosé and you would identify it as the most expensive claret. And that's because you're too good at tasting. I probably would. And that's the level of expertise that I will be bringing to today's episode, which is all about the history of wine. And I love the fact that Pliny is the prototype for Alan Partridge and indeed for you, Dominic, and indeed for me.

And for everyone who fancies themselves as a wine snob. I'm a little bit of a wine buff. A little bit of a wine buff. It's a reminder that wine has been a part of human culture for millennia. And the history of how people have grown it, have drunk it, have been unable to taste it correctly, have enjoyed it, and even on occasion have tried to ban it. I think it's a great theme for a history podcast. But there's another reason, too, why the history of wine, I think, is so interesting. And you mentioned all the various places on our world tours that we've been to, the kind of wine growing areas of the world.

And one of those was the Barrossa Valley, which we visited last November when we were in Australia outside Adelaide. And there would obviously have been no wine grown there without the British Empire because the first fleet, when it arrived in Botany Bay in 1788 with all the convicts, it also brought wines, which were cuttings from Rio in Brazil and from the Cape. And so that's where the Australian wine industry began. But Barossa Valley is outside Adelaide in South Australia. In South Australia, there were no convicts, whoever wanted to go there. And loads of Germans went, didn't they? And they set up weird German bowling courts. It's like being back in the Barossa Valley with our wine guide, Kim, listening to you on this.

Yeah, I could listen to this all day. I've only heard it twice. So a third time. Brilliant. So the Barossa Valley was settled by Germans, and they brought their own tradition. of viticulture. And where did those traditions come from? Well, they had originally been introduced to Germany by the Romans back in the age of pliny. So everything, everything connects. Whoa, that's history. Like the curling of a vine tendril. Brilliant. And people may be wondering,

where did the Romans get their wine from? We will be finding out in today's episode. Because actually, the story of wine reaches back a very, very long way. Some might say, all the way back to the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the cretaceous period and also incinerated many of the forests that covered the planet. And so you have these in the centuries that follow the asteroid hitting, you have these young forests that are regenerating. And this apparently is perfect for vines because they were able to kind of curl up these young trees and thrive in the post-asteroid Earth by filling gaps in the ecosystem. And I commend Jean-Baptiste Bosque, who is my daughter Katie's new French boyfriend for that information.

He's not only a wine expert, a sommelier, but he's also very knowledgeable about dinosaurs. And so I commend Katie's taste. But we're not the rest of the prehistory. Let's stick to the history. And of course, there is a lot of it because the history of wine spans at least 8,000 years. So there's a lot to cover. We can't cover it all. So I thought we could look at seven key moments in the history of wine moments that will enable us to trace its emergence, its spread, its evolution into what it is now, which is basically a kind of $500 billion industry.

You know, there are, as you said, wineries in California and in Australia and New Zealand and South Africa and all across the world. So it's a huge story. where does it begin? Well, let's turn for that answer to the Bible and the book of Genesis. So we are told in the book of Genesis, Noah, as in the Ark, was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard and he drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent. Let himself down. Let itself very badly down.

So anyone who's got paralytic may have some sympathies there for Noah. And presumably he planted his vineyard on Mount Ararat, which is where the ark had come to rest. And Ararat is part of this kind of great range of mountains, south of the Black Sea, in the east of Turkey. So you've got the Taurus mountains, you've got the Caucasus, you've got the Zagros, the northern Zagros in Iran. And it's this kind of area where the key development in the history of wine took place. And Dominic, this kind of basically involves science. So it's the domestication of the Binaferra grape, which is basically the grape from which all the great types of grape have descended today. And because I'm not entirely confident of my ability to sum up the science precisely, I'm going to quote from an excellent forthcoming book by Kathleen Burke, the great historian of America.

Why in the global history, which is coming out, I think in September, and I saw a preview of it. And it's fantastic and go and pre-order it. And she writes, wild grapevines are male or female. I didn't know that. The female vines can produce fruit, but the male cannot, and so pollination has to take place by bees or the wind. What had to happen was cross-breeding either accidentally or by early man in order to create the hermaphroditic vine, able to produce fruit by itself.

The vines are hermaphrodites. Did you know that? Everyone knows that, don't they? No, they don't. I've never heard that before. The people of the Republic of Georgia, not the Jimmy Carter, Georgia, but the Stalin, Georgia, they're very proud of this, aren't they? because they see themselves as the home of wine.

They argue that Georgia is the place on earth where wine has been produced for longer than anywhere else. And I think most people would say they're right. Well, I don't think they argue it. I mean, I think they're right. Because there is firm archaeological evidence. And this was found very near Tbilisi, which is only about 100 old miles from Ararat. So maybe the Bible was right.

And they found shards of pottery, which has chemical traces of what seems to have been wine. And this dates all the way back to 6,000 BC. And then 2,000 years later, a village called Arani in Armenia has evidence of the oldest known winery. And so this is a large wine press that was found in a cave. And there were traces of withered grapevines and of skins and of seeds. And I gather that wine is made in Arani to this day. And I went and looked up to see what they have to offer. And apparently there's a Zulal-Arani dry red, which is described as balanced pure.

and lush. Lush. Wow. I know what people in the Holland House that will be drinking those Armenian Reds. I'm quite tempted to

try that. Yeah, of course you are. I know your methods. I know you bought a massive bottle of wine in California, purely because it had Richard the 3rd's head on it

or something, isn't that right? There was some historical reason I bought it. And that was very nice as well. I think the thing that's interesting about the Iranian vine press isn't just that it's incredibly old,

but also that is pretty big. And so that suggests that already in whatever it is, 4,000 BC, wine is being made on a scale large enough that it can be kind of handed out to other people. And so this is looking forward to the emergence of the wine trade because in due time wine starts to reach Iran, Mesopotamia, Canaan, so what's now kind of the Levant. Yeah.

And the Canaanites are the forebears of the Phoenicians, and they rank as the first mass exporters of wine. And so they're number two on my list of the key moments in the history of wine. So the centre of the Canaanite wine trade, which begins in the sixth millennium BC, is the Becker Valley in Lebanon. Big wine place now. Chateau Musar, Massiah, very big, pungent, heavy reds,

but very nice, I would say, weirdly produced in Hezbollah-controlled territory. Yeah. Because it's where Balbeck is, isn't it? the kind of the great Roman temple complex. Yeah. So it's still going strong. And Canaan becomes famous in the ancient world for its wines. So there's an Egyptian story that was written around 2000 BC,

in which Canaan is described as a land where wine is more plentiful than water. And the reason that the Egyptians know to say this is because by 2000 BC, there is a lot of wine being exported to Egypt, also to Cyprus and to Crete, all of which become very keen on wine. And the reason that the Canaanites can transport it overseas is because they have invented the amphora. I'm sure most people would be able to picture what an amphora looks like, but just in case you can't, it has two handles. It's got a kind of pointed base so you can stick it in sand or mara or whatever. And it's got a very narrow neck, which you can then seal with a clay stopper.

And having invented it, it's then used for thousands and thousands of years, actually right the way up to the coming of Islam in the 7th century AD. Have you ever had wine that was kept in an amphora? Because I have. There's a winery in the Alentejo in Portugal called Esperal. And there you go and do a tasting. And they have wine that's kept in steel that's being kept in oak barrels, obviously. So it tastes a little bit more oaky. And then they've got wine that's been kept in a clay amphora.

Because that's what Pliny's talking about, isn't it? Is the difference between wood and clay? Of course. The different flavours that it gives you. And actually, it does taste different. It's got a very clayy and actually not unpleasant taste at all. And that's what most, I guess, most people in human history would have tasted when they drank wine, the taste of the clay amphra. Yeah.

And it survives because it's incredibly useful. I mean, it's kind of an amazing piece of tech, really. And so it survives the collapse of the Canaanite civilization in the Bronze Age collapse in the early 1100s BC. Everything is kind of left in rubble in Canaan, but then you have like flowers emerging from the, from the first. frosts of winter, you have Phoenician civilization. And the Phoenicians are great merchants. They export even more wine over even greater distances than the Canaanites done. And in 1997, I read in Kathleen Burke's book, two Phoenicians ships were found off Gaza, about 50 miles off, by a US submarine. And this contained 781 and foray, which is equivalent to 20,000 wine

bottles. So, I mean, that's a, that's a huge amount of trade. And other ships have been found that contained even kind of greater quantities. So the Phoenicians are able essentially to export wine across the entire Mediterranean and actually beyond. You mentioned Portugal. Just south of Portugal is Cadiz, ancient Gardez, is Phoenician settlement. And wine amphorae have been found there dating from around 800 BC. So they must be the oldest known amphorae in Iberia. I would guess. And of course, the Phoenicians are in direct competition with another ancient people who are very keen on wine. And these are the Greeks. And they are also heading west and they're also taking wine with them. And the classic account in literature of this is in the Odyssey, where Odysseus and his men are trying to get back to Ithaca from Troy. And they've picked up some 12 jars of a very precious red wine from a place in Thrace, the North Aegean, a place called Maron. And they end up with them on the island of the Cyclops. And they take these vases up as a kind of gift for the inhabitants of this island.

The Greeks dilute the wine. So it's kind of 19 water to one bit of wine. But Polyphemus, the Cyclops, who turns out to be the host of Odysseus and his guys and ends up kind of trying to eat them all, he necks the whole lot. And he does that because he's a complete barbarian and he doesn't understand wine culture. And that is a reminder of the fact that the Greeks like the Phoenicians are not just exporting kind of physical quantities of alcohol. They are also exporting an entire culture, an entire way of life governed by rules, how much you dilute it. Right.

The kind of sociability that wine fuel, so the symposia in ancient Greek, you kind of lie around and drink wine and talk philosophy. And this is part of what is being exported. So the Phoenicians are exporting this. Spain, the Greeks are taking it to France. So they establish a colony, Massilia, which will become Marseille, around 600 BC. And of course, wine is going to have a very, very promising future in Gaul, aka France. So by the time the Roman Empire emerges, there is a wine culture that has spread from its homelands in the Near East across the Mediterranean and the Romans inherit this.

And the Romans are the third way stop on our journey through the history of wine because the Roman Empire constitutes the first properly international wine culture. Because it's a giant marketplace. Globalized single market. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Now, to begin with, I guess a bit like Americans in the.

19th or 20th century visiting the vineyards of Bordeaux. The Romans are very, very conscious of themselves as kind of parvenus. They're anxious about whether they're doing the right thing, a bit like me going and displaying my mastery of wine tasting in the Napa Valley. They have a default assumption that the best wines are Greek, and because of that, Greek wines become the most expensive. Yeah. They are also, people who listen to our episode on Carthage, we did one on the destruction of the city and they may remember that all the Carthaginian libraries kind of get disposed of, but the Romans keep one volume by an agronomist called Mago. And one of the reasons they wanted to keep him is that Mago was very famous writer on how you grow wines. And so that was translated

from Carthaginian into Latin and became a very important influence on the growth of vineyards in Italy. But actually, what happens is that wine beds down so deeply into the soil of Roman Italy, that as the legions start expanding beyond the limits of the Mediterranean, wine becomes a marker of Roman civilization. It becomes one of the kind of the key light motifs of what it is to be Roman. And actually, a bit like whiskey in the expansion of the American West, wine plays a role in Rome's imperial expansion, say, into Gaul. So in the second century BC, has occupied the south. Massilia, Marseille, is a part of the Roman Empire. And the Romans are kind of looking northwards, wondering about how they're going to pacify all these

terrifying tribes that live there. And so merchants start traveling up the rivers into the interior of Gaul, and they take wine with them. And the Gauls absolutely love it. They end up completely addicted, like Polyphemus, they're barbarians and say they don't dilute it. They kind of wallow in drunken binges, to quote one. Greek historian, they end up so inebriated that they either fall asleep or go mad. And essentially, what the Roman merchants are doing is to create a market of alcoholics. And by doing that, because the Gauls have become alcoholics, the merchants can then inflate their prices. Perfect.

And to make sure that it's only the Romans who can provide the wine, the Senate passes an official decree banning the selling of vines to the Gauls. So the manufacturing of wine remains in Roman hands. And the result of that is that by the time of Julius Caesar, who's going to conquer Gaul, the exchange rate, I mean, is insane. It's one and four of wine basically equates to a slave. You know, and a slave is worth a lot. And so this in turn generates fighting among the Gauls because they need to capture slaves if they're going to get the wine. So it makes any notion of Gallic unity against the advance of the Romans impossible. while for the Romans it's a virtuous circle

because you buy the, you get these slaves in return for the wine, you can then sell it to viticulturalists who can then use the slaves to make more wine, which then gets the ghouls even more pissed, and that in turn fosters more wars, which results in more slaves. And, you know, it's brilliant. So basically wine is what enables Julius East to conquer Gull,

unexpected dimension of the history of wine, perhaps. That is an unexpected dimension. So by the time Pliny is writing, what did we say, the first century AD, was it? Yeah, first century AD. The Roman kind of wine world encompasses quite a lot of the areas that we now associate with wine. So you mentioned you've got Greece. I mean, Greece is not a massive wine powerhouse now, though there are some nice wines from Greece.

The Becker Valley in Lebanon, there's some very nice wines made in Lebanon. Wine has spread into France. So it's already in Burgundy, the Loire, the Moselle and the Rhine, for example. So those areas that are kind of slightly on the periphery of the Roman world. But above all, Italy. By the time Augustus, Tiberius and co are in charge, Italy is the home and the heartland of wine, isn't it? It's taken over from Greece and indeed from Georgia. Yeah.

So Greek winemakers are basically kind of artisanal winemakers. The Romans are doing it on an industrial scale. I mean, they've got all these slaves, for instance. But they're not just kind of mass producing. They also have really superb wines of which the classic is called Fallonian. So Pliny loves forlornian. I mean, basically, all the Romans love Fallenian. That is the best.

as it had done in Greece, it has become part of Roman culture. So it absolutely saturates the work of all the great Roman poets. And one of the most famous phrases from Roman poetry, still in use, Carpe diem, from the poet Horace, I mean, that's an illusion to viticulture. It's, you know, pluck the day as though the day is kind of a bunch of grapes on the vine. So there is, you know, in our kind of everyday language still used today, is a kind of trace element of how deeply the Romans were influenced by their relationship with wine. Now, of course, the collapse of Roman power when it comes in the West

ends this sense of a common civilization that had been bonded by the drinking of wine. Amid the chaos of Rome's fall, vineyards are either destroyed or they're abandoned completely. The barbarians, who are the new masters of the Western provinces, tend to drink beer in preference to wine. wine. Well, beer is easier to produce, you don't use such a sophisticated system to produce beer. And it's better suited to the kind of colder climates of the north. But the main factor is just the destruction of the Roman single market. You know, they just aren't the kind of the trade networks that had previously existed. However, all that said, the wine culture is not

obliterated. It does survive. And there are two things really that make that possible. The first is that there are kind of trade links. They do survive. So the Rhine in particular is absolutely crucial. comes to be called a river of wine. So much wine flows down it. And it's from the wine that it ends up reaching Scandinavia, for instance, where wine becomes very popular with the Viking elites, despite the fact or actually maybe because of the fact that it is so expensive. I mean, everyone who's been to Scandinavia knows that wine in Scandinavia is madly expensive. Isn't the point that wine then, as now, is a marker of sophistication. It's seen as, It's identified with Roman culture and therefore it's prestigious.

Yeah. And so it maintains this prestige throughout the kind of the early Middle Ages. The other reason, of course, is Christianity because wine is incredibly important to Christian ritual. If you're going to celebrate the Eucharist, the mass, you need wine. And so abbeys in particular in the early Middle Ages are great enthusiasts for vineyards, again, particularly in Germany. So all along the length of the Rhine, you have these abbeys with vineyards and that's what enables the Rhine. to become this kind of great channel for the wine trade. And the aristocracy, for the reasons that you've said, Dominic, they become great enthusiasts for it. And as early as the sixth century,

the law of the Franks, with its kind of notion of veergilds, the idea that if you kill someone, you have to kind of pay a set amount of money, which is determined legally. The Weirgild of someone who's working on a vineyard is set at twice the level of a ploughman or a cowherd, which suggests how prestigious and how important vineyards are already coming to seem to the Franks. And over the course of the early Middle Ages, what will become France starts to recover quicker from the chaos of the time than Italy. And France comes to replace Italy as the center of the wine trade. But you still, all the way through the early Middle Ages into the high middle ages, there's still no real sense of a wine culture that is intercourse.

international in its scale of the kind that it existed under the Roman Empire. And it's as late as 1596. So, you know, well into the Renaissance, when you have an Italian scholar who's a guy called Andrea Bacci. And he published a great seven-volume survey of wine. And this is the first great survey of wine that has been written since Pliny, 1500 years before. And of course, Pliny is a massive influence on it. But of course, we've talked about the Roman continuity, though, Tom. So areas that produced wine under the Romans or were celebrated for their wine are still celebrated today. But there are obvious exceptions to that. And that's partly because much of what was once the Eastern Roman Empire has been taken over by the armies of Islam. And obviously wine has a very different place in Islamic culture than it does in Christian. Yeah. Well, we mentioned already how amphorae, which had been around since the early Kurnanak period, they vanish in the 7th century, which is the period that sees the caliphate established over much of what had been the Roman and Persian empires, both of which had been very keen on wine.

And I think the repudiation of the culture of wine under the caliphate is a very dramatic marker of just how transformative Islam inspired to be and would obviously have been one that was experienced as such by people who come under the caliphate. So in Islam, the mainstream legal position on wine is unambiguous. You shouldn't drink it. So according to the Quran, which for Muslims is, I mean, literally it's divinity in the form of language, wine is an abomination. And it's been invented by Satan to encourage people to kind of brawl and fight and to distract the faithful from, and I quote from the Quran, from the remembrance of God and from prayer, will ye not then? abstain. And this Quranic verdict is buttressed by the hadiths, which are the sayings above all of

Muhammad, the prophet. So the prophet is supposed to have spoken as follows about wine. God has cursed wine, the one who drinks it, the one who pours it, the one who sells it, the one who buys it, the one who squeezes the grape to make it, the one for whom it is made, the one who transports it, the one to whom it is brought. And then there are the four legal schools that you get in Sunni Islam that emerge in the first centuries of the caliphate. And all four of these are very strict in their attitude to punishments for drinking wine, the sanctions. So the general consensus is that if you drink wine and you are a free person, you get 80 lashes

of the whip. And if you are a slave, you get 40 lashes. Some schools emphasize a saying of the prophet a hadith, which say that you should be lashed with palm branches stripped of their leave. and also spanked with a slipper. Quaky. That's probably better than getting a whip, I would guess. But I mean, neither of them sound fun.

Slippers what happens to like Billy Banta? That seems like a very peculiar punishment. Dorm feasts. Yeah, for having feasts and stealing jam and stuff. Wine drinking does persist, though, no? Yeah. Partly because there are moments in the Quran where wine is described in a more positive way.

So there are absolutely there are ambivalences in the Islamic attitude. to wine. So I've given the kind of the hardcore perspective. You are right. There are verses in the Quran that have a slightly less strict attitude to wine. So there's one that kind of seems to imply that wine might have positives as well as negatives. And there's also one that seems to imply that it's okay to get drunk as long as you're not going to then go and pray. The problem is that these verses, according to Islamic scholarly tradition, had preceded the verse. that explicitly bans alcohol and therefore, according to Islamic scholarship, are abrogated. However, if you want to drink and you go to heaven, there's great news because the Quran promises

that up in heaven there will be rivers of wine and they will be a joy to those who drink. Superb. And I think you're right that those verses do provide scope for those in the Islamic world who do want to have an occasional taste of wine. Yeah. Among whom rank a large number of the caliphs. I mean, a lot of caliphs are very keen on wine. And the scope also for lawyers to do what lawyers do,

which is always to try and get round legal prescriptions. So one of the four legal schools in Sunni Islam, the Hanafi's, they point out that the Quran has banned wine that has been made from grapes, but not from dates. And so they suggest that maybe if you make wine from dates, that would be fine. And they also rule that it's not the actual drinking of wine that annoys God. It's the getting drunk. So basically, if you can drink wine but not get drunk, then you're okay.

I'll quote from Saddakad Khadri in his wonderful book on Sharia law, Heaven on Earth. This, according to these jurists, meant that Muslims could legally drink as much wine as they liked. And I quote, until they became incapable of telling a slave girl from a beardless boy. So bad news for lightweights, but good news for the rest of us. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I suppose the question that's left open is how do you become so inured to wine that you can drink four bottles and still tell a slave girl from a beardless boy apart? If you know, you know. So we did an episode about the golden age of Baghdad, didn't we?

And Baghdad at its peak, it's kind of medieval peak, there are loads of taverns. serving wine. But interestingly, they're run not by Muslims, but by Christians. So the wine trade is monopolized by Christians, right? Yeah, because Christians need it for the mass. And so that's fine. And they're not, they're not kind of bound by Quranic prescriptions and legal prescriptions. And Harun al-Rashid, who is the caliph at the golden age of Baghdad, the caliph, lots of the stories in the Arabian Nights. He sponsored a famous poet called Abu Nawas. So he of the dangling locks of hair. And he was notoriously transgressive, very dissolute, very fond of wine.

And he wrote a notorious piece of poetry about the rivers of wine that flow in heaven, according to the Quran. As for that which is forbidden, whatever could be dafter, a thing banned in this world yet abounds in the hereafter. Yeah. Amazing. He rhymes in English as well as Arabic. Who knew? Yes. In other words, Islam is a kind of an amazingly rich civilization in which there are enormous shades of opinion and behavior.

Right. And by the 13th, by the 14th centuries, the tension in the attitudes to wine in the Islamic world have come to foster kind of very sophisticated cultures within the overall civilization of Islam. And there are two kind of representative figures of these cultures. So the first, this is the guy who's not in favour of wine is a bloke called Ibn Tamir. He is a hardline Sunni reformist. He's trying to reform the Islamic world in the wake of the catastrophe of the Mongol invasions. And so he says, get rid of all this, you know, legal quibbling and attempts to soft soap, the Quran and the Hadiths. We've got to go back to basics.

So he's absolutely dogmatically opposed to wine. He's also very opposed to a kind of hip, new intoxicant that's appeared on the scene called Hashish. And Ibn Tamir describes hashish as being to wine as feces are to urine. So there's a marketing slogan. And he says that anyone who disagrees with his judgment is an apostate and therefore subject to the penalties of apostasy, which would include death. And Ibn Tamir is basically, he's the godfather of Salafism, of kind of Islamism. very hard-core radical jihadi Islam. Against that, there's a much more kind of hippy, 1960s-friendly kind of of Islam called Sufism. And one of the great representative figures of

Sufism is a Persian mystic and poet called Rumi, who was a massive bestseller throughout the 60s and 70s in America. And in Rumi's poetry, wine serves as a metaphor for the experience of divine love. And so Rumi... in kind of poetry that is designed to seem shocking to its readers, says that the image of the soul that has opened itself up to the love of God is that of the drunk, someone who staggers around. He's so kind of overcome by intoxicants. Right. This is not because Rumi is saying, it's brilliant, go and get drunk.

He's not offering this metaphor literally. He doesn't seem to have drunk wine himself, but he's using it kind of to imply that wine is the best metaphor that believers have for how God should be experienced. And so he writes these famous lines, before garden, vine and grape were in the world. Our soul was drunk with immortal wine. So wine is almost kind of, you know, it's a platonic notion of wine, something that has always existed. And he frames the spiritual path of the believer as being a journey back to the tasting of that primordial wine. So you can see.

why it would appeal to hippies, I guess, in the 60s, and why it appealed to lots of Muslims and has appealed to lots of Muslims throughout the course of Islamic history. Now, Ibn Tamir obviously sees this as rubbish. He's very opposed to the Sufis. He thinks they're basically not Muslim at all. And Rumi, in turn, he sees the sobriety of the conventionally pious people like Ibn Tamaya as a form of spiritual death as not really being Islam at all. And I think that what this illustrates is that even when wine is banned,

it can still have a kind of massive, massive cultural influence. And of course, when it's not banned, well, the sky is the limit. All right. So let's take a break and we'll come back after the break to delve deeper into the limitless bottle of wine history. RBC Training Ground has discovered potential in over 20,000 Canadian athletes and counting. Your story could be next. If you've got the drive, they'll help you find your path to the Olympics. Let's see what you've got. free at rbc trainingground.ca.

Welcome back to the rest is history and you have not yet drunk your fill because we have talked about four of the key moments in the history of wine from prehistory to the present and we have three to go. And one thing that we have been lacking is one of the world's great wine heavyweights and that is our own dear country of England. Some people listening to this may raise an eyebrow at that and say England, wine, they're quite wrong of course because if England doesn't necessarily. necessarily produce the greatest wine. Surely we rank among the world's great consumers.

And actually, now, an Englishman is, am I right in thinking it is the English that gave us bottles of wine, Tom? The first modern wine bottle, not the first wine bottle. So wine bottles are actually 2,000 years old. They seem to have originated in Syria, in the first century BC. They get picked up by the Romans. Roman glass blowers kind of refined them. But they're never use for transportation because the glass is too fragile, they would smash. They're purely decorative, kind of markers of status. And in 1867, one of these wine bottles was found in a tomb in spayer on the Rhine, tellingly again, you know, the river of wine. And it dated from the fourth century and it contained liquid wine. And it is the world's oldest unopened wine bottle, although the

wine within it is not the oldest wine to have been found because that was discovered two years ago in a tomb in Spain. It was in an urn. And that dates back to the first century AD. Okay. Some vintages there. God knows what it would taste like. But the problem with with wine bottles up to this point, well, certainly for centuries, is that the glass is too delicate, right? So there's a huge problem. You're basically they're going to break. And it is. English glassmakers who solve this difficult technical issue. Hooray for us. So this happens in the early 17th century.

So in the 1620s, English glassmakers start to develop furnaces that are defied by coal rather than wood. And then the following decade, they introduce wind tunnels, which apparently produce even higher furnace heat. And at the same time, the recipe for making glass was changed. And I'm going to quote Kathleen Burke here, because I'm going to quote Kathleen Burke here, because I don't entirely understand what it means, but technologically minded people would. So the recipe for making glass was changed by raising the ratio of sand to potash and lime.

If you have more sand, you just got a better bottle, basically. Can't have too much potash. No. Too much potash is never, never good. Yeah, definitely. So who's behind this? History records the name of one inventor in particular. He gets named in a parliamentary inquiry that was held in 1662 to identify who had basically invented.

this new unbreakable form of grass. And they fingered this absolute top lad called Ken Elm Digby. Oh, yeah. And Digby is a tremendous character. So he was raised Catholic. He was actually the son of one of the conspirators in the gunpowder plot who'd been executed. He becomes a privateer. He goes around capturing Dutch merchantman, which Dominic, I'm sure you approve of.

I do. Splendidly, he sells into the Mediterranean and he negotiates the release of 50 English. English slaves from the Barbary pirates of Algiers. So that reflects well on him. He's then briefly imprisoned for killing a French nobleman in a duel. He has an absolutely shambolet record in the Civil War. He's kind of always hairing around losing battles, left, right and centre. But he becomes a massive favourite of Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I, and accompanies her into exile after her husband is executed. And then Henrietta Maria's son, Charles II, is restored to the English throne after the death of Cromwell in 1660. And it's in the wake of the

restoration, so two years after the restoration, that this parliamentary inquiry is held and Digby gets the credit for it. And I suspect that part of that is because he's the favourite of Henrietta Maria. Yes, this is slightly undeserved, isn't it? There aren't loads of people working on this? And he's basically just the figurehead. Yeah, but he's a fun figurehead. And so I think I think we should celebrate him. So these bottles that Digby and various other entrepreneurs who are less interesting have developed, they come to be called English bottles across Europe. And an English bottle has glass that is thicker, it's heavier, it's stronger, and also

crucially, it's cheap to manufacture. And the glass is very dark because of the coal fumes. And this comes to be seen by consumers as a kind of mark of quality. essentially that is why wine bottles tend to be dark to this day. It's a kind of legacy of its origins in the 17th century. That is so interesting. It never occurred to me before, but yeah, why are they murky? And that's the reason.

Well, yeah, it's because of us. So hooray. And crucially, the glass is strong enough to contain sparkling wine, because that sparkling wine has got CO2 that is trying to get out. And if the glass isn't solid enough, then it will kind of, explode and send shards of glass flying through the air. And up until the invention of English glass, if you kept sparkling wine in a cellar, you'd have to wear a helmet because it might explode at any moment.

You know, you might end up with a shard of glass in your eye. So very dangerous. But now, hooray, English glass has appeared on the scene. Initially, they're pear-shaped, then onion-shaped, and then by the 1740s, they've come to take on the shape that everyone will be familiar with now. And because you can then lie them down in rows, this facilitates the emergence of wine cellars in the form that people will recognize today. And these wine bottles, they have, of course, very narrow tops, and so they can be stoppered. And what you use to stopper it increasingly is cork.

And cork is produced in Portugal. And in England, access to cork is facilitated in 1703 by the signing of what is very much a friend. of the rest of history, and that's the Methuen Treaty. And Dominic, we've had the Methuen Treaty quite a lot on the rest of history, haven't we? We have. We did a whole episode about the Methuen Treaty, I think, when we did the 12 days of Christmas or something like that. I can't remember exactly what it was.

But just remind people who may not remember what the Methuen Treaty is. So England is at war with France. So access to French wine has been cut off. The Methuen Treaty is a treaty that allows wool to go to Portugal, England's oldest ally. And at the same time, England's oldest ally. import duties on Portuguese wine. So Portuguese wine comes the other way. This is the sort of genesis of the English fascination with port. Port wine, isn't it? Yeah. Exactly. So when you go

to Porto and you go the banks of the Rivaduro, you see all the great, you know, port wine lodges, tailors and sandermans. But also in the Alentasia, which is the kind of Portuguese rural heartland, there are these great forests. I was actually only there a couple of weeks ago. There are all these forests that produce cork. And Portugal, still to this day, is the world's great producer of corks. Yeah. And again, the cork is a little bit like the dark wine bottle, isn't it? There are lots of people, particularly in the New World, in Australia and in California,

who say, why we're still using cork? You know, a screw top is just as good. But cork is seen as a marker of prestige and quality. And, you know, if you buy a very expensive bottle of wine, you don't expect it to have a screw cap, you expect it to have a Portuguese cork. I mean, of course, in the early 18th century, cork does present a problem, which is how do you get the cork out. Right. And so the English, as well as inventing the modern wine bottle, also invent the corkscrew. And so the first mention of a corkscrew, it's described as a silver worm,

comes in 1681. And then, brilliantly, in 1720, there's the first poem about a corkscrew. And I will quote from it. So Roger set his teeth to work this way and that the cork he plied, and wrenched in vain from side to side, so we can't open it. Then Backus, the God of Wine. appears to him in a dream and gives him a cork screw and then the poem continues he to the cork applied the point then bending earthward lobe twixt his knees the bottle firmly fixed and giving it a sudden jerk from its close prison wrenched the cork to be fair everyone's anyone who's you know drinks wine has had a moment like that with a cork where basically something's gone hideously wrong and you can't get it out and you're just shaming yourself in front of your guests

But the corkscrew, so at this point the corkscrew is not a patented thing. It's not the first patent for it is not granted until the end of the 18th century, right? To a clergyman. 1795, and the clergyman is called Samuel Henschel. And I know about this because I went down a corkscrew-shaped rabbit hole. Because it turns out there are antique corkscrew obsessives online. Of course there are. Most of them seem to live in Canada for some reason.

And they all came over and set up a plaque to, Samuel Henschel in Bochurch in the East End because that's where he'd been. And there are very detailed descriptions as to exactly what is revolutionary about this corkscrew that I've read about 10 times and I still don't really understand. But well done Samuel Henshiel. He invents the corkscrew. But I'm afraid Dominic that that's probably all we've got time for when it comes to English inventiveness on this particular episode because that was number five in our top seven moments in the history of wine. And now we need to come on to number six, which is the invention of the language of wine. And the language of wine, of course, is French.

So now we come to our beloved neighbour across the channel. So the French have been producing wine all through this period. Well, since the Romans. Yeah, we talked about the Gallic enthusiasm for wine. They've been producing it through the Roman period. Bordeaux, when the English control Bordeaux in the Middle Ages. Yeah. That is producing claret for English tables.

And you were sneering at my inability to tell between a light and a heavy red wine. I wasn't sneering. I was just remarking. So claret comes for claret. It means lighter and that become anglicized claret. And it's a reflection of the way in which claret in the Middle Ages was a light red and now tends to be associated with kind of much heavier, kind of richer red wines. But of course, the English lose control of Bordeaux at the end of the hundred.

year's war and going into the 16th and then into the 17th century and it may be because that umbilical cord with england has been has been broken france's kind of role in the wine trade it ceases to be as absolutely central as it had been in the middle ages so it's not just the hundred years war that's having an impact there's also the rise of the dutch as the great global commercial power they do invest very heavily in french wine but they are also out-recognitioned neutering Portugal, reconnoiting Spain. They make a trade agreement with the Ottomans to buy Greek wines. And then, of course, the Methuen Treaty coming in between England and Portugal

means that port wine is much cheaper in England than French wine. And of course, it doesn't happen that France and Britain are just constantly at war throughout the late 17th into the 18th centuries. So I think all of that impairs the notion of France as being economically central to the wine. trade in the kind of the early modern period. But even as it's going into retreat perhaps economically, its cultural centrality is going on by leaps and bounds. And the legacy of that cultural centrality is with us today and it spreads around the world. So it's why there are winemakers in New Zealand who will talk about their terroir. It's why you have wines in

South Africa that will be labelled Grand Cru. And it's why in California, a land famously without castles, there are chateau. Yeah. And the thing I find so fascinating about this process is it's a little bit like the emergence of the suit. And we did an episode on that. And you can kind of pinpoint the moment

when the suit is invented, thanks to the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who was writing in post-restoration London, so in the 1660s. And Samuel Peepes pops up again with reference to this process whereby French comes to be the land. language of wine. And it's a diary entry for the 10th of April 1663. And Dominant, you're a very

peepsian figure. I mean, not in every sense. No. But the pleasant senses. The conviviality. There's a dark side's peeps that I don't, that I don't endorse. Anyway, off the exchange with Sir Jay Cutler and Mr. Grant to the Royal Oak Tavern in Lombard Street, where Broom the poet was a merry and witty man, I believe, if he'd be not. a little conceited, and here drank a sort of French wine called Ho-Bryan that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with. Now this is so interesting, isn't it, because what's he call it, Ho-Bryon? Yeah, his approach to pronouncing foreign languages is very much mine. So it's actually O'Brien, which was the first, this is so interesting, the first Bordeaux

wine, so the first claret to be sold in London, not... labeled as Bordeaux or as claret and not labeled because they always used to have the label, well, often the label they would have the name of the wine merchant, wouldn't they? Yeah. But this bottle that Peep's has been drinking has the name of the estate that made the wine. So, O'Brien, it's the first. And it's been produced by this guy called Anno de Pontac back in Bordeaux. He's the president of the provincial parliament there.

he's not particularly interested in wine but what he has a complete genius for is marketing um and in 1666 he's capitalizing on this kind of enthusiasm in london for ho brian you know this kind of marketing of his own estate um and he sends his son to open what effectively becomes london's first restaurant and it's a very luxurious tavern that um is modestly called pontack's head after owner de pontac himself. And it becomes a hugely, hugely fashionable. And that means that the Pontax can massively raise the price that they can charge for the wine. So the normal price for wine in Restoration London is about two shillings. But the Obrillon at Pontack's head can be sold for seven shillings. Wow. And what Pontack is demonstrating is that ultimately a wine is

worth what people are prepared to pay for it. Of course. That ultimately is the only objective way of measuring a wine. And he realizes he's really onto something. So he wants to sell a second wine. So how is he going to do that? He starts to market Ote-Briand as his first growth, which in French is Grand Cru. And then he markets that stuff from his second estate as being his second crew.

so his second growth. And this again is establishing a template for classifying wine that will have a very, very long existence. And it's one that gets taken up by other estates in the Bordeaux region. So by the 1720s, there are three other estates that are marketing themselves as O'DBriand had been marketing itself. This is Lafitte, Latour, and Margot, very famous names, if you were interested in wine. So these estates are in the Medoc, which is on the left side of the Girond, which is the estuary, which leads to Bordeaux. Odebriot itself is, I mean, today it's basically a suburb of Bordeaux. But they're all kind of roughly in the same area.

And they establish themselves as the absolute aristocracy of Bordeaux vineyards. And the revolution comes and goes, terrible slaughter in the region, but the vineyards survive. and by 1855 Napoleon III, who is emperor in France by then, he's staging

a great universal exposition in Paris and he wants to use it to showcase the very best

wines that France has. And so he asks the wine brokers to come up with a list of the best

wines. They get down to it and they draw up a list of the 60 best reds

and each one is classified as a Grand Cru and they're placed in one of five separate classes. And the top class, there are only four wines. And these are the original

vineyards. So that's Ode Brignon, Lafitte, Latour, and Margot. And it's a status that they have never lost. And only one other vineyard has been added to it in all that time. And that was Chateau-Mouton-Rostchild in 1973, which was promoted from Premier Crew to Premier Grand Cru. So a tremendous honour. And this is language that is understood by wine enthusiasts around the world. And it's an incredible manifestation of France's enduring cultural prestige, I think. I mean, not just in the field of wine, but more generally, it's a kind of emblem of luxury. But Dominic, sticking up for our in beloved country, I think it's also emblematic of England's cultural prestige.

because the rankings when they were drawn up in 1855 weren't based on kind of objective standards of quality. They were based on how much people in England were prepared to pay for the wine. So to quote Kathleen Burke, the English had long been admired for having what were considered to be the best pallets in the world. And so therefore what the English were prepared to pay for these wines provided the French with their standard for judging what the best wine. were. It's not interesting. So the French make the best wines, but the people who decide which those wines are are English consumers. And I think that's still true today. I mean, when you say English consumers, it's obviously aristocratic consumers. Well, do you know what? It's funny. We're talking about the English palate, but as late as the 1950s, most English people never,

ever drank wine in any given year. It's such an elite exclusive thing. Yeah. So it's it's it's it's very much the kind of the upper classes. But, um, you know, this, this works well for Bordeaux, but what about other regions? Now, the French are as good at marketing wine as they are at making it. So in 1677, the philosopher John Locke, he, he goes on one of the first recorded wine tours of Bordeaux. So he's the, the ancestor of our tours around Napa Valley and so on. And of course he goes to visit what he describes as Pontax Vineyard at Hote Bryan. And he goes there and he's expecting kind of rich fertile soil to produce such kind of an exquisite wine and he's really puzzled. The soil is terrible. He writes, it's nothing but pure white sand

mixed with a little gravel. One would imagine it's scarce fit to bear anything. And then he goes south, he tours the longer dock. And again, he notes that the more kind of barrenuous, and gravelly a slope looks, the better the wine tends to be that's produced on that slope. And he's told by the wine growers in the Longadoc that ultimately nothing matters more than the quality, and I quote, of the soil they plant in, on which very much depends the goodness of the wine. And this, of course, is a concept that goes back to Pliny. He's obsessed by this, the quality of the soil. But in France, particularly in the 19th and especially in the 20th century, This notion of the soil and its relationship to the wine it produces comes to have an almost spiritual quality.

And it comes to be focused in a word that is essentially untranslatable. And this is terroir. So there have been attempts. So the geologist James Wilson, he describes terroir as being the totality of the elements of the vineyard habitat. But I think for the French, it's important that it's untranslatable. because the more that France industrialises through the 19th century, so the more terroix comes to signify for conservatives. And I think most people who own vineyards tend to be conservative.

It comes to signify something that they are afraid is under attack. And that is the roots of La Patrie of ancient France. The attachment of the French to their ancient source. oil, the sense of being under threat from industrialisation, from foreigners, from Germans, from whoever. Yeah. It matters to them that terror is something that only the French can properly understand. Well, of course, becomes very useful later in the 20th century when they're facing competition

from the new world and they can say, well, look, you may have this, you may have that, but you don't have our tradition and our terroix. Right. Right. because just because something is deeply felt on a kind of spiritual dimension doesn't mean that you can't use it to flog wine, which is exactly what the French are doing, particularly in places where they don't have exclusive chateau, like in Bordeaux. So Burgundy would be the perfect example. Again, a very, very famous area of France, but because it's not connected by the sea to England, it doesn't have this kind of history, this pedigree. And so they, in Burgundy, they market their vineyards, which tend to be on a very small scale, as being embodiments of kind of ancient Gallic tradition.

These traditions are basically an invention of the 1920s. It's very like the episode we did on the history of Italian food. I mean, you discover that all these traditions are completely, you know, complete marketing inventions in the 20th century. And they're marketed because tourists love them. And it helps to sell, you know, all these wives. from Burgundy that otherwise wouldn't have perhaps a ready market. And as you say, it's also a way in the world that follows the Second World War of slapping down competition in the new world because there you were starting to get pretenders in California, in Australia,

in New Zealand, in South Africa, all of which are places without ancient chateau, without kind of jovial peasants, steeply rooted in the soil with traditional festivities that have been invented in the 1920s. And it's a way of saying to the world, there is no way that any wine can compete with a wine that has been grown in the terroix of Burgundy or of Bojolet or of the Longadok or wherever. Well, people genuinely believe that, didn't they, for a long time, until the 1970s, the most interesting decade in history. And we come to our final moment, which is the judgment of Paris. So that's 1976. And actually members of the rest of history club will be hearing a bit more about this on a bonus episode on Wednesday with the great

wine writer Henry Jeffries who will be talking about this and indeed about wine in the new world and the history behind it and the relationship with the British Empire and so on. So that's on Wednesday. But Tom, tell us a little bit about the judgment of Paris because this is probably the most celebrated moment, one of those controversial moment, in the entire modern history of winemaking. So it's a wine tasting competition that staged in 1976 in Paris by an English wine merchant called Stephen Spurrier. And it's interesting that the English are still kind of hanging around in France as arbiters of taste, even in the 70s. And he's opened up a wine shop in Paris and a wine school. And he's very keen to market

New World wines to the French who are very reluctant to buy them. And so essentially he's trying to think of some kind of whee's that would enable him to promote the New World wines in a way that the French might respond to. The problem he faces is that the French are convinced that Californian wines and American wines more generally are terrible. And in the 1970s, you can kind of see why the French would assume this, because essentially the story of Californian wine focuses pretty much everything that the French despise about America more generally. You know, there's a lot of anti-Americanism in France in this period. So Californian wine, it's all about vulgarity, the French think.

And the archetype for this vulgarity is a guy called Leland Stanford, who was a railroad entrepreneur. Yeah. It became governor of California. And, of course, he's the founder of the university that is named after him, Stanford University. And Stanford goes on holiday to Bordeaux and he tours all the great vineyards. And he thinks, I'd like a bit of this. I could have this in California. And he goes back home. Not only does he want a bit of Bordeaux, he wants to do it on a much larger scale. And so he plants these massive vineyards.

But the problem is he doesn't know about Téroix. He plants it on very kind of rich soil on an enormous scale. he hasn't scoped out the climate. And the problem is that the vines just don't give the grapes of the standard that he requires. So by 1890, it's his fourth vintage. And it's terrible. And he produces two million gallons of wine. And the standard is so low that all of it has to be distilled into brandy. So, you know, when the news of that reaches, Borto, everyone thinks it's hilarious and confirms them in all their darkest suspicions.

To be fair, we've all had American wines that taste like that. But then, so a huge problem for American winemakers is that a love for Americans think they shouldn't be making wine at all because they don't think alcohol should have any place in American culture. Right. And so this, of course, is the strain of puritanism in American culture, which French wine growers also despise. And the great manifestation of this is the prohibition of alcohol between 1920 and 1933, which completely destroys the Californian wine industry, which had just been starting to kind of get on its feet. at that point. Americans are superb at selling stuff and they have lawyers who are superb at kind of getting around legal restrictions. So there's a lot of entrepreneurial ingenuity invested into attempts to try and get round prohibition. So would-be winemakers in America can order packages of pressed grapes from the vineyards that have survived in California. And these will be sent to you and they're called wine bricks.

And they will be accompanied by a yeast pill. There's a warning accompanies this yeast pill. It says, on no account, use this yeast pill, whatever you do. And I quote, if you do use it, this will turn into wine, which would be illegal. So don't do it. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, it sounds like the wine would be terrible that you're making it with a pill and a brick of grapes. Yeah, but it's alcoholic, I guess, would be the take.

And the other thing that people do is to register as rabbis. So to quote Kathleen Burke in her forthcoming book on the history of wine, the Jewish faith requires the religious use of wine in the home. Anybody could call himself a rabbi and get a permit to buy wine legally, merely by presenting a list of his congregation. Millions of all faiths and no faith became members of fake synagogues, some without their knowledge when the lists were copied from telephone directories. There's also quite a lot of people in this period who are registering themselves as priests

and so on making wine for the use. Eucharist. That's nothing that helps the French to think that California winemakers will be good. And then there's the whole kind of the sense that Americans are willing to sacrifice quality on the altar of commercialism. I mean, they are all over very sweet wines, wines flavored with chocolate, cranberry flavored wines. I mean, basically whatever the consumer wants. God. And French wine drinkers just stray their hands up and kind of say the horror, the horror. So, Stephen Spurrier, realizing the scale of the challenge. decides the stage this blind tasting of French and Californian wines,

and he brings in nine French wine experts who will do it blind. I mean, by the way, wine experts, some of these people are the arbiters of French wine. Yeah. So, I mean, there's the head of the Inological Institute of France. There is the head of the Wine Academy. There is the Inspector General of the Appellation d'Origine Controllay Board, which is basically the board that decides whether your wine. you know, gets appellation status, gets the sort of badge of quality. So these are not just like

the wine critic of Le Figaro or something. These are like proper people. Yeah. So their decisions will echo and reverberate around France and perhaps beyond. So what do they, what do they decide? So they're presented with the whites first and, you know, this kind of wine equivalent of the Academy Francaise deliver their opinion. and it's a shocker. A Californian chardonnay comes in first, then a burgundy, and then two more Californian chardonnays. So sacrableu.

Then it's time for the Reds, and surely this time French wine will step up to the plate. But no. Again, the result is a bombshell. So the 1970 Chateau-Mouton-Rost-Child comes in second. And remember, it's just been promoted to the top league by this point. So it really should be, you know, at the top.

But it isn't because the wine that is voted number one comes from a Californian vineyard that had only been planted in 1970. Yeah, Stag's Leap. And it had been planted brilliantly by a man called Warren Winniusky. So I mean, couldn't be more American. It's new and it's printed by a bloke called Warren. And Spurier had invited, actually, I think Spurier's partner, who is American, had invited the Paris correspondent of Time magazine to watch it. And he writes it up. Last week in Paris, France, at a formal wine tasting organized by Spurier, the unthinkable happened. California defeated all Gaul. And there is a tone there of, you know, maybe a Roman crowing over the Greeks. after they've been defeated by Italian wines in 50 BC or a Canaanite, perhaps celebrating the

victory of the Becker Valley over a rainy in 3,000 BC. And, I mean, it's had a pretty seismic impact, I think, hasn't it, on the prestige, not just of Californian wines, but of New World wines generally. Oh, totally. And I guess Henry will be talking more about that. But I think, I mean, I think it's important to emphasize, it isn't just a story of the new world banquishing the old, because I think. think France definitely retains its prestige even today. So we've said already that there are lots

of vineyards in California with the name Chateau in the title. Well, one of those wines in the judgment of Paris was from a winery, I think founded in something like 1971 or 1972 called Claudeauvel. So given a kind of artificial, contrived French name to denote quality. Yeah. And The Americans, you know, have massively invested in Bordeaux as the British had done before them and as the Chinese are doing now. And it's kind of interesting that a setback, maybe you can kind of track the course of superpower status by the degree to which a country can invest in Bordeaux. So Britain and its great imperial age was investing in America, now China. And the notion of terroir we've said, you know, it's like a cutting from Burgundy, has a, been transplanted to the opposite ends of the world. So in New Zealand, that wine grows there

are particularly keen on the notion of terroir, and it's been mingled with, and I hope I get the pronunciation of this right. It's a Maori notion of belonging to a particular place called Turung-Uwai-Wai. I mean, that trips off the tongue. I probably haven't pronounced that right, and it means literally a place to stand, apparently. So ending on a kind of a rending note. I like to think that the history of wine isn't just about competition, but it's about partnership. Oh, isn't that kind? That's a nice note on which to end.

I think it's about competition, frankly, but there you go. You're probably right. But I think, I mean, I think ultimately if you're not a kind of wine chauvinist, but just someone who enjoys wine, then it doesn't really matter. You know, Carpe diem. And so I think it would be nice to end on a note of poetry. We've had quite a lot of poetry. And this is poetry that says ultimately it doesn't matter what the history of wine has been.

And it doesn't matter what will be. And this comes from a Persian like Rumi, another great devotee of wine. And this is Omar Kayam. Ah, fill the cup. What boots it to repeat? How time is slipping underneath our feet. unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday, why fret about them if today be sweet? Lovely.

Such an interesting story. And if you're interested in hearing more about the history of wine, we will be talking about wine in the new world and its relationship to deeper historical changes, not least the rise and fall of the British Empire. In Wednesday's bonus episode for Restis History Club members with the great wine writer and friend of the show, Henry Jeffries. And if you're not a member of the club and you'd like to hear that episode, you merely need to head to The Restishistory.com to sign up. And of course, if you're keen to

hear more about the history of wine or indeed about the subject of our next regular episode, which is about the Mona Lisa, then there will be lots more in our Super Sorroway new newsletter to which I'm very much looking forward. All right. Thank you very much, Tom. Cheers and saunate everybody. Bye-bye. Goodbye, everyone. We've got some brilliant news, a new The Rest is History book. is heading your way and it is called A History of the World in 51 heroes and villains and it's got everything that you would expect. It's got mad battles. It's got sensational sex scandals. It's got lots of Machiavellian wheeling and dealing. It's brilliant. And along the way Tom and I will be

debating some of the most important questions of history. So, for example, was Caligula an irredeemable monster or was he simply an early example of an influencer? Was Vuech the Bear? a true hero of the Second World War or was he more of a cuddly mascot and was Elizabeth the first really a virgin queen or was she just brilliant at branding? So polish up your armour, twirl your massive First World War General's moustache and prepare to take a side between heroes and villains.

Yes, a history of the world in 51 heroes and villains is available to pre-order now. Don't miss out.