The History of Wine — The Drink Nobody Could Control

In 1976, in Paris, British wine merchant Stephen Spurrier organises a wine tasting. He invites nine of France's best experts, critics, sommeliers and vineyard owners. Every sample is hidden. No one knows what they are drinking. The experts evaluate the wines, give them scores and write down their comments. When the envelopes are opened and it is revealed which wine was behind each number, the room falls into dead silence. California wine, which nobody in Europe had ever taken seriously, takes first place in both the red and the white categories. The French experts have just publicly ranked American wine above their own. One of the judges demands his ballot back. The French press refuses to cover the results. Time magazine writes about it and the global wine industry is never the same again. But this is only one of the stories. A tiny insect, the size of a pinhead, arrived from America on a ship in the middle of the 19th century and, within 20 years, destroyed two-thirds of all the vineyards in Europe. The way Europeans saved their wine was so strange that producers still prefer not to talk about it. A bottle of wine from 1945 sells today for $500,000. Yet most people would spit out what is inside. And a list drawn up by Napoleon's officials in 1855 still determines which wine is worth $1,000 and which is worth $20. And in 170 years, not a single line has changed. How did all of this happen to a single drink that, 8,000 years ago, was nothing more than fermented juice from wild berries in a clay jar in the Caucasus? In 2007, in the Arrheni cave in Armenia, archaeologists discover a wooden wine press, clay vessels, and dried grape seeds. Analysis shows that wine was being produced here around 6,000 BC. It is the oldest known winemaking facility ever discovered on Earth. But discoveries in Georgia suggest that the tradition began even earlier, around 8,000 years ago, during the period when humans were only beginning to transition from a nomadic lifestyle to permanent settlements. No one invented wine on purpose. It was an accident. Wild grapes are sweet only on the outside. Their juice is bitter and astringent, making them almost impossible to eat raw. But if grapes are left in a stone vessel under the sun, they begin to ferment on their own. The yeast living on the skins of the berries converts sugar into alcohol. Someone tasted this liquid, felt its effects, and decided to repeat the process intentionally. That person, whose name we will never know, started an industry that today is worth $500 billion a year. The winemakers of the Caucasus did not simply gather wild grapes. They began cultivating them, selecting vines with the best juice, transplanting them, and caring for them. It was the same kind of intuitive selective breeding that Andean farmers applied to potatoes, without any understanding of genetics, yet with results that would shape the next several thousand years. Georgia still produces wine in traditional clay vessels called Kwevri, using a method that is 8,000 years old. And UNESCO has added this technique to the representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. The tradition survived the Mongol invasions, Soviet collectivization, and prohibition, and it continues to this day. But wine remained a regional drink of the mountainous Caucasus until it was adopted by two civilizations that spread it across the entire known world. The ancient Greeks took wine so seriously that they created a god specifically for it. Dionysus was not simply the god of drunkenness, as he is often portrayed today. He was the god of ecstasy, liberation, and transcending the ordinary. His cult became one of the most popular in the Greek world because it offered something everyday life could not, a state in which an ordinary person could feel closer to the gods. The Dionysian mysteries, religious ceremonies in which wine played the central role, were the predecessors of what would later become theatre, carnival, and ultimately the modern idea of celebration. The Greeks drank their wine diluted with water, typically three parts water to one part wine. Drinking it undiluted was considered barbaric in the literal sense. That was what barbarians did, people who did not know the rules of civilized dining. The symposium, a Greek drinking banquet, was not simply a party. It was a social institution where philosophy, politics, and art were discussed. Plato and Socrates held symposia. Many of the ideas that became the foundation of Western civilization were first spoken over diluted wine at Athenian gatherings. Rome inherited the Greek wine culture and expanded it beyond recognition. By the first century AD, the Roman Empire was producing wine across territories stretching from Spain to Syria. Legionaries received it as part of their official rations, posca, a mixture of sour wine and water that soldiers drank instead of plain water because it was safer. Roman vineyards appeared in Gaul, Germany, and Britain. Everywhere the Some of those vineyards still produce wine today. The vineyards of the Moselle in Germany, whose rieslings now sell for hundreds of euros a bottle, were first planted by Roman legionaries nearly 2,000 years ago. They survived the fall of Rome, barbarian invasions, plagues, wars, and two world wars. Vines live a very long time, but there was one detail that Rome did not understand, and it may have cost the empire more than any military defeat. The Romans stored wine in lead vessels and added lead acetate to it, a sweet substance they called sapper, which they used as a sweetener. Lead slowly accumulated in the body. Chronic lead poisoning causes irritability, impaired judgment, infertility, and the gradual decline of mental abilities. The Roman elite drank the most, and suffered the most. Some historians believe this may partly explain the behaviour of several later emperors, whose contemporaries described them as insane. Rome did not know it was poisoning itself with its favourite drink. It simply kept drinking. When the Roman Empire fell, and Europe descended into what is commonly called the Dark Ages, wine could have disappeared along with it. Vineyards became overgrown, trade routes collapsed, and the knowledge of how to properly prune vines and age wine began to fade. That did not happen for one reason, the church. Christianity made wine an essential part of its central sacrament, the Eucharist. Wine was the blood of Christ. Without wine there could be no mass, and without mass there could be no church. That meant every monastery in Europe had to have access to wine, and most of them began producing it themselves. Monastic vineyards became the principal guardians of winemaking knowledge during a period when everything else was falling apart. Burgundy, a region that today produces some of the most expensive wine in the world, was in many ways created by Cistercian monks during the 12th and 13th centuries. The monks of Cito Abbey noticed that different plots of land in Burgundy produced wines with different flavours, even when they were cultivated in exactly the same way. They began mapping these plots, marking their boundaries with stones, and recording their observations year after year. It was the first systematic attempt in history to understand how soil and climate influenced the taste of wine, a concept the French would later call terroir, which remains the foundation of the entire global wine classification system. The monks knew nothing about soil mineral composition, microclimates or drainage. They simply observed and recorded. But over the several centuries, their observations became the map of Burgundy that, with only minor changes, is still used today. Some of the vineyard plots they identified 800 years ago now produce wines worth tens of thousands of dollars per bottle. One Burgundian vineyard, Romanée-Conti, covering less than two hectares and first described by monks in the 12th century, produces around 6,000 bottles a year. The average auction price of a single bottle is about $30,000. The entire annual harvest from that tiny plot is worth roughly as much as a small residential neighbourhood in a European city. All because a few monks 800 years ago noticed that this particular piece of land produced extraordinary wine and marked its boundaries with stones. And then the insect arrived. In 1863, in southern France, vineyard owners begin noticing that the vines in several vineyards are behaving strangely. The leaves turn yellow, the vines weaken, and the harvest declines. The following year, the same thing happens in neighbouring vineyards. A year later, it spreads even farther. No one understands what is happening. People blame bad weather, diseased soil, or poor cultivation. The truth turns out to be far worse. A microscopic insect from America arrived on a trading ship. A tiny aphid, less than a millimetre long, later named Phylloxera. In North America, it had existed for thousands of years, and American grapevines had evolved resistance to it. European vines had never encountered it. Phylloxera fed on the roots from below, hidden underground. By the time a grower realised something was wrong, the vine was already doomed. The insect spread at a speed no one could stop. By the 1880s, it had devastated vineyards across France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Austria. Within 20 years, around two-thirds of all the grapevines in Europe had been destroyed. Entire regions with winemaking traditions stretching back thousands of years were wiped from the map. Growers who had spent their lives working the land of their fathers and grandfathers were ruined in a single season. Villages emptied. In Languedoc, in southern France, a region where the Romans had already been making wine, the population fell by a third within 20 years because people no longer had a way to earn a living. The French government offered a reward of 300,000 gold francs to anyone who could find a solution. It was an enormous sum. For 20 years, no one claimed it. People tried everything. Flooding vineyards with water, burying live toads beneath the vines, treating the soil with kerosene. Some of these methods killed the insect and killed the vines at the same time. Winemakers were desperate. Then a French scientist proposed a solution so counterintuitive that it was initially dismissed as absurd. Jules Planchon suggested grafting European grapevines onto American rootstocks. American roots were resistant to phylloxera. They had coexisted with it for thousands of years. European vines produced the desired flavours. They carried thousands of years of selective breeding. Combine one with the other and you would have a vine that could survive. It worked. But the solution had one consequence that winemakers still prefer not to discuss out loud. Virtually all the wine produced in Europe today, in France, Italy, Spain and Germany, grows on American roots. Those same Burgundian vineyards, mapped by Cistercian monks 800 years ago, those same vines that produce wines worth tens of thousands of dollars per bottle, they are grafted onto the roots of wild American grapevines. America saved European wine. And an industry worth 500 billion dollars is built on that quiet secret. In 1855, Napoleon III was preparing the Exposition Universelle in Paris, and wanted to present the finest French wines to the world. He instructed the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce to create an official classification. The Commission spent several months interviewing wine merchants and studying market prices. It was the prices, not the quality of the wines, that determined the rankings. And compiled a list of 61 chateaus, divided into five categories. The list was published. The exhibition came and went. Napoleon III fell from power a few years later. The Franco-Prussian War followed, then two world wars, dozens of governments, a revolution in agriculture, the invention of refrigeration and chemical fertilizers, and countless changes in vineyard ownership. The list did not change. In 170 years, exactly one line has been altered. In 1973, Chateau Mouton Rothschild, after 20 years of lobbying, was promoted from second growth to first growth. That is the only change ever made. The 1855 classification still determines the price of a bottle today. A chateau listed as a first growth can sell its wine for $1,000, simply because Napoleon's officials decided so, regardless of what has happened to that vineyard over the past 170 years. A chateau that was left off the list may produce objectively better wine, and still sell it for $20, simply because it does not exist within the system. This is neither a metaphor nor an exaggeration. It is literally how the Bordeaux wine market still works today. If the 1855 classification is a story about the power of the past over the present, then Robert Parker is the story of how one man, with one extraordinary nose, gained influence over an entire industry. In 1978, an American lawyer from Maryland named Robert Parker began publishing a small wine newsletter. Unlike other critics, he refused to accept advertising or free samples. Every tasting was independent and paid for with his own money. He introduced a simple 100-point rating system that anyone could understand, even without formal wine education, and he possessed an exceptional palate. His first major success came with the 1982 Bordeaux Vintage. Virtually every European expert dismissed it as mediocre. Parker tasted it and declared it one of the greatest vintages of the century. A few years later, when the wines had matured, it became clear that Parker had been right, and everyone else had been wrong. His reputation soared overnight. By the 1990s, Parker's score was literally determining the price of wine on the global market. A wine that received 95 points or higher would immediately increase in value several times over, sometimes overnight, as soon as his review was published. Parker praised a wine, and its price skyrocketed. Parker stayed silent or gave it a low score, and the bottles remained on the shelves. One American from Maryland held more influence over French winemaking than the French government itself. Winemakers began adjusting their style to match his personal preferences. Parker favoured concentrated, dark, powerful wines, with high alcohol content, and pronounced oak flavours from ageing in new barrels. Entire wine regions altered traditions that had developed over centuries, simply to earn a high score from a single critic. The phenomenon became known as Parkerisation, and among traditional winemakers, the term eventually became an insult, describing the way centuries-old winemaking traditions were being reshaped to satisfy the palate of one American. One man, armed with a scale from 0 to 100, acquired a level of influence that no critic in any other field of culture had ever possessed, and in doing so, he changed the taste of the world's wine, perhaps forever. But before Parker appeared on the scene, and before the judgment of Paris changed the balance of power, there was one problem that had haunted winemaking for most of its history. The vast majority of the wine sold across Europe until the 20th century was counterfeit. Not slightly counterfeit, completely. Wine was diluted with water, coloured with elderberry juice, and sweetened with lead acetate, the very same substance that had poisoned the Romans, and that some producers were still using well into the 19th century. Sugar was added to increase the alcohol content, acids were mixed in to imitate the taste of ageing, and cheap southern wine was blended with expensive northern wine, and sold under the northern label. A bottle labelled Bordeaux might contain Spanish or Algerian wine, or no French wine at all. This was no secret. Everyone knew it was happening. The problem was that no one could prove it, and there simply was no law that prohibited it. France's first serious law protecting the geographical origin of wine was not passed until 1935, 40 years after Phylloxera had destroyed most of the authentic vineyards, and producers had been forced to find ways to compensate for their losses. The AOC system, Appellation d'origine contrôlée, which today guarantees that Bordeaux is truly Bordeaux, and that Champagne is genuinely Champagne from the Champagne region, rather than sparkling wine made anywhere else, was created as a direct response to decades of widespread fraud. The protection of geographical names became one of the most important regulatory milestones in the history of the food industry, and that is why today you can usually trust that what is written on the bottle is what is actually inside, although counterfeit wine scandals still occur in the 21st century, just less often, and with far more serious consequences for those responsible. And now we return to where we began. The year is 1976. Stephen Spurrier, nine French experts, sealed bottles. What happened at that tasting became known as the Judgment of Paris. California wines, Stag's Leap wine cellars and Chateau Montelena, took first place in the red and white categories. At first the French press remained silent. The only journalist present at the tasting was a correspondent from Time magazine, and his article appeared several weeks later. When French newspapers finally covered the event, they questioned the methodology, the qualifications of the judges, and even the very idea of blind tasting. But that argument was difficult to make, not because the judges lacked expertise, but because they were precisely the people France itself regarded as the finest experts in the field. The tasting was repeated several times over the following years. The Californians won again and again. The Judgment of Paris shattered France's monopoly on the idea of what great wine could be. Over the following decades, world-class winemaking emerged in Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, and South Africa. Today, some of the world's finest wines are produced on six continents. The belief that only France could make truly great wine died in Paris in 1976, and it was buried by the very French experts who had awarded the highest scores to American wine. The person who tasted fermented grape juice in an Armenian cave 8,000 years ago could never have known what they were setting in motion. The Greek philosopher, discussing the nature of existence over diluted wine at a symposium, had no idea that his words would outlive him by thousands of years. The Cistercian monk who marked the boundaries of a Burgundian vineyard with stones could not have imagined that those very boundaries would still determine the price of a bottle eight centuries later, or that the same plot of land would become the most valuable vineyard on earth. Robert Parker, launching his small newsletter from Maryland, had no way of knowing that one man with one extraordinary nose could change the taste of an entire industry, or that the word parkerization would enter the vocabulary of winemakers as a synonym for the loss of identity. And Phylloxera, arriving from America aboard a ship, knew nothing at all. Yet it transformed European winemaking so completely that most people drinking French wine today have no idea the vines it comes from stand on American roots. Wine survived the fall of Rome, the plagues of the Middle Ages, the Napoleonic Wars, and the invasion of a tiny American insect. It survived prohibition, counterfeiting, and one critic with extraordinary influence. Today the global wine market is worth roughly 500 billion dollars a year. Around 27 billion bottles of wine are produced worldwide every year. Over the past 20 years China has become one of the five largest wine producing countries on earth, and today that hardly surprises anyone. Georgia, the country where this story began 8,000 years ago, still makes wine in the same clay quevery vessels it used back then, and its wines are now served in some of the finest restaurants in New York and Tokyo. And the bottle from 1945 that sold for 500,000 dollars is not simply a bottle of wine. It is one of the last surviving witnesses to the final year of the Second World War, sealed beneath a cork while Europe was still burning. The person who bought it at auction in 2018 did not pay for the flavour. They paid for time, for history, for the 8,000 year journey from a clay vessel in an Armenian cave to a glass bottle on an auction table in New York. Not bad for fermented juice from a wild grape.