History of Wine (part three)
Kathleen Burk
True connoisseurship in the assessment and the enjoyment of wine apparently had to
await the Romans. Here, my hero is Pliny the Elder, who is probably remembered primarily
for being killed in 79 AD by the eruption of Vesuvius. But in his own day, for centuries
thereafter, and amongst those today who are interested in the ingathering of knowledge,
Pliny was famous above all for his Naturalis Historia, in whose thirty-seven books
he surveys all of nature. Book XIV is devoted to the vine and wine. He describes
the various ways of cultivating the vine, and follows this with pages on the many
varieties of grapes and their uses. He talks about famous wines of former times,
the oldest of which was the wine of Maronea, fragrant, rich, dark and sweet, grown
in the seaboard parts of Thrace, and so strong that it was diluted with water at
a ratio of twenty parts water to one part wine. This was used by Odysseus against
the Cyclop Polyphemus. In one of his previous stops on his long voyage home, Odysseus
had been given some wineskins of Maronean wine, and he gave a generous amount to
Polyphemus. It made the Cyclop roaringly drunk, allowing the Greeks to thrust a red-hot
stake into his one eye, and the resulting blindness enabled Odysseus and those of
his shipmates who had not been eaten to make their way back to the ships and flee.
Pliny also celebrates a more recent vintage, that of Opimius, called such because
it was the year of the consulship of Lucius Opimius; this was in 121 BC, a year memorable
to the Romans for the assassination of Gaius Gracchus ‘for stirring up the common
people with seditions’, or proposals for reform. That year the weather was so fine
and bright – they called it ‘the boiling of the grape’ – that wines from that vintage,
according to Pliny, still survived nearly two hundred years later. He did, however,
add that they had ‘now been reduced to the consistency of honey with a rough flavour,
for such in fact is the nature of wines in their old age’. He discusses the unbelievable
sums such wines attracted, stupidly, he clearly felt, and here one might think of
the few bottles of wine from the cellar of Thomas Jefferson which still exist, one
of which, a bottle of Château Lafite 1787, fetched £105,000 at auction in 1985.
Many are familiar with the Bordeaux classification of 1855, when the red wines of
Bordeaux were classified as Premier, Deuxième, Troisième, Quatrième and Cinquième
crus. Pliny pre-dated this classification technique by nearly two thousand years,
when he listed Italian wines in order of merit, for, he says, ‘who can doubt … that
some kinds of wine are more agreeable than others, or who does not know that one
of two wines from the same vat can be superior to the other, surpassing its relation
either owing to its cask or from some accidental circumstance?’ He then classifies
Italian wines into first-, second, third, and fourth-class wines, other wines, and
foreign wines. He does not, however, follow fashion blindly. Many commentators have
exalted Falernian wine, and, indeed, he remarks that ‘no other wine has a higher
rank at the present day’. Pliny, however, puts it into the second class: the reason,
he says, is that ‘the reputation of this district also is passing out of vogue through
the fault of paying more attention to quantity than to quality.’ Modern parallels
leap to mind.
But then, thanks to the barbarian invasions and the fall of Rome, we lost wine connoisseurship
almost entirely, and in this case, if no other, the next thousand years or so were
truly the Dark Ages. In part, this was the result of the neglect or destruction of
farms and vineyards by the invaders, who preferred barley- or grain-based alcoholic
drinks to those made from grapes. Numerous accounts in Gregory of Tours’ History
of the Franks tell of this destruction and pillage. Yet, the greatest damage done
by these invaders was arguably not the destruction of the vineyards and wineries,
but the subsequent collapse of the economic and social structure of the western Empire.
The division of Italy, Gaul and Iberia into a number of small warring kingdoms effectively
undermined the long-distance wine trade, whilst the decline of the population of
cities, such as Rome itself, dramatically curtailed the demand for such wines. Furthermore,
there were reasons in the transport of the wine itself which mostly killed any chance
of drinking decent wine. The Romans had used airtight amphorae for both storage and
shipping, closed with cork stoppers, but this knowledge of the use of cork was lost
during the mediaeval period. Instead, amphorae gradually gave way to wineskins and
barrels and the cork was replaced by beeswax and oil-soaked rags – only in the seventeenth
century did cork make a re-appearance.
But we must celebrate Charlemagne’s attempts to reform winemaking and shipping. During
his reign, reforms were mandated in many areas of the economy. For wine, it was required
that ‘The stewards take charge of the vineyards and see that they are properly worked
… [and that] the wine-presses be kept in good order and no one dare crush the grapes
with their feet, that everything is clean and decent … [that] the wine be put in
good barrels bound with iron, that containers should not be made of leather … that
particular care be taken that no loss is incurred in shipping it to the army or to
the palace … and that each steward make an annual statement of the income.’ As a
result, although the growing of vines and the making of wine merely survived in Southern
Europe as part of a subsistence economy, it prospered north of the Seine and the
Mosel, around Aachen, Rheims and Cologne. The concurrent expansion of monasticism
provided both continuity and record-keeping. There are arguments over the actual
importance of the Church in keeping alive the intelligent growing of grapes and making
of wine – some ascribe great responsibility, since wine was necessary to the liturgy,
whilst others argue that private enterprise, such as lay winemakers, were more responsible
for keeping the knowledge and traditions alive. We can only be grateful that someone
did it.
Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19th century portrait
A coin of Charlemagne with the inscription KAROLVS IMP AVG ("Carolus Imperator Augustus")
