How wine conquered the globe

Wine: a Global History, Kathleen Burk, Profile Books, £30

The World Atlas of Wine, ninth edition, Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson and Julia Harding, Mitchell Beazley, £60

One of the things that struck me while reading Kathleen Burk’s epic Wine: a Global History is that for most of the 8,000 years of grape cultivation, the end product would often have been revolting. Making wine is relatively easy. Grapes contain lots of sugar and have yeast on the skins, so crushing them is usually enough to start fermentation. I visited Armenia in 2016 and tasted some rudimentary young wine by the side of the road. It was delicious: how you wish Beaujolais Nouveau would taste but usually doesn’t. Then the proud home winemaker gave me an older vintage to try, which he had bottled. It had the overwhelming stench of old socks. It tasted even worse, catching in my throat and making it hard to swallow. I winced and stuttered out a shnorhakalut’yun, the unwieldy Armenian word for ‘thank you’.

That has long been the problem with wine, trying to keep that brief moment of perfection after the yeasts have died but before millions of other micro-organisms pile in. The idea that wine is simply a natural product is nonsense. Burk is scathing about so-called ‘natural wines’, whose makers boast of how little human intervention there has been: ‘if winemakers actually knew how wine was made in antiquity – the dirt, the oxidation, the vinegar – they might not be so keen to take this as their slogan’.

Armenia, or neighbouring Georgia, Turkey or Iran, is thought to be the birthplace of wine. In a cave in the mountains above that amateur Armenian oenologist’s house lies a site called Areni-1, where archaeologists have found evidence of winemaking – a stone basin and clay amphora containing wine residue – dated to around 4000 BC. Earlier still, wine residue has been found dated to 5400 BC at Hajji Firuz Tepe in the Zagros mountains of Iran.

From its highland birthplace, wine was spread by the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans around Europe and the near East before the vitis vinifera vine, the source of almost all modern wine, was taken to the New World by Spaniards, Portuguese, British and Dutch.

What is apparent is that from the very beginning wine had a status that rivals such as beer or mead did not. ‘In Mesopotamia, because it was an elite beverage and terribly expensive, wine acquired a social cachet,’ Burk writes. Wine would have been exported to the cities of the Fertile Crescent, which were too hot for viticulture. Herodotus wrote, perhaps a little fancifully, how wine came from Armenia to Babylon. It was brought down river in boats made from animal hides, which were then broken up and carried back up river by donkeys. While the story may not be entirely accurate, the laborious process points to the value of the cargo.

The Canaanites in what is now Lebanon were superb salesmen: along with the shipment of wine, they would include a ‘set comprising a small jug or pitcher to dip into the large jar of wine, a strainer through which to pour the wine, and a drinking bowl, all of which were presented to the pharaoh’, Burk writes. The modern equivalents would be Riedel glasses and a decanter. But the main draw of wine was its potency. In the words of Hugh Johnson: ‘It was not the subtle bouquet of wine, or a lingering aftertaste of violets and raspberries, that first caught the attention of our ancestors. It was, I’m afraid, its effect.’

In the ancient world, wine was thought to have metaphysical powers. You can see it in the Greek god Dionysus and his Roman equivalent Bacchus. Wine might bring you closer to the gods, but it could also be destructive. There was a Dionysian cult in which participants known as maenads – mad women – would take part in wine-fuelled rites in which they would experience ‘enthusiasm’, literally to be filled with the god, and ‘ecstasy’, to stand outside oneself. Orpheus the bard met a horrible demise when he was torn to pieces by the Dionysus-worshipping Ciconian women.

The dangers of women drinking was a popular theme of Greek theatre, such as in Aristophanes’ comedy The Women at the Thesmophoria, which Burk quotes: ‘Oh women, women, ever thirsting after booze! Forever plotting to find more through some new ruse. To all mankind, and all his worldly goods, a curse – A blessing only to the tavern-keeper’s purse.’

Wine is venerated in all three Abrahamic religions, from the wine drunk at Shabbat to Holy Communion. One of the best sections in the book is called ‘The complex relationship between Islam and wine’. The Muslim prohibition on wine was an acknowledgment of its power. In Islam, wine is something sacred, so much so that you have to wait until the afterlife to enjoy it. Far from there being a total prohibition, wine was often enjoyed throughout Islamic history. Burk writes: ‘elites could and did drink wine freely while it was often dangerous for everyone else to do so’. Some of the greatest poetry written in praise of wine was written by Muslims, such as Abu Nuwas from Baghdad and the Persian Omar Khayyam. In a poem translated by Alex Rowell, Nuwas pointed out the irony of the Koranic strictures on wine consumption:

‘As for that which is forbidden/ Whatever could be dafter/ A thing banned in this world/ Yet abounds in the hereafter.’

The Koran promises pious believers ‘a pure wine, securely sealed’ in the afterlife. This points to an aged wine of the sort enjoyed in ancient Rome. In Petronius’ Satyricon, written around AD 65, the nouveau-riche wine merchant Trimalchio, a later model for Jay Gatsby, opened the great Opimian vintage Falernian – Rome’s equivalent of a 1953 Petrus. It was meant to have been made in 121 BC during the consulship of Lucius Opimius. The chances of the wine being genuine are small, but, nevertheless, Roman wines could last for decades if kept in airtight amphora. The most valuable and age-worthy were made by adding sun-dried grapes to fermenting wine to bolster sugar and alcohol levels. Similar wines are still made today, such as Vin Santo and Passito di Pantelleria in Italy or Tokay in Hungary.

There were other ways of preserving wine, such as the addition of pine resin, an antioxidant, the origins of modern Greek retsina. For wine that was on the turn, herbs, spices, honey and even sea water – collected as far from the shore as possible to avoid sewage – could be added to make sour wine more palatable. Much Roman wine would have been closer to vermouth than Chianti.

This persisted for hundreds of years. Medieval and early modern books were full of ways to make bad wine taste palatable. Even high-status wines would be bolstered. Until recently, Bordeaux and Burgundy would both have been routinely souped up with wines from southern France, Algeria or even port. In the 1980s Auberon Waugh was decrying the end of ‘British Burgundies’ concocted by merchants like Avery’s of Bristol. I was told in strictest confidence that one of the greatest Burgundy producers has some alicante bouschet, a rustic southern grape, growing in his vineyard to boost the colour of his pinot noir. Wine has never been pure. The quest for ‘natural’ wine is a chimera.

The process where wine went from always being a step away from vinegar to the consistent, globalised product we know today is a long one. Milestones along the way include the building of giant barrels in early modern Germany, which kept the wine away from air contact. The largest of these, the great tun of Heidelberg, built in 1751, was made using 130 oak trees and holds over 200,000 litres of wine. There was the use of anti-microbial sulphur dioxide candles by the Dutch and the development of the wine bottle and cork in 17th-century England. But it was only when winemakers in the 19th century began to understand fermentation thanks to scientists such as Antoine Chaptal and Louis Pasteur, and temperature control became routine at the end of the 20th century, that wine became reliable.

It’s an epic tale that Burks book more than does justice to. She’s an academic, a professor at UCL, but thankfully doesn’t write like one. Along with other works, she was the co-author of the amusing Is This Bottle Corked?, written with the late British journalist Michael Bywater. While Wine: A Global History doesn’t quite have the narrative sweep of Hugh Johnson’s magisterial The Story of Wine or polemical thrust of Inventing Wine by Paul Lukacs, it does roam further afield. There are chapters on wine in China, Japan and the Far East. As you might expect from an author born in California wine country, the section on North America is particularly strong. Some parts are weaker than others, inevitable in a book of this scope, but if you want to learn about the history of wine, there’s no better place to start.

Nowadays, good quality, stable wine of a kind that would have amazed our ancestors is produced from Argentina to Zagreb. I hear they are even making some quite nice wine in England these days. That’s the theme of another epic wine book published this autumn. It’s the ninth edition of The World Atlas of Wine by Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson and Julia Harding. The first edition was published in 1971, a solo undertaking by Johnson. We have some early editions at my parents’ house, and, while they are rich in Burgundy, Mosel and the Douro valley, the sections on Georgia or Armenia, the birthplaces of wine, are very much in the ‘here be dragons’ vein.

This edition has been fully updated since the last one in 2019. There are new maps of Santorini, Crete and elsewhere. The whole book remains a visual treat, full of useful information and beautiful photographs alongside the maps. Some of them are more useful than others. A detailed topographic map of, say, the Middle Mosel explains the wines the way a map of south-east England doesn’t. You can see how the most famous vineyards are on the steepest slopes and on the side of the river that best catches the evening sunshine in order to ripen riesling grapes as fully as possible. If you want to understand complicated regions like Burgundy or the Mosel, then this book is essential.

Sadly, some of these great vineyards, such as Ürziger Würzgarten, which once produced some of the most valuable wine in the world, are now essentially worthless. It costs more to farm the steep slopes than growers can charge for their wines.

That’s not the only crisis going on in the wine world. The World Atlas of Wine is also a warning about the changing climate. Robinson writes: ‘It was quite frightening to see from the figures kindly provided by wine-producing climate scientist Greg Jones the extent to which average temperatures have increased around the world.’ The authorities in regions such as Bordeaux have allowed in non-traditional grapes as a result of rising temperatures and there’s talk that Champagne might be too hot for sparkling wine. This edition of the Atlas has pages on Scandinavia and the Baltic. Who could have predicted that in 1971?

Burk sounds a different alarm at the end of her book: the decline of wine-drinking globally and the potential rise of something even worse than global warming – non-alcoholic wine! Blame the internet for keeping everyone glued to their phones or blame health scaremongering, but the younger generation isn’t taking to alcohol the way they used to. Let’s hope this is just a temporary blip. As Burk shows us, wine has faced worse in its long history. Many of the greatest vineyards of Europe were nearly wiped out by the vine-munching louse phylloxera in the late 19th century. This was followed by war, Prohibition in the United States and economic crises.

Today, we are truly blessed when it comes to wine. The ancients would look upon the bounty available at a click of a button with awe. Open a bottle of wine tonight and make a toast to our good fortune.