A Short History of Wine

The history of wine spans thousands of years and is closely intertwined with the history of agriculture, cuisine, civilization and humanity itself. Archaeological evidence suggests that the earliest known wine production occurred in what is now the country of Georgia around 7000 BC, with other notable sites in Greater Iran dated 4500 BC and Armenia 4100 BC, respectively. The world's oldest known winery (dated to 3000 BC) was discovered in Areni cave in a mountainous area of Armenia. Increasingly clear archaeological evidence indicates that domestication of the grapevine took place during the Early Bronze Age in the Near East, Sumer and Egypt from around the third millennium BC.

Evidence of the earliest wine production in Balkans has been uncovered at archaeological sites in northern Greece (Macedonia), dated to 4500 BC. These same sites also contain remnants of the world's earliest evidence of crushed grapes. In Egypt, wine became a part of recorded history, playing an important role in ancient ceremonial life. Traces of wild wine dating from the second and first millennia BC have also been found in China.

Wine, linked in myth to Dionysus-Bacchus, was common in ancient Greece and Rome, and many of today's major wine-producing regions of Western Europe were established with Phoenician and, later, Roman plantations. Winemaking technology improved considerably during the time of the Roman Empire: many grape varieties and cultivation techniques were known; the design of the wine press advanced; and barrels were developed for storing and shipping wine.

Following the decline of Rome and its industrial-scale wine production for export, the Christian Church in medieval Europe became a firm supporter of wine, necessary for celebration of the Catholic Mass. Whereas wine was forbidden in medieval Islamic cultures, its use in Christian libation was widely tolerated. Geber and other Muslim chemists pioneered the distillation of wine for Islamic medicinal and industrial purposes such as perfume. Wine production gradually increased, with consumption burgeoning from the 15th century onwards. Wine production survived the devastating Phylloxera louse of 1887 and eventually spread to numerous regions throughout the world.

Following the voyages of Columbus, grape culture and wine making were transported from the Old World to the New. Spanish missionaries took viticulture to Chile and Argentina in the mid-16th century and to lower California in the 18th century. With the flood of European immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries, modern industries, based on imported V. vinifera grapes, were developed. The prime wine-growing regions of South America were established in the foothills of the Andes Mountains. In California, the center of viticulture shifted from the southern missions to the Central Valley and the northern counties of Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino. British settlers planted European vines in Australia and New Zealand in the early 19th century, and Dutch settlers took grapes from the Rhine region to South Africa as early as 1654. The introduction of the eastern American root louse, phylloxera, seriously threatened wine industries around the world between 1870 and 1900, destroying vineyards almost everywhere that V. vinifera was planted, especially in Europe and parts of Australia and California. To combat this parasite, V. vinifera scions (detached shoots including buds) were grafted to species native to the eastern United States, which proved almost completely resistant to phylloxera. After the vineyards recovered, European governments protected the reputations of the great regions by enacting laws that allotted regional names and quality rankings only to those wines produced in specific regions under strictly regulated procedures. In recent times, present-day wineproducing countries have passed similar regulations.