Wine in Mythology

Dionysus with Satyr

Wine has been around for nearly as long as man has been upon the earth. How wine was discovered and then recreated is a chapter of history that will be forever lost. To make up for this lack, man connected it to his gods. Every ancient culture, which extolled the virtues of fermented grape juice, thanked one deity or another for the gift bestowed upon us mere mortals. Wine was considered a deep, rich mysterious liquid, which, by drinking, would allow us to understand the minds of the gods.

Wine was sacred to many cultures around the world. Some of the characters in the stories, we still know today, such as Bacchus and Dionysus. Some are lesser known, today, but were still important to their ancient cultures. Ninkasi was the Sumerian goddess of intoxicating beverages, as was Varuni to the Hindu peoples.

The ancient Egyptians held a yearly Feast of Drunkenness to the goddess Hathor. The god of wine to this formidable culture was Osiris, who gave it to his people as the sweat of Ra, the Sun God.

The red wine from Nimea, Greece is attributed to Hercules. He fought a lion, there, and where his blood dripped on the ground, grapevines sprung up. The locals will tell you that the grapes they produce are descended from those same vines.

Retsina is known as the Wine of the Gods, in Greece. Personally, though, I believe they were mad at us when they gave it to us. Santorini's history (and mythology) states that this Greek isle was the true location of Atlantis. Whether true or not, we know that the volcanic ash on the remainder of the island is exceptional for growing grapes.

Odin, the great god of the Norse Vikings, received all wisdom after drinking the precious mead he stole from the giants. He even seduced the giant's daughter to help him in his quest.

But there were also stories of mythological proportions of people who had dramatic experiences with this Elixir of the Gods. Deichtine, the sister of Conchober, king of the Ulster Celts, became pregnant after drinking wine.

Then there is the story of Oferus, the Hermit who first planted Syrah in the Rhone Valley, France. As the story goes, he was a knight in the Crusades. While in the Middle East, fighting for god and king, he encountered a wine so complex and exciting that he decided to take roots home to plant.

What Is Wine?

carbonic maceration

Wine is any fermented fruit juice. People typically associate wine solely with grapes and it's true that the vast majority of all wine that you'll find almost anywhere is fermented grape juice, but wine can technically be made from other fruits like blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries.

  Grapes have become the standard for wines for two reasons. First, there is an acid found in grapes but not other fruits which preserves the juice for decades or even centuries. Second, there is a lot more sugar in grapes than in other fruits and this helps produce stronger wines because almost all the sugar is transformed into alcohol.

The Technological Revolution

The development of both the science of biochemistry and the technology of agricultural engineering started a revolution in wine production that expanded even more rapidly after World War II. Originating in the work of Louis Pasteur in the second half of the nineteenth century, enology and viticulture developed a rational, scientific base. It was no longer enough to continue practices merely because they had been adopted by one's forebears. Universities like Bordeaux and Montpellier in France and later the University of California at Davis and Adelaide in Australia began both to research wine and to teach those who would grow grapes and make wine. As the science developed, so did the wines. Control of yeast and bacteria meant that off-dry and medium-dry wines could be safely marketed. This allowed massive expansion of styles like German liebfraumilch, which dominated the white wine market in the United Kingdom until the 1980s. This technological change came late to wine, perhaps because it was an agricultural, often peasant-based product, but it became crucial as, with the development of the railways and the new markets of industrialized nations, wine had to travel some distance and had to remain stable enough to be drinkable.

Technical development involved three key areas. First was the understanding of

the importance of anaerobic handling, the need to control oxygen contact both to preserve fruitiness in wine and to avoid bacterial spoilage. Second was the recognition of the significance of hygiene during wine making and handling, again to avoid spoilage. Underpinning both of these was an increased control of all stages of the process: temperature control, specially cultured yeasts, prepared bacteria to stimulate the malolactic fermentation, and the addition of enzymes that enhance the development of "natural" aromas in the wine (such as pectinase and apiosidase). A modern winery could be a tank farm with a central computerized control room that monitored what each batch of wine was doing.

Viticulture developed at the same time. Spurred originally by the need to combat phylloxera, then by the requirements of rapid new plantings in the Americas and Australasia, pest control, soil management, irrigation, and controlling the canopy of the vine to maximize sun exposure have been led by science. The result has been to raise the quality of the most basic wines, so even at the cheapest end of the market the consumer can expect to get a fruity, fault-free wine rather than one dominated by oxidative flavors and coarse tannins. The converse, some critics claim, has been to make wines more homogeneous. This,

they argue, means that wines have lost their personalities, and wines from across the world increasingly resemble each other. Certain wine makers have

reacted against such a clinical approach to let the wine develop in its own way. But even when producers indulge in so-called "dirty wine making" in pursuit of individuality, they do it from a position of knowledge, not faith, as their predecessors would have done.

The Evolution of Modern Wine

At the start of the twentieth century wine was a beverage with a very limited range. Essentially it was made as a bulk product by peasants in southern Europe and was consumed by all classes in the country of origin. A small amount of premium wine found its way to the tables of the rich in the capital cities of Europe and the European diaspora. Some outposts of production existed in the United States and the colonies of Europe, but they were insignificant both qualitatively and quantitatively. The Bordeaux vintage of 1900 was highly regarded, but the production and consumption of that style of wine was marginal to the substantive function of the drink.

Despite the great opening vintage, the first decades of the century were not happy ones for wine producers. By 1900 phylloxera had completed its devastation of the European viticultural landscape, often leaving vineyards replanted with low-quality hybrid vines that brought viral disease in their wake. Algeria was widely planted and produced large amounts of cheap vin ordinaire (ordinary wine). Agricultural depression and the flight of the population to the cities exacerbated the situation; then came World War I. Meanwhile, for the producers of prestige wines a continual flood of impostors from poor-quality viticultural regions seeking to gain the premium offered by reputation devalued that reputation and reduced their profits.

The response was to define a system that, it was argued, would protect both the producer and the consumer. By defining the boundaries of a given region and allowing only wine from grapes grown there to carry the name of the region, producers could maintain a price premium, and consumers could have certainty about the nature (and by extension the quality) of what they were drinking. The first nationwide appellation system was developed in Portugal, but it was perfected in France from 1935 onward in the appellation controlée system with the legal enshrinement of the definitions of "quality wine" and "table wine."

This codification of a classification system helped producers in prestigious regions but did little for the bulk producers, still almost all agricultural peasantry with little capital to invest in the technical advances in the winery. In these regions a strange combination of corporatist government and anarcho-syndicalism produced wine cooperatives that were controlled by local small-scale grape growers and to which they could sell their produce. Cooperatives in turn could raise the necessary capital to invest in production facilities.

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.