Wine History

The history of wine spans thousands of years and is very much tangled with the history of farming, cuisine, society and humankind itself. Archaeological proof suggests that the first wine making came from sites in Georgia and Iran, dating from 6000 to 5000 BC. The archaeological proof becomes clearer and points to domestication of grapevine in Early Bronze Age sites of the Near East, Sumer and Egypt from approximately the 3rd millennium BC.

Proof of the initial European wine making has been exposed at archaeological sites in Macedonia, dated to 6,500 years ago. These same sites also include remnants of the world’s earliest proof of smashed grapes. In Egypt, wine was a part of recorded olden times, playing an important role in ancient traditional life. Traces of natural wine dating from the second and first millennium BC have also been found in China.

Wine was regular in traditional Rome, Greece and many other major wine producing areas of Western Europe, nowadays these were well-known with Phoenician civilisation and later with Roman plantations. Wine manufacturing skill, like the wine press, enhanced significantly during the period of the Roman Empire; several grape varieties and agricultural methods were known, and barrels were made for producing, storing and shipping wine.

In medieval Europe, subsequent the turn down of Rome and consequently of extensive wine production, the Christian Church became a staunch enthusiast of the wine necessary for celebration of the Catholic Mass. while wine was prohibited in medieval Islamic customs, Geber and other Muslim physicist experimented the refining of wine to be used for curative purposes and its use in Christian libation was largely tolerated. Wine making progressively augmented and its utilization became familiarize from the 15th century and thereafter, surviving the shattering Phylloxera louse (Daktulosphaira vitifoliae)of the 1870s and ultimately building growing regions throughout the world.