A brief history of wine
It is now generally accepted that wine was discovered by accident somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, the bountiful agricultural expanse of river valleys that stretches from the Nile to the Persian Gulf. Although archaeologists have traced the origins of wine grapes back tens of thousands of years, the first evidence that wine was actually made from grapes comes from a clay pot found in ancient Persia dating to around 10,000 years BC.
The early civilizations in this region owed their existence to the rich soils, and it is here that the wine grape first thrived. Separate waves of the great, ancient seafaring cultures of the ancient world (first the Phoenicians, then the Greeks, then the Romans) took the vine and winemaking secrets with them on their voyages along the Mediterranean and European coasts.
Despite popular myth, the vine was introduced to southern Gaul (now France) long before the Romans arrived. However, the Romans taught their sophisticated cultivation methods to the native Gauls and also introduced more resistant varieties to the northern regions of France.
During the time of the Crusades, European Christian soldiers brought new strains of Vitis vinifera to Europe. During this period, the two most important regions of France, Burgundy and Bordeaux, further developed their reputation for producing quality wines.
When Henry II of England married Eleanor of Aquitaine in the early 12th century, part of her dowry included the vineyard areas of Bordeaux and neighboring Gascony. The pale red wine from these regions found favor in England, where it became known as Claret, and by the mid-14th century the port of Bordeaux was shipping the equivalent of one million cases of wine a year to Britain.
By the end of the 17th century, France had been recognized as the greatest of the wine-producing nations. The French Revolution of 1789 had a negative impact on wine production in Burgundy. The vineyards there were expropriated from the Church and the nobles, and instead were given to the people. Unfortunately, few of them were given enough acreage to produce their own wine.
Thomas Jefferson wrote enthusiastically about the quality of French wine in correspondence with friends and encouraged the planting of European wine grapes in the New World in the late 18th century. These early attempts at growing wine in the American colonies largely failed, and the transplanting of European and Native American vines back and forth brought a destructive grapevine louse to Europe. The result of this was the famous phylloxera plague of the late 19th century, which destroyed most vineyards both in France and throughout Europe.
Missionaries were responsible for the first vines planted in New Zealand, back in 1819. Australians, however, were ahead of their neighbors (the first bunches of grapes were picked in the Governor’s Garden at the end of the 18th century and cultivated from transplanted vines from the Cape of South Africa).
At that time, South Africans had been making wine for almost 150 years. In fact, the first vineyard in the Cape Province was planted in 1655 by its first governor, Jan van Riebeeck. Initially, the wines produced were of rather low quality and intended for home consumption. During the 20th century, this quality increased, improvements in transportation techniques occurred, and a growing demand for New World wines, particularly the United Kingdom, further increased production.
An effort was made in 1905 to establish consistent standards for all important aspects of wine production, including grape varieties, alcohol content, region of production, and vineyard yield. France has passed a series of laws, collectively known as the “appellation d’origine controlee” laws, which protect France’s famous place names and ensure that wines bearing their names have, and still comply with, rigorous controls. Italy followed this example soon after with its own set of laws, the “denominazione di origine controllata” and the “denominazione di origine controllata egarantita”.
New World producers took a different approach and while Old World producers made their blended wines and wines named after the areas in which they were made (for example, Chablis or Champagne), their New World counterparts They made what is known as varietal wines, where the grape variety that goes into the wine occupies a place of honor on the label. It became much easier for the average person to choose and buy wine, after all, all he needed to know was whether he liked the taste of a Merlot or a Pino Noir, for example.