Whether drink is the curse of the working man is a question that seems to have been posed only in modern times. The ancestors of all our yesterdays were content and grateful enough to recognize fermented liquor as a blessing that provided one of the rare solaces in their uncomfortable and savage world.
The world is now much more comfortable and less immediately savage. But, as the benefits of solaces may raise moral objections, it is perhaps best just to remember that those who enjoy wines and other alcoholic drinks today are the inheritors and successors of countless generations who, throughout the world, also found pleasure in them. It is a moot point whether the consequences would have been so dire if Adam and Eve had succumbed to the temptation of the grape instead of the apple. The opportunity must have been there, for the grape-vine is as old as History itself.
Wine is far older than recorded history. It emerges with civilisation itself from the east. The evidence from tablets and papyri and Egyptian tombs fills volumes. Mankind, as we recognise ourselves, working quarelling, loving and worrying, comes on the scene with the support of a jug of wine.
The first chapters of Genesis tell stories of the creation and earliest history of mankind. When Noah made the revolutionary change from a nomadic to a settled life, it was perhaps significant that this first husbandman 'planted a vine yard: and he drank of the wine, and was drunken'. Reference to wine and its characteristics is found throughout both Old and New Testaments.
Fable, however, must be relied upon to give a clue to the discovery of wine. A lady of the King Jamshid's court in Persia is reported to have been so driven to desperation by the loss of royal favour that she decided to end her life by draining the juice of some eating grapes which had gone bad in a storing jar. She succumbed to the fermented juices, slept and awoke to find that the stresses and strains which had made life intolerable had disappeared. She returned to the source of her relief and presumably her conduct became so remarkable that she was noticed again by King Jamshid who, with his court, forthwith enjoyed and made full use of this new drink.
Our age of wine, with still-traceable roots, begins with the Greeks and Phoenicians who colonised the Mediterranean, starting about 1500 BC. It was then that wine first arrived where it was to make its real home: Italy, France and Spain. The Greeks called Italy the Land of wines, just as the Vikings called America Vinland from the profusion of its native vines 2,000 years later.
Roman wine growing was on a very large scale, and business calculation was at the heart of it. It spread right across the Empire, so that Rome was eventually importing countless shiploads of amphoras from her colonies in Spain, North Africa – the entire Mediterranean.
Out of the Dark Ages which followed the fall of the Roman Empire, we gradually emerge into the illumination of the medieval period, to see in its lovely painted pages an entirely familiar scene; winemaking methods that were not to change in their essentials until this century. The church came to be identified with wines – not only as the Blood of Christ, but as luxury and comfort in this world. It was within the stable framework of the Church and the monasteries, the styles of wine and even some of the grape varieties now familiar to us slowly came into being.
Up to the start of the 17th century, wine had no challengers. Water was normally unsafe to drink, ale with without hops very quickly went bad. There were no other spirits nor any of the caffeine-containing drinks that appear essential to the life today.
In the 17th century, all this changed; starting with the chocolate from Central America, coffee from Arabia and finally tea from China. At the same time the Dutch developed the art of distilling, turning a huge part of western France into suppliers of cheap white wine for their stills, hops turned ale into more stable beer and great cities began to pipe the clean water they had lacked since the Romans. Thus the wine industry was threatened until it developed new ideas.
Since Roman times wines made had spent all its life in the barrels. The bottles or the jugs were mainly used to bring it to the table. The 17th century saw the development of glass making that made it more easier to make and stronger. At the same time, a novel method of corking the bottle was introduced. Thus the bottled wine came into being.