History of Wine (part two)

In many parts of the ancient world, such as in Egypt, wine was drunk primarily by the kings and the upper classes.  In Greece, however, it was drunk by everybody.  It played an important role in The Odyssey of Homer, in Odysseus’ fight with Polyphemus.  Odysseus relates how he had saved from harm Maron, a priest of Apollo and his wife and child, who in thanks gave Odysseus many gifts, amongst them twelve jars of a very precious wine, red and honey-sweet, which was so strong that it was drunk by diluting it twenty to one with water.  When the ships reached the land of the Cyclops and the men landed, Odysseus took with him a wineskin of the Maronean wine.  When, then, they were caught by one-eyed Polyphemus, and the monster had eaten a number of Odysseus’ shipmates, the hero offered to him an ivy bowl of the undiluted black wine.  He drank it, and Odysseus offered him a further two bowls.  The Cyclops then fell back to sleep, after some of the wine gurgled up from him, carrying gobs of human meat with it.  Odysseus and his shipmates then, with a hardened stake, put out his one eye. 

The Greeks loved wine.  Aristophanes has the orator Demosthenes declaim that ‘tis when men drink they thrive, Grow wealthy, speed their business, win their suits, Make themselves happy, benefit their friends.’  Plato, however, was quite clear just who should drink and when:  ‘Boys under 18 shall not taste wine at all, for one should not conduct fire to fire.  Wine in moderation may be tasted until one is 30 years old, but the young man should abstain entirely from drunkenness and excessive drinking.  But when a man is entering his fortieth year … he may summon the other gods and particularly call upon Dionysus to join the old men’s holy rite, and their mirth as well, which the god has given to men to lighten their burden – wine, that is, the cure for the crabbedness of old age, whereby we may renew our youth and enjoy forgetfulness of despair.’  In other words, once you are forty and thus an old man, you can drink as much as you wish and get as drunk as you want.

There was one Greek social convention which has come down to our time, but whose organisation has, regrettably, changed.  This was the symposium, a word which meant nothing more or less than ‘drinking together’, and which we would today see as a dinner party of a special sort.  Its modern definition as a learned conference probably derives from the habit of aristocratic Greeks of indulging in after dinner conversation, although one faint hangover during the modern period might be the after-dinner conversation over a bottle or two of port.  The so-called flute girls, who in Socrates’ time were part of the ambience, seldom now make an appearance, although the geisha is perhaps a possible comparison.  Plato, in his dialogue The Symposium, emphasises the symposium as a search for truth, and the discussion that night focused on the nature of love.  But his dialogue also provides some clues as to the uses made of wine.  After the meal was cleared away, the guests had their hands washed, and were sometimes garlanded with flowers and anointed with perfumed oils, although not on this occasion.  The symposium began with a taste of unmixed wine, accompanied by hymns to the god Dionysos.  Subsequently, wine was mixed with water in a large bowl called a kratêr, normally in the proportion of five parts wine to two parts water which was often sea-water.  For the Greeks, only barbarians, such as those from Thrace, or Polyphemus, drank unmixed wine.  The resulting drink was roughly the strength of modern beer;  you could get drunk, but you had to drink rather a lot of it.  One person, the symposiarch, was elected to set, in consultation with others, the precise strength of the mixture, the number of bowls to be mixed, usually three, and the size of cups to be used.  The andrôn, a square room in the men’s part of the house, had seven to eleven couches.  Guests reclined on them, typically two to a couch, in the manner learned from the Assyrians in about 600 BC.  Wine was poured, and the party began.  I suspect that Plato’s injunction as to how much one ought to drink was not always followed.  One example was Alcibiades, described as the handsomest man in Athens, and madly desired by Socrates.  He arrived drunk at the symposium, and took over the proceedings.

The Greeks did differentiate between the different types and qualities of wines, preferring wine which was a bit sweet. Wines were often referred to by their islands or regions of origin - Lesbian wine from the Island of Lesbos, or Chian wine from the island of Chios, for example – but true connoisseurship apparently had to await the Romans.

History of Wine (part one)

So who first invented wine? It is probably more to the point to ask, who first discovered wine? It is not difficult to make it. On the outside skin of the grape is the yeast and on the inside is the sweet juice: mix them together, leave it for a few days for the yeast to ferment the sugar and turn it into alcohol, and the result is wine. All you really need are grapes. One claimant for first place is Noah. According to Genesis chapter 9, verses 20-21: 'And Noah began to be a husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken'. So for Christians and Jews, at least historically, it was Noah. For the ancient Greeks, the discovery of wine by men was the gift of Dionysos, the god of wine, the avatar who burst out of Thrace - or perhaps Phrygia - and brought the knowledge of wine to Attica. Certainly, the vine was widely cultivated in Greece and Grecian areas by the early Bronze Age - both Homer and Hesiod make it clear that wine was an essential part of life - and clay tablets dating from the late Bronze Age, about 1200 BC, connect Dionysos with wine.
Another candidate is the legendary, or mythical, Persian King Jamshíd, a great lover of grapes. One day it was discovered that a jar of them had spoiled, and it was taken to a warehouse and labelled 'poison'. Not long after, a very depressed lady of his harem went to find the jar. According to one source, he had banished her from his kingdom; according to another, she was plagued with horrendous migraines. In any case, having lost the will to live, she found the jar and drank deeply, after which she fell into a deep and healing sleep. She went back to the King and revealed what she had found: he and his court drank it with pleasure, and she was welcomed back into the harem. This Persian legend has some plausibility. By the use of micro-chemical techniques on archaeological residues in some of the earliest wine jars known, which were found at Hajji Firuz Tepe in the northern Zagros Mountains of north-western Iran, it has become clear that wine was being produced in the highlands of Persia in the Neolithic Period from about 5400 BC.
The primary competitor, and probably the winner, is the Transcaucasus. This could be in what is now Georgia, but was once ancient Armenia, which once included much of eastern Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. The vine was indigenous to the Armenian valleys, having established itself there over a million years ago, with petrified grape pips found at several Neolithic sites; there have also been found vessels dating back to 7000 BC, and special pruning knives dating back to between 3000 and 2000 BC. Georgia was always my favourite as the home of an old and pervasive wine culture, because when Christianity arrived in Georgia in the fourth century, the first cross was made of vines. But today's Armenia has recently pulled ahead, in particular if you are of a technological bent. Recently discovered, in the Areni-1 cave complex near Armenia's southern border with Iran - and outside a tiny village still known for its wine-making activities - is the world's oldest known winery. The site includes grape seeds, withered grape vines, remains of pressed grapes, a rudimentary wine press, a clay vat apparently used for fermentation, wine-soaked pieces of pots and a cup and drinking bowl. From the grapes to the glass: what more evidence does one need?