The Earliest Wine: Spread of Wine Making in Europe

The Earliest Wine: Spread of Wine Making in Europe
The practice of aging wines was first discovered by the Greeks, in cylinders known as amphorae. Made of clay, they were remarkably airtight.

Fifteen hundred years later, the Romans tried a similar method, but their clay was more porous and didn’t work as well.

So they began coating their clay vessels with tar in the insides, a process known as pitching.

By 1,000 BC grapevines were found in Sicily and Northern Africa. Within the next 500 years, grapevines reached the Iberian Peninsula, Southern France and even Southern Russian.

Conquering Saracen (Arab) tribes in the Middle Ages brought both winemaking and distillation skills with them.

The word alcohol and still are Arabic in origin.

As the Roman Empire spread it brought grapes to Northern Europe, too. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church was the most prominent promoter of viticulture.

Monasteries became the vanguards of wine production and knowledge because wine was needed both in everyday life and in sacramental activities.

The Portuguese are credited with shipping the first corked bottles of wine to England but not until the year 1780.

In one of the more fascinating discoveries of this century - at least for wine lovers – a bottle of wine from the 1700s was discovered in 2002, bobbing around in the North Sea off the cross of the Netherlands.

Although the cork was soft no appreciable amount of seawater has seeped into the flask glass bottle.

A tasting panel of seven experts gathered to sip and study the contents. They decided it was a early variant of dry port that had been colored with as mall amount do elderberry juice.

Its alcohol content was estimated as 10.6 percent, it showed no traces of oxidation, and its acidity compared favorably to present day wines.
The Earliest Wine: Spread of Wine Making in Europe