666. Wine and the Birth of Civilisation

Now, when you think about it, every dynasty in history has boiled down to two important elements, aspiration and action. And a classic example of this from British history, the rise of the house of Wessex, the family of Alfred the Great and his heirs, who between them established the United Kingdom of England.

“Yeah, it's great story isn't it's a great lesson in leadership, I think, for anybody.”

So Alfred and his heirs, they marry idealism and pragmatism, they're brought into the alliances, they're brought into managing power, they're pretty, of course, managing their money, which is a key part of political leadership, and of course, we are all reaping the rewards of their wisdom and foresight. When it's time to make your next move, you can bank on Lloyds to be ready when you are, because from new businesses, to new homes and new life chapters, backed by generations of hope and ambition, you can see Tom,

why 14 million people trust Lloyds to help make their dreams a reality, based on Lloyds internal customer data from March 2026.

No one can really doubt that some kinds of wine are simply better than others. Nor does it come as news to anyone that when wines are made from the same that, one cask will often turn out to be superior to the other, either because of the material that the cask has been made from, or due to some other circumstance. Nevertheless, even though there is a general consensus as to the best wines, one that's been arrived after many years, that can be no accounting for personal taste. A famous story is told which illustrates this.

One of the freedmen in the household of the dayified Augustus, a man celebrated for his connoisseur ship and his pallet, a company Augustus, on a visit to a house. Brought a local wine by the master of the house, he tasted it, and then delivered this verdict. This is not a wine that I have ever tasted before. I do not rate it. It is effectively vinegar. Caesar, however, will love it, and doubtless will insist on drinking it all the time.

So that was the very first wine snob in history. No lesser figure than Pliny the Elder. And that story features in his enormous encyclopedia, which he wrote in the first century AD.

And it's part of a long section of the encyclopedia, which is all about wine, and anyone who knows the work of Alan Partridge, one of Alan Partridge has a huge world book of wine. And it sounds remarkably similar to Pliny's thing about wine, because like Alan Partridge's world book of wine, Pliny the Elder catalogs it by region with great thoroughness and attention to detail. Pliny offers lists of all the great wines. He discusses bitter culture, the different varieties of grapes, the influence of the soil, when you should drink a wine, when it should be young, old and so on and so forth.

Whether you should store it in clay or in wood or whatever, and Tom, you will no doubt bring a lot of expertise to this discussion of wine like your hero Pliny the Elder. Because I have seen you sampling wines in the Napa Valley in Sonoma twice in the Bross of Valley in Australia.

“And I will never forget the occasion in the, I think it was the Sonoma Valley when the, the guy to being the wine tour put down to wines, he said, now one of these is a very heavy rich red and the other is a very light piano noir.”

Please identify which is which and unearingly you chose the wrong one and it was a tremendous moment. But you're going to bring the same level of forensic expertise to this episode. Well, when I suggested doing this subject, I knew that you would feel in safe hands because you have an enormous respect for my knowledge of wine, you know that.

I have an incredible ability to taste and all of that.

What was it? The man the bloke said that you got it wrong because you were on a quote, but were you a super tasteer?

“So a super tasteer is somebody who were noeringly will get it wrong every time, is that right? No, I'm so right that I'm wrong and in being wrong, I'm right. I think that's how it works because your taste buds are so overdeveloped.”

Yeah, that you don't taste as ordinary mortals. Correct. So somebody could give you a glass of the cheapest rosé and you would identify it as the most expensive clarity. And that's because you're too good at tasting. I probably would and that's the level of expertise that I will be bringing to today's episode, which is all about the history of wine.

I'm a little bit of a wine buff. Oh, a little bit of a wine buff. It's a reminder that wine has been a part of human culture for millennia and the history of how people have grown it, have drunk it, have been unable to taste it correctly. I've enjoyed it and even on occasion have tried to ban it.

“I think it's a great theme for history podcast.”

But there's another reason, too, by the history of wine, I think, is so interesting. And you mentioned all the various places on our world tours that we've been to, the kind of the wine growing areas of the world. And one of those was the Barossa Valley, which we visited last November when we were in Australia outside Adelaide.

And there would obviously have been no wine growing there without the British Empire because the first fleet when it arrived in Botany Bay in 1788 with all the convicts.

It also brought wines, which were cuttings from Rio, in Brazil and from the Cape. And so that's where the Australian wine industry began. But Barossa Valley is outside Adelaide in South Australia. In South Australia, there were no conflicts who ever wanted to go there. And loads of Germans went, didn't they?

And they set up. We ate German bowling courts. It's like being back in the Barossa Valley with a wine guide Kim listening to you on this. Yeah, I could listen to this all day. I've only heard it twice, so a third time. Brilliant.

So the Barossa Valley was settled by Germans and they brought their own traditions of literature. And where did those traditions come from? Well, they had originally been introduced to Germany by the Romans back in the age of Pliny. So everything, everything connects. Wow.

That's history. Like the curling of a vine tendril. Brilliant.

“And people may be wondering where did the Romans get their wine from?”

We will be finding out in today's episode because actually the story of wine, which is back a very, very long way. Some might say all the way back to the asteroid that which wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Klesits period and also incinerated many of the forests that covered the planet. And so you have these in the centuries that follow the asteroid hitting.

You have these young forests that are regenerating. And this apparently is perfect for vines because they were able to kind of curl up these young trees and thrive in the post-astroid earth by filling gaps in the ecosystem. And I commend John Bertie's boss who is my daughter Katie's new French boyfriend. So that information.

He's not only a wine expert, a familiar, but he's also very knowledgeable about dinosaurs. And so I commend Katie's taste. But we're not the rest of the history. Let's stick to the history. And of course there is a lot of it because the history of wine spans at least 8,000 years.

There's a lot to cover. We can't cover it all.

“So I thought we could look at seven key moments in the history of wine moments that will enable us to trace its emergence.”

It's spread.

It's evolution into what it is now, which is basically a kind of 500 billion dollar industry.

You know, there are what, as you said, wineries in California and Australia and New Zealand and South Africa and all across the world. So it's a huge story. Where does it begin? Well, let's turn for that answer to the Bible and the book of Genesis. So we are told in the book of Genesis.

Noah, as in the arc, was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard and he drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent. Let's move on. Let's talk directly badly down. So anyone who's got paralytic may have some sympathies there for Noah.

And presumably he planted his vineyard on Mount Arorat, which is where the arc had come to rest. And Arorat is part of this kind of great range of mountains. South of the Black Sea in the east of Turkey. So you've got the tallest mountains, you've got the Caucasus, you've got the Zagros, the northern Zagros in Iran. And it's this kind of area where the key development in the history of wine took place.

And Dominic, this kind of basically involves science.

So it's the domestication of the Benefera grape, which is basically the grape from which all the great types of grape have descended today. And because I'm not entirely confident for my ability to sum up the science precisely, I'm going to quote from an excellent forthcoming book by Kathleen Burke, the great historian of America. Why in the global history, which is coming out of thinking September, and I saw a preview of it.

And she writes, "Wild grape vines are male or female." I don't know that. The female vines can produce fruit, but the male cannot. And so pollination has to take place by bees or the wind. What had to happen was crossbreeding either accidentally or by early man.

In order to create the hermaphroditic vine, able to produce fruit by itself. The vines are hermaphrodites. Did you know that? Everyone knows that, don't they?

No, they don't.

I've never heard that before.

The people of the Republic of Georgia, not the Jimmy Carter Georgia, but the Stalin Georgia. They're very proud of this aren't they? Because they see themselves as the home of wine. They argue that Georgia is the place on earth where wine has been produced for longer than anywhere else.

“And I think most people would say they're right.”

Yeah. Well, anyway, I'll give it. I mean, I think they're right. Because there is firm archaeological evidence. And this was found very near to Bleesey,

which is only about 100 odd miles from Ararat. So maybe the Bible was right. And they found shards of pottery, which has chemical traces of what seems to have been wine. And this dates all the way back to 6,000 BC. And then 2,000 years later, a village called Araney in Armenia

has evidence of the oldest known winery. And so this is a large wine press that was found in a cave. And there were traces of withered grapevines and of skins and of seeds. And I gather that wine is made in Araney to this day. And I went and looked up to see what they have to offer.

And apparently, there's a zool-out Araney dry red, which is described as balanced, pure and lush. Lush. Well, I know what people in the Holland House will be drinking. There's our median reds.

[laughter] I'm quite tempted to try that. Yeah, of course you are. I know your methods. I know you bought a massive bottle of wine in California,

“because I had Richard III's head on it or something, isn't that right?”

There was some historical reason I bought it. And that was very nice as well. I think the thing that's interesting about the Araney vine press isn't just that it's incredibly old, but also that it's pretty big. And so that suggests that already in whatever it is,

4,000 BC, wine is being made on a scale large enough that it can be handed out to other people. And so this is looking forward to the emergence of the wine trade, because in due time wine starts to reach Iran, Mesopotamia, Canaan, so what's now kind of the Levant.

Yeah. And the Canaanites are the forebears of the Phoenicians,

and they rank as the first mass exporters of wine.

So they're number two on my list of the key moments in the history of wine. So the centre of the Canaanite wine trade, which begins in the 6th millennium BC, is the Becker Valley in Lebanon. Big wine place now, Shate Musa, Massiah, Very big, pungent, heavy reds, but very nice, so would say.

Weirdly produced in Hezbollah control territory. Yeah, because it's where Balbek is, isn't it? The kind of great Roman temple complex. Yeah. So it's still going strong.

And Canaan becomes famous in the ancient world for its wines. So there's an Egyptian story that was written around 2,000 BC, in which Canaan is described as a land where wine is more plentiful than water. And the reason that the Egyptians know to say this is because, by 2,000 BC, there is a lot of wine being exported to Egypt, also to Cyprus,

and to Crete, all of which become very keen on wine. And the reason that the Canaanites can transported overseas is because they have invented the Amphora. I'm sure most people will be able to picture what an Amphora looks like, but just in case you can't, has two handles.

It's got a kind of pointed base so you can stick it in sand or marred or whatever. And it's got a very narrow neck, which you can then seal with a clay stopper. And having invented it, it's then used for thousands and thousands of years, actually right the way up to the coming of Islam in the 7th century AD. Have you ever had wine that was kept in an Amphora?

Because I have, there's a winery in the Alentazio, in Portugal, good Esparal. And there, you know, you're going to do a tasting. And they have wine that's kept in steel that's been kept in Oberols, obviously, so it tastes a little bit more. And then they've got wine that's been kept in a clay Amphora.

“Because that's what plentiful talking about isn't it?”

Is the difference between wood and clay? Of course, the different flavors that it gives you can actually, it does taste different, it's got a very clay and actually not unpleasant taste at all. And that's what most, I guess, most people in human history would have tasted when they drank wine. The taste of the clay Amphora.

Yeah. And it survives because it's incredibly useful.

I mean, it's kind of an amazing piece of tech, really.

And so it survives the collapse of the of canylite civilization in the Bronze Age collapse in the early 1100s BC. Everything is kind of left in rubble in Canaan, but then you have like flowers emerging from the frosts of winter, you have Phoenicians civilization.

than the Canaanites done.

“And in 1997, I read in Kathleen Burke's book, two Phoenicianships were found”

off Gaza, about 50 miles off by a US submarine. And this contained 781 Amphora, which is equivalent to 20,000 wine bottles. So I mean, that's a huge amount of trade. And other ships have been found that contain even kind of greater quantities. So the Phoenicians are able essentially to export wine across the entire Mediterranean

and actually beyond, you mentioned Portugal. Just south of Portugal is Cadiz, ancient goddess, it's Phoenician settlement. And wine Amphora have been found there dating from around 800 BC.

“So they must be the oldest known Amphora in Iberia, I would guess.”

And of course, the Phoenicians are in direct competition with another ancient people who are very keen on wine. And these are the Greeks, and they are also heading west, and they're also taking wine with them. And the classic account in literature of this is in the Odyssey, where Odysseus and his men are trying to get back with the curve from Troy, and they've picked up some 12 jars of a very precious red wine from a place in Thrace, the North of June, a place called Maron, and they end up with them on the island of the Cyclops.

And they take these vases up as a kind of gift for the inhabitants of this island. The Greeks dilute the wine, so it's kind of 19 water to one bit of wine. But polyphemous, the Cyclops who turns out to be the host of the Odysseus and his guys and ends up kind of trying to eat them all. He next the whole lot, and he does that because he's a complete barbarian, and he doesn't understand wine culture. And that is a reminder of the fact that the Greeks like the Phoenicians are not just exporting kind of physical quantities of alcohol.

They are also exporting an entire culture, an entire way of life, governed by rules, how much you dilute it. The kind of sociability that wine feels, so the symposia in ancient Greek, you kind of lie around and drink wine and talk philosophy. And this is part of what is being exported. So the Phoenicians are exporting the Spain, the Greeks are taking it to France. So they establish a colony massilia which will become Marseille around 600 BC, and of course wine is going to have a very, very promising future in Goul aka France.

So by the time the Roman Empire emerges, there is a wine culture that has spread from its home lands in the Near East across the Mediterranean and the Romans inherit this.

And the Romans are the third way stop on our journey through the history of wine, because the Roman Empire constitutes the first properly international wine culture.

Because it's a giant marketplace, globalized single market. Exactly. Now, to begin with, I guess a bit like Americans in the 19th or 20th century visiting the vineyards of Bordeaux, the Romans are very, very conscious of themselves as kind of parvenues. They're anxious about whether they're doing the right thing, bit like me going and displaying in my mastery of wine tasting. In the Navar Valley, they have a default assumption that the best wines are Greek and because of that, Greek wines become the most expensive.

Yeah. They are also people who listened to our episode on Carthage.

“We did one on the destruction of the city, and they may remember that all that the Carthaginian libraries kind of get disposed of, but the Romans keep one volume by an agronomist called Mego.”

And one of the reasons they wanted to keep him is that Mego was very famous writer on how you grow wines. And so that was translated from Carthaginian into Latin and became very important influence on the growth of vineyards in Italy. But actually, what happens is that wine beds down so deeply into the soil of Roman Italy, that as the Legion start expanding beyond the limits of the Mediterranean, wine becomes a marker of Romans civilization. It becomes one of the kind of the key light motifs of what it is to be Roman.

And actually a bit like whiskey in the expansion of the American West, wine plays a role in Rome's imperial expansion, say, inter-integral.

So, in the second century BC, Rome has occupied the south, Massilia Massay is a part of the Roman Empire.

And the Romans are kind of looking northwards wondering about how they're going to pacify all these terrifying tribes that live there. And so, merchants start traveling up the rivers into the interior of Gaul, and they take wine with them.

They kind of wallow in drunken binges to quote one Greek historian, they end up so inebriated that they either fall asleep or go mad.

“And essentially, what the Roman merchants are doing is to create a market of alcoholics.”

And by doing that, because the Gaul's become alcoholics, the merchants can then inflate their prices, perfect. And to make sure that it's only the Romans who can provide the wine, the Senate passes an official decree banning the selling of vines to the Gaul's. So the manufacturing of wine remains in Roman hands. And the result of that is that by the time of Julius Caesar, who's going to conquer Gaul, the exchange rate, I mean, is insane.

It's one and four of wine basically equates to a slave, you know, and a slave is worth a lot.

And so this in turn generates fighting among the Gauls, because they need to capture slaves if they're going to get the wine.

“So it makes any notion of Gallic and Unity against the advance of the Romans impossible. Well, for the Romans, it's a virtue of circle, because you buy the, you get these slaves in return for the wine.”

You can then sell it to viticulturists who can then use the slaves to make more wine, which then gets the Gauls even more pissed. And that in turn, frost is more wars, which results in more slaves. And, you know, it's brilliant to basically wine is what enables Julius Caesar to conquer Gaul. You can expect a dimension of history of wine, perhaps. That is not expected I mentioned.

So by the time Pliny is writing, what did we say the first century AD was it? Yeah, first century AD.

The Roman kind of wine world encompasses quite a lot of the areas that we now associate with wine. So you mentioned, you've got Greece. I mean, Greece is not a massive wine powerhouse. Now, although there are some nice wines and Greece, the Becker Valley in Lebanon, there's some very nice wines made in Lebanon. Wine is spread into France, so it's already in Burgundy, the Loir, the Mosell and the Rhine, for example. So there's areas that are kind of slightly on the periphery of the Roman world. But above all Italy, by the time Augustus, Tiberius and Co are in charge, Italy is the home and the heartland of wine, isn't it? It's taken over from Greece and indeed from Georgia.

Yeah, so Greek wine makers are basically kind of artisanal wine makers. The Romans are doing it on an industrial scale. I mean, they've got all these slaves for instance.

But they're not just kind of mass producing. They also have really superb wines of which the classic is called Follernian. So Pliny loves Follet. I mean, basically, all the Romans love Follernian. That is the best. As it had done in Greece, it has become part of Roman culture. So it absolutely saturates the work of all the great Roman poets. And one of the most famous phrases from Roman poetry is still in use Carpe Diem, from the poet Horace. I mean, that's an illusion to Tiberti culture. It's, you know, pluck the day as though the day is kind of a bunch of grapes on the vine.

So there is, you know, in a kind of everyday language still used today is a kind of trace element of how deeply the Romans were influenced by their relationship with wine. Now, of course, the collapse of Roman power when it comes in the West ends this sense of a common civilization that had been bonded by the drinking of wine. And made the chaos of Rome's fall. Vineyards are either destroyed or they're abandoned completely. The barbarians who are the new masters of the Western provinces tend to drink beer in preference to wine.

Well, beer is easier to produce. You don't use such a sophisticated system to produce beer. And it's better suited to the kind of cold, cold climates of the north. But the main factor is just the destruction of the Roman single market. You know, they just aren't the kind of the trade network that had previously existed. However, all that said, the wine culture is not obliterated. It does survive. And there are two things really that make that possible. The first is that there are kind of trade links. They do survive.

“So the Rhine in particular is absolutely crucial. It comes to be called a river of wine. So much wine flows down it. And it is from the wine that it ends up reaching Scandinavia, for instance, where wine becomes very popular with the Viking elites.”

Despite the fact or actually maybe because of the fact that it is so expensive. I mean, everyone has been Scandinavia knows that why wine in Scandinavia is madly expensive. It's in the point that wine, then, as now, is a marker of sophistication. It's seen as identified with Roman culture and therefore it's prestigious. And so it maintains this prestige throughout the kind of the early Middle Ages. The other reason, of course, is Christianity because wine is incredibly important to Christian ritual if you're going to celebrate the Eucharist, the mass you need wine.

And so, Abbey's in particular in the early Middle Ages are great enthusiasts for vineyards. Again, particularly in Germany. So all along the length of the Rhine, you have these Abbey's with vineyards. And that's what enables the Rhine to become this kind of great channel for the wine trade.

The way a guild of someone who's working on a vineyard is set at twice the level of a plowman or a cow herd, which suggests how prestigious and how important vineyards are already coming to seem to the Franks. And over the course of the early Middle Ages, what will become France starts to recover quicker from the chaos of the time, then Italy, and France comes to replace Italy as the centre of the wine trade.

“But you still all the way through the early Middle Ages into the high Middle Ages. The still no real sense of a wine culture that is international in its scale of the kind that it existed under the Roman Empire.”

And it says later as 1596, so you know, well into the Renaissance, when you have an Italian scholar who's a guy called Andrea Batchi, and he published a great seven volume survey of wine. And this is the first great survey of wine that has been written since Pliny 1500 years before, and of course Pliny is a massive influence on it.

But of course, we've talked about the Roman continuity, though, Tom. So areas that produce wine under the Romans or were celebrated if they're wine, are still celebrated today.

“But there are obvious exceptions to that. And that's partly because much of what was once the Eastern Roman Empire has been taken over by the armies of Islam, and obviously wine has a very different place in Islamic culture than it does in Christian.”

Yeah, well, we mentioned already how, and for which had been around since, you know, the early Kernan period, they vanish in the seventh century, which is the period that sees the caliphate established. They've a much of what had been the Roman and Persian Empire, both of which had been very keen on wine. And I think the repudiation of the culture of wine under the caliphate is a very dramatic marker of just how transformative Islam inspired to be, and was would obviously have been one that was experienced as such by people who come under the caliphate.

So in Islam, the mainstream legal position on wine is unambiguous. You shouldn't drink it. So according to the Quran, which for Muslims is, I mean, literally it's divinity in the form of language, wine is an abomination.

“And it's been invented by Satan to encourage people, to kind of brawl and fight, and to distract the faithful from the Quran, from the remembrance of God and from prayer, will ye not then abstain?”

And this keranic verdict is buttressed by the Hadiths, which are the saying above all of Muhammad, the prophet, so the prophet is supposed to have spoken as follows about wine. God has cursed wine, the one who drinks it, the one who pours it, the one who sells it, the one who buys it, the one who squeezes the grape to make it, the one for whom it is made, the one who transports it, the one to whom it is brought. And then there are the four legal schools that you get in Sunni Islam, that emerge in the first centuries of the caliphate, and all four of these are very strict in their attitude to punishments for drinking wine, the sanctions.

So the general consensus is that if you drink wine and you are free person, you get 80 lashes of the whip, and if you are a slave, you get 40 lashes, some schools emphasise a saying of the prophet, a Hadith, which say that you should be lashed with palm branches, stripped of their leaves, and also spanked with a slipper.

That's probably better than getting a whip, I would guess, but I mean, neither of them sound fun, slipper swappens like Billy Bunter, that seems like a very peculiar punishment.

Dorm feasts. Yeah, having feasts and stealing jam and stuff. Why drinking does persist, though, no? Yeah, partly because there are moments in the Quran where wine is described in a more positive way. Absolutely, there are ambivalences in the Islamic attitude to wine. So I've given the kind of the hard core perspective, you are right, there are verses in the Quran that have a slightly less strict attitude to wine. So there's one that kind of seems to imply that wine might have positives as well as negatives, and there's also one that seems to imply that it's okay to get drunk, as long as you're not going to then go and pray.

The problem is that these verses, according to Islamic scholarly tradition, had preceded the verse that explicitly bands alcohol, and therefore, according to Islamic scholarship, are abrogated.

However, if you want to drink and you go to heaven, there's great news because the Quran promises that up in heaven, there will be rivers of wine, and they will be a joy to those who drink.

Because a lot of caliphs are very keen on wine. And the scope also for lawyers to do what lawyers do, which is always to try and get round legal prescription. So one of the four legal schools in Sonia Islam, the Hannafis, they point out that the Quran has banned wine that has been made from grapes, but not from dates.

“And so they suggest that maybe if you make wine from dates, that will be fine. And they also rule that it's not the actual drinking of wine that a noise God, it's the getting drunk.”

So basically, if you can drink wine but not get drunk, then you're okay. Our quote from Sadikab Kadrian is wonderful book on Sharia Law Heaven on Earth. This, according to these jurists, meant that Muslims could legally drink as much wine as they liked, and I quote, until they became incapable of telling a slave girl from a beardless boy. So bad news for light weights, but good news for the rest of us. Yeah, exactly. I mean, but I suppose the question that's left open is how do you, how do you become so in the order to wine that you, you can drink four bottles and still tell a slave girl from a beardless boy apart.

If you know, you know, so we did a, we did an episode about the golden age of Baghdad and we, and Baghdad is peak, it's kind of medieval peak. There are loads of taverns serving wine, but interesting, they're run not by Muslims but by Christians. So the wine trade is monopolized by Christians, right? Yeah, because Christians need it for the, for the mass, and so that's fine, and they're not, they're not kind of bound by caronic prescriptions and descriptions. And Harun Al Rashid, who is the, the Khalif, the golden age of Baghdad, the Khalif, lots of the stories in the Arabian night.

He's sponsored a famous poet called Abunawas, so he of the dangling locks of hair, and he was notoriously transgressive, very disillude, very fond of wine. And he wrote a notorious piece of poetry about the rivers of wine that flow in heaven according to the Quran.

“As for that, which is forbidden, whatever could be daftah, a thing banned in this world yet abounds in the hair after. Yeah, maybe because rhymes in English as well as Arabic.”

In other words, Islam is kind of an amazingly rich civilization in which there are enormous shades of opinion and behavior.

Right. And by the 13th, by the 14th centuries, the tension in the attitudes to wine in the Islamic world have come to foster kind of very sophisticated cultures within the overall civilization of Islam. And there are two kind of representative figures of these cultures. So the first, this is the guy who's not in favor of wine is a bloke called Ibn Tamir. He is a hard-line Sunni reformist. He's trying to reform the Islamic world in the wake of the catastrophe of the Mongol invasions.

“And so he says, get rid of all this legal quibbling and attempts to soft soap the Quran and the Hadiths. We've got to go back to basics. So he's absolutely dogmaticly opposed to wine.”

He's also very opposed to a kind of hip, new intoxicant that's appeared on the scene called Hashish.

And Ibn Tamir describes Hashish as being to wine as feces are to urine. So there's a marketing slogan. And he says to anyone who disagrees with his judgment is an apostate and therefore subject to the penalties of a post-C which would include death.

And Ibn Tamir is basically he's the godfather of Salafism, of kind of Islamism.

Very hard-core radical, Jadi Islam. Against that there's a much more kind of hippie 1960s friendly kind of of Islam called Sufism. And one of the great representative figures of Sufism is a person mystic and poet called Rumi, who is a massive bestseller throughout the 60s and 70s in America. And in Rumi's poetry, wine serves as a metaphor for the experience of divine love. And so Rumi in kind of poetry that is designed to seem shocking to its readers says that the image of the soul that has opened itself up to the love of God is that of the drunk.

One who staggers around, he's so kind of overcome by intoxicants. This is not because Rumi is saying it's really going to get drunk. He's not offering this metaphor literally. He doesn't seem to have drunk wine himself, but he's using it kind of to imply that wine is the best metaphor that believers have for how God should be experienced.

And he frames the spiritual path of the believer as being a journey back to the tasting of that primordial wine. So you can see why it would appeal to hippies, I guess, in the 60s. And why it appeal to lots of Muslims and has appeal to lots of Muslims throughout the course of Islamic history. Now, Ibn Tamir obviously sees it as rubbish. He's very opposed to the Sufi, he thinks they're basically not Muslim at all. And Rumi in turn, he sees the sobriety of the conventionally pious people like Ibn Tamir as a form of spiritual death as not really being Islam at all.

“And I think that what this illustrates is that even when wine is banned, it can still have a kind of massive, massive cultural influence.”

Yeah, and of course when it's not banned, well, the sky is a limit. All right, so let's take a break and we'll come back after the break to delve deeper into the limitless bottle of wine history. Welcome back to the rest is history and you have not yet drunk your fill because we have talked about four of the key moments in the history of wine from prehistory to the present and we have three to go. And one thing that we have been lacking is one of the world's great wine heavy weights and that is our own dear country of England.

“If we listen to this may raise an eyebrow that and say England wine, they're quite wrong of course because if England doesn't necessarily produce the greatest wine surely we rank among the world's great consumers.”

And actually now an Englishman is at my right to think the it is the English that gave us bottles of wine Tom the first modern wine bottle not the first wine bottle.

So wine bottles are actually 2000 years old they seem to have originated in Syria in the first century BC they picked up by the Romans Roman glass blowers kind of refined them but they never use for transportation because the glasses too fragile they would smash their purely decorative kind of markers of status. In 1967 one of these wine bottles was found in a tomb and spare on the Rhine telling me again you know this the river of of wine. And it dated from the fourth century and it contained liquid wine and it is the world's oldest unopened wine bottle although the wine within it is not the oldest wine to have been found because that was discovered two years ago in a tomb in Spain it was in an earn and that dates back to the first century.

A D. Okay some vintage is there.

“God nice what it would taste like but the problem with with wine bottles up to this point was sunny for centuries.”

Is it the glass is to delicate right so there's a huge problem you're going to you're basically they're going to break and it is English glass makers. It is who solved this this difficult technical issue. Who wrote for us so this happens in the early 17th century so in the 1620s English glass makers start to develop. Furnaces that divide by coal rather than wood and then the following decade they introduce wind tunnels which apparently produce even higher furnace heat and at the same time the recipe for making glass was changed and I'm going to quote Kathleen Burke here because I don't entirely understand what it means but technologically minded people would.

So the recipe for making glass was changed by raising the ratio of sand to potash and lime. If you have more sand you just got a better bottle basically cut off too much potash.

No too much potash is never never.

Yeah definitely so who's behind this history records the name of one inventor in particular he gets named in a parliamentary inquiry that was held in 1662 to identify who had basically invented this new unbreakable form of grass. And they fingered this absolute top lad called kennel digby oh yeah and digby is a tremendous character. So he was raised to Catholic he was actually the son of one of the conspirators in the gunpowder plot he'd been executed. He becomes a private here he goes around capturing Dutch merchant man which don't want to come show you a proof of I do splendidly he sells into the Mediterranean and he negotiates the release of 50 English slaves from the barbry pirates of how jazz so that reflects well on him.

He's then briefly imprisoned for killing a French nobleman in a duel he has an absolutely shambolic record in the civil war he's kind of always hearing around losing battles left right in center.

But he becomes a massive favorite of Henrietta Maria the wife of Charles the first and accompanies her into exile after her husband is executed.

And I suspect that that part of that is because he's the favorite of Henrietta Maria. Yes, this is slightly undeserved doesn't it that loads of people working on this and he's basically just the figurehead.

“Yeah, but he's a fun figurehead and so I think I think we should celebrate him.”

So these bottles that digby and various other entrepreneurs who are less interesting have developed they come to be called English bottles across across Europe. And then English bottle has glass that is thicker it's heavier it's stronger and also crucially it's cheap to manufacture. And the glass is very dark because of the coal fumes and this comes to be seen by consumers as a kind of mark of quality. Essentially that is why wine bottles tend to be dark to this day it's a kind of legacy of its origins in the 17th century.

And so interesting and then never occurred to me before but yeah, why are they murky and that's the reason.

Well, yeah, it's because of us so hooray and crucially the glass is strong enough to contain sparkling wine because that sparkling wine has got CO2 that is trying to get out. And if the wine if the glass isn't solid enough then it will kind of explode and send shards of glass flying through the air. And up until the invention of English glass if you kept sparkling wine in a cellar you'd have to wear a helmet because it might explode at any moment. You know you might end up with a shower glass in your eye. So very dangerous.

But now hooray, English glasses appeared on the scene. Initially they're pear-shaped then onion-shaped and then by the 1740s they've come to take on the shape that everyone will be familiar with now. And because you can then lie them down in rows this facilitates the emergence of wine sellers in the form that people will recognise today. And these wine bottles they have comes very narrow tops and so they can be stopped at. And what you use to stop at it increasingly is cork and cork is produced in Portugal and in England access to cork is facilitated in 1703 by the signing of what is very much.

A friend of the rest is history and that's the messy in treaty. And Dominic we've had the messy in treaty quite a lot on the rest is history.

“We have we did a whole episode about the Matthew and Treaty. I think we did the 12 days of Christmas or something like that.”

I can't remember exactly what it was. But just remind people who may not remember what the Matthew and Treaty is. So England is at war with France. So access to French wine has been cut off. Now the Matthew and Treaty is a treaty that allows wool to go to Portugal, England's oldest ally and at the same time England cuts import duties on Portuguese wine.

So Portuguese wine comes together. The way this is the sort of genesis of the English fascination with port. Port wine isn't it? Yeah exactly. So when you go to Porto and you go at the banks of the River Duro, you see all the great, you know, port wine lodges, tailors and sandaments. Also, in the Alentasia, which is the kind of Portuguese rural heartland.

There are these great forests. I was actually only there a couple of weeks ago. There are all these forests that produce cork. And Portugal still to this day is the world's great producer of corks. Yeah.

“And again, the cork is a little bit like the dark wine bottle isn't it?”

There are lots of people, particularly in the New World and Australia and in California, who say why we're still using cork, you know, a screw top is just as good. But cork is seen as a market of prestige and quality. And you know, if you buy a very expensive bottle of wine, you don't expect it to have a screw cap. You expect it to have a Portuguese cork.

I mean, of course, in the early 18th century, cork does present a problem, which is how do you get the cork out? Right. And so the English, as well as inventing the modern wine bottle, also invent the cork screw.

And so the first mention of a cork screw is described as a silver worm comes in 681.

And then brilliantly, in 1720, that's the first poem about a cork screw and I will quote from it. So Roger said his teeth to work this way and that's the cork he applied and wrenched in vain from side to side. So we can't open it. Then back as the god of wine appears to him in a dream and gives him a cork screw and then the poem continues. He to the cork applied to the point. Then bending earthward lobe a twist his knees, the bottle firmly fixed and giving it a sudden jerk from its close prison wrenched the cork.

I think everyone who's, you know, drinks wine has had a moment like that with a cork, where basically something's going to hit his sleeve wrong when you can't get it out and you'll just shame yourself from front of your guests. But the cork screw, so this point, the cork screw is not a patented thing.

It's not the first patent for it. It's not granted until the end of the 18th century, right to a clergyman, 1795 and the clergyman is called Samuel Henshull.

Of course there are.

“Most of them seem to live in Canada for some reason and they all came over and set up a plaque to Samuel Henshull in Bo Church in the East End because that's where he'd been.”

And there are very detailed descriptions as to exactly what his revolutionary about this cork screw that I've read about 10 times and I still don't really understand.

But anyway, well done Samuel Henshull. He invents the cork screw. But I'm afraid Dominic that that's probably all we've got time for when it comes to English inventiveness on this particular episode because that was number five in our top seven moments in the history of wine. And now we need to come on to number six, which is the invention of the language of wine and the language of wine, of course, is French. So now we come to our beloved neighbor across the channel. So the French have been producing wine all through this period.

Well since the Romans. Yeah, we talked about the Gallic enthusiasts and for wine.

They've been producing it through the Roman period.

Well, when the English control bore dough in the middle ages, that is producing clarot for English tables. And you were sneering at my inability to tell between a light and a heavy red wine. I wasn't sneering, I was just remarking. So, um, clarot comes for Clerre. It means lighter and that becomes anglicised clarot. And it's a reflection of the way in which clarot in the middle ages was a light red and now tends to be associated with kind of much heavier kind of richer red wines.

But of course the English lose controllable dough at the end of the hundred years' war and going into the sixteenth and then into the seventeenth century. And it may be because that unbiblical chord with England has been as broken. France has kind of rolled in the wine trade. It ceases to be as absolutely central as it had been in the Middle Ages. So it's not just the hundred years' war that's having an impact. There's also the rise of the Duchess, the great global commercial power.

They do invest very heavily in French wine. But they are also at Reconoitering Portugal, Reconoiting Spain. They make a trade agreement with the Ottomans to buy Greek wines. And then of course the Matthew and treaty coming in between England and Portugal means that port wine is much cheaper in England and French wine. And of course it doesn't happen that France and Britain are just constantly at war throughout the eight seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.

“So I think all of that impairs the notion of France as being economically central to the wine trade in the early modern period.”

But even as it's going into retreat perhaps economically, its cultural centrality is going on by leaps and bounds. And the legacy of that cultural centrality is with us today and it spreads around the world. So it's why there are winemakers in New Zealand who will talk about their terra, it's why you have wines in South Africa that will be labeled "go-crew". And it's why in California a land famously without carcels. There are shadow.

Yeah. And the thing I find so fascinating about this process is it's a little bit like the emergence of the suit. And we did an episode on that. And you can kind of pinpoint the moment when the suit is invented thanks to the diaries of Samuel Peeps, who was writing in post-restration London, so in the 1660s. And Samuel Peeps pops up again with reference to this process whereby French comes to be the language of wine.

And it's a diary entry for the tenth of April 1663. I'd dominant you're a very Peepsian figure. I mean not in every sense. No, but the pleasant senses. The confivality. There's a dark side of the peeps that I don't, that I don't endorse anyway.

Of the exchange with such a cutleromist to grant to the royal oak tavern in Lombard Street,

“where broom the poet was a Mary and witty man, I believe, if he'd be not a little conceited.”

And here Drank is sort of French wine called Ho Brian, that has a good and most particular taste that I never met with.

Now, this is so interesting, isn't it? Because what he call it, Ho Brian. Yeah, he's approached the pronouncing for a language, it's very much mine. So it's actually O'Brien, which was the first, this is so interesting. The first Bordeaux wine, so the first Claret, to be sold in London, not labeled as Bordeaux or as Claret. And not labels, because they always used to have the label.

Well, often on the label, they would have the name of the wine merchant, wouldn't they? Yeah, but this bottle that Peeps has been drinking has the name of the estate that made the wine.

And it's been produced by this guy called Uno de Pontac, back in Bordeaux, he's president of the provincial parliament there.

“He's not particularly interested in wine, but what he has a complete genius for is marketing.”

And in 1666, he's capitalizing on this kind of enthusiasm in London for Ho Brian, you know, this kind of marketing of his own estate.

And he sends his son to open what effectively becomes London's first restaurant. And it's a very luxurious tavern that is modestly called Pontac's head after Uno de Pontac himself.

And it becomes a hugely, hugely fashionable. And that means that the Pontac's can massively raise the price that they can charge for the wine. So the normal price for wine in restoration London is about two shillings, but the O'Brien at Pontac's head can be sold for seven shillings. And what Pontac is demonstrating is that ultimately a wine is worth what people are prepared to pay for it. Of course, that ultimately is the only objective way of measuring a wine. And he realizes he's really onto something. So he wants to sell a second wine.

So how is he going to do that? He starts to market O'Brien as his first growth, which in French is growing crew. And then he markets that stuff from his second estate as being his doesiam crew. So his second growth. And this again is establishing a template for classifying wine that will have a very very long existence. And it's one that gets taken up by other estates in the Bordeaux region.

So by the 1720s, there are three other estates that are marketing themselves. O'Brien had been marketing itself. This is La Feet, La Torre, and Amargo, very famous names, if you interested in wine. So these estates are in the mid-Occ, which is on the left side of the Girond, which is the estuary, which leads to Bordeaux. O'Brien itself is, I mean, today it's basically a suburb of Bordeaux, but they're all kind of roughly in the same area. And they establish themselves as the absolute aristocracy of Bordeaux vineyards.

And the revolution comes and goes, terrible slaughter in the region, but the vineyards survive. And by 1855 Napoleon III, who is Emperor in France, by then, he's staging a great universal exposition in Paris. And he wants to use it to showcase the very best wines that France has. And so he asks the wine brokers to come up with a list of the best wines. They get down to it, and they draw up a list of the 60 best reds.

And each one is classified as a gone crew, and they're placed in one of five separate classes. And the top class, there are only four wines. And these are the original vineyards. So that's O'Brien, La Feet, La Torre, and Amargo.

And it's a status that they have never lost.

And only one other vineyard has been added to it in all that time. And that was Shadow Mutant, Ross Child, in 1973, which was promoted from Premier Crew to Premier Grand Crew. So they are tremendous honour. And this is language that is understood by wine enthusiasts around the world.

“And it's an incredible manifestation of France's enduring cultural prestige, I think.”

I mean, not just in the field of wine, but more generally, it's a kind of emblem of luxury. But Dominic, sticking up for our in beloved country, I think it's also emblematic of England's cultural prestige, because the rankings when they were drawn up in 1855 weren't based on kind of objective standards of quality. They were based on how much people in England were prepared to pay for the wine. So to quote Kathleen Burke, the English had long been admired for having what were considered to be the best pallets in the world.

And so therefore, what the English were prepared to pay for these wines provided the French with their standard for judging what the best wines were. It's not interesting. So the French make the best wines, but the people who decide which those wines are are English consumers.

“Yes, and I think that's still true today.”

I mean, when you say English consumers, it's obviously aristocratic consumers. Well, do you know what? It's funny, we're talking about the English pallets.

But as late as the 1950s, most English people never, ever drank wine in any given year.

Yes, so it's very much the kind of the upper classes.

“But, you know, this works well for Bulldo, but what about other regions?”

Now, the French are as good at marketing wine as they are at making it.

So in 1677, the philosopher John Locke, he goes on one of the first recorded wine tours of Bulldo.

So he's the ancestor of our tours around Napa Valley and so on. And, of course, he goes to visit what he describes as Pontax vineyard at Hotel Brian. And he goes there and he's expecting kind of rich fertile soil to produce such a kind of exquisite wine. And he's really puzzled. The soil is terrible. He writes, it's nothing but pure white sand mixed with a little gravel.

“One would imagine it's scarce fit to bear anything.”

And then he goes south, he tours the longer dock. And again, he notes that the more kind of barren and gravelly a slope looks. The better the wine tends to be that it's produced on that slope.

And he's told by the wine grows in the longer dock that ultimately nothing matters more than the quality.

And I quote, "Of the soil, they plant in on which very much depends the goodness of the wine." And this, of course, is a concept that goes back to Pliny. He's obsessed by this, the quality of the soil. But in France, particularly in the 19th and especially in the 20th century, this notion of the soil and its relationship to the wine it produces comes to have an almost spiritual quality.

And it comes to be focused in a word that is essentially untranslatable. And this is Terroar.

So there have been attempts, so the geologist James Wilson, he describes Terroar as being the totality of the elements of the vineyard habitat.

“But I think for the French, it's important that it's untranslatable because the more that France industrializes through the 19th century,”

so the more Terroar comes to signify for conservatives. And I think most people who end vineyards tend to be conservative. It comes to signify something that they are afraid is under attack. And that is the roots of lapartery of ancient France. The attachment of the French to their ancient soil, the sense of being under threat from industrialization, from foreigners, from Germans, from whoever.

Yeah. It matters to them that Terroar is something that only the French can properly understand. Well, of course, it becomes very useful later in the 20th century when they're facing competition from the new world. And they can say, "Well, look, you may have this, you may have that, but you don't have our tradition in our Terroar." Right, because just because something is deeply felt on a kind of spiritual dimension, doesn't mean that you can't use it to vlog wine,

which is exactly what the French are doing, particularly in places where they don't have exclusive shadow, like in Bordeaux. So Burgundy would be the perfect example, again, a very very famous area of France, but because it's not connected by the sea to England, it doesn't have this kind of history, this pedigree. And so they, in Burgundy, they market their vineyards, which tend to be on a very small scale as being embodiment of ancient Gallic tradition. These traditions are basically an invention of the 1920s. It's very like the episode we did on the history of Italian food. I mean, you discover that all these traditions are completely marketing inventions in the 20th century.

And they're marketed because tourists love them, and it helps to sell all these wines from Burgundy that otherwise wouldn't have perhaps a ready market. And as you say, it's also a way in the world that follows the Second World War of slapping down competition in the new world. Because they were starting to get pretenders in California, in Australia, New Zealand, in South Africa, all of which are places without ancient shadow, without kind of jovial peasant, steeply rooted in the soil, with traditional festivities that have been invented in the 1920s.

And it's a way of telling, saying to the world, there is no way that any wine can compete with a wine that has been grown in the terra of Burgundy, or of Bojale, or of the Longadoc, or wherever. Well, people genuinely believe that didn't they for a long time until the 1970s, the most interesting decade in history, and we come to our final moment, which is the judgment of Paris. That's 1976, and actually members of the rest of the history club will be hearing a bit more about this on a bonus episode on Wednesday with a great wine writer Henry Jeffries who will be talking about this, and indeed about wine in the new world, and the history behind it, and the relationship with British Empire and so on. So that's on Wednesday, but Tom, tell us a little bit about the judgment of Paris, because this is probably the most celebrated moment, when those controversial moments in the entire modern history of wine making.

So essentially, he's trying to think of some kind of weeds that would enable him to promote the new world wines in a way that the French might respond to.

The problem he faces is that the French are convinced that Californian wines and American wines more generally are terrible, and in the 1970s, you can kind of see why the French would assume this, because essentially the story of Californian wine focuses pretty much everything that the French despise about America more generally.

“You know, there's a lot of anti-Americanism in France in the period. So, Californian wine, it's all about vulgarity, the French think.”

And the archetype for this vulgarity is a guy called Leel and Stanford, who was a railroad entrepreneur, it became Governor of California, and of course he's the founder of the university that is named after him, Stanford University.

Stanford goes on holiday to Bordeaux, and he tours all the great vineyards, and he thinks I'd like a bit of this, I could have this in California, and he goes back home.

Not only does he want a bit of Bordeaux, he wants to do it on a much larger scale, and so he plants these massive vineyards. But the problem is, he doesn't know about Taiwan, he plants it on very kind of rich soil, on an enormous scale, he hasn't scoped out the climate, and the problem is that the vine's just don't give the grapes of the standard that he requires, so by 1890, it's his fourth vintage, and it's terrible, and he produces two million gallons of wine, and the standard is so low that it all of it has to be distilled into Brandy.

“You know, when the news of that reaches Bordeaux and thinks it's hilarious and confirms them in all their darker suspicions, to be fair, we've all had American wines, the taste like that.”

But then, so a huge problem for American wine makers is that there's a lot of Americans think they shouldn't be making wine at all, because they don't think alcohol should have any place in American culture. Right, and so this, of course, is the strain of puritanism in American culture, which French wine grows also despise, and the great manifestation of this is the prohibition of alcohol between 1920 and 1933, which completely destroys the California and wine industry, which has just been starting to kind of get on its feet at that point.

Americans are superb at selling stuff, and they have lawyers who are superb at kind of getting round legal restrictions. So there's a lot of entrepreneurial ingenuity invested into attempts to try and get round prohibition.

“So would be wine makers in America, can order packages of pressed grapes from the vineyards that have survived in California, and these will be sent to you and they're called wine bricks, and they will be accompanied by a yeast pill.”

There's a warning, a company's this yeast pill, it says, "Oh no, I can't use this yeast pill, whatever you do." And I quote, "If you do use it, this will turn into wine which would be illegal."

So don't do it. Yeah, I mean, to be fair, it sounds like the wine would be terrible that you're making with a pill and a brick of grapes. Yeah, but it's alcoholic, I guess, would be the tape. And the other thing that people do is to register as rabbis, so to quite carefully work in her forthcoming book on the history of wine. The Jewish faith requires the religious use of wine in the home, anybody could call himself a rabbi and get a permit to buy wine legally, merely by presenting a list of his congregation.

Millions of all faiths and no faith became members of fake synagogues, some without their knowledge when the lists were copied from telephone directories. There's also quite a lot of people in this period who are registering themselves as priests and so on. All right, I'm making wine for the Eucharist. That's nothing that helps the French to think that California and why makers will be good. And then there's the whole kind of the sense that Americans are willing to sacrifice quality on the altar of commercialism.

And there are all of us very sweet wines, wines flavored with chocolate, cranberry flavored wines. I mean, basically, whatever the consumer wants, God, and French wine drink has just stray their hands up and kind of save the horror the horror. So Steven Spurrier, realising the scale of the challenge decides to stage this blind tasting of French and Californian wines and he brings in nine French wine experts who will do it blind. Anyway, wine experts, some of these people are the arbiter's of French wine.

So I mean, as the head of the inological institute of France, there is the head of the wine academy, there is the inspector general of the Appalachian D'Origin Controle board, which is basically the board that decides whether your wine, you know, gets Appalachian status, gets the sort of badge of quality.

Yeah, so their decisions will echo and reverberate around France. And perhaps beyond. And so what do they decide?

So they're presented with the whites first and, you know, this kind of wine equivalent to the Academy of François, deliver their opinion.

And it's a shocker. A Californian, Schardonnay comes in first, then a burgundy, and then two more Californian, Schardonnay's. So Sacra Blur. Then it's time for the reds and surely this time, French wine will step up to the plate. But no. Again, the result is a bombshell. So the 1970 Shateau Mutant Ross Child comes in second.

“And remember, it's just that being promoted to the top league by this point. So it really should be, you know, at the top.”

But it isn't because the wine that is voted number one comes from a Californian vineyard that had only been planted in 1970.

Yeah, Stag's Leap and it had been planted brilliantly by a man called Warren Winniaski. Couldn't be more American. It's new and it's printed by a bloke called Warren. And the spirit had invited. Actually, I think Spirius Partner, who is American, had invited the Paris Correspondent of Time Magazine to watch it. And he writes it up. Last week in Paris France at a formal wine tasting organized by Spirius, the unthinkable happened. But California defeated all goal. And there is a tone there of, you know, maybe a Roman crowing over the Greeks after they've been defeated by Italian wines in 50 BC.

We're a canaanite, perhaps celebrating the victory of the Becker Valley over a rainy in 3000 BC. And I mean, it's had a pretty seismic impact, I think, hasn't it, on the prestige, not just of California and wines, but of new world wines generally. Oh, totally. And I guess Henry will be talking more about that.

“But I think it's important to emphasize, it isn't just the story of the new world bankishing the old, because I think France definitely retains its prestige even today.”

So we've said already that there are lots of vineyards in California with the name Shateau in the title. Well, one of those wines in the judgment of Paris was from a winery. I think, found in something like 1971 or 1972, called Clude Uval. So given a kind of artificial, contrived French name to denote quality. Yeah, and the Americans, you know, have massively invested in Bordeaux as the British had done before them. And as the Chinese are doing now, and it's kind of interesting that, I said, maybe you can kind of track the course of super power status by the degree to which a country can invest in Bordeaux. So Britain and its great imperial age was investing in America now, China.

And the notion of Tévoir, we've said, you know, it's like a cutting from Burgundy has been transplanted to the opposite ends of the world. So New Zealand, that wine grows there a particularly keen on the notion of Tévoir. It's been mingled with, and I hope I get the pronunciation of this right. It's a married notion of belonging to a particular place called Tu-rang-a-y-y. I mean, that trips of the tongue. I probably haven't pronounced that right, but it means literally a place to stand, apparently.

Okay. So, ending on a kind of a Renic note, I like to think that the history of wine isn't just about competition, but it's about partnership.

“It's always in that kind. There's a nice note on which to end. I think it's about competition, frankly, but there you go.”

You're probably right. But I think, I mean, I think ultimately, if you're not a kind of wine showvenist, but just a man who enjoys wine, then it doesn't really matter.

I think it would be nice to end on a note of poetry. We've had quite a lot of poetry, and this is poetry that says, ultimately, it doesn't matter what the history of wine has been, and it doesn't matter what will be. Sometimes from a person like Rumi, another great devotee of wine, and this is Omar Kayam, are fill the cup, what boots it to repeat, how time is slipping underneath our feet, unborn tomorrow, and dead yesterday, why fret about them, if today be sweet. Lovely. Such an interesting story. And if you're interested in hearing more about the history of wine, we will be talking about wine in the new world, and its relationship to deeper historical changes.

And of course, if you're keen to hear more about the history of wine, or indeed about the subject to our next regular episode, which is about the Mona Lisa, then there will be lots more in our super sore away new newsletter to which I'm very much looking forward.

“All right, thank you very much Tom. Cheers and Someday, everybody. Bye-bye. Goodbye, everyone.”

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