The History of Wine
From the Vine to Wine
Aujourd'hui, l'espace est splendide.
Space is magnificent today. Sans mors, sans Γ©peron, sans bride, Riding without bit, spur or bridle, Partons Γ cheval sur le vin, mounted on wine, Pour un ciel fΓ©erique et divin. 1 let us set out for a magical and divine heaven.
T he Greeks did not actually invent wine. They did even better: in making the god Dionysus its patron, they immortalized it. We do not know the precise geographical origin of the grapevine, Vitis vinifera, 'the vine that bears wine', or rather bears the grapes from which wine can be made. It is generally thought to have come from the southern Caucasus, situated between Turkey, Armenia and Iran. This is more or less where Noah, famous as the first of all drunkards, is supposed to have landed his ark after the Flood: a pleasing coincidence. If the findings of Soviet scientists are to be believed, the bases of some jars of considerable diameter containing fossilized wine lees have been found in the Mount Ararat region near traces of wood -acacia wood, not wood from the cedars of Lebanon -which may once have been part of a large ship.
However, the grapevine was already growing in Western Europe during the Miocene, the third epoch of the Tertiary period, when monkeys first made their appearance in Africa. The impression of vine leaves has been found in the tufa rock near Montpellier, much to the satisfaction of the wine-growers of the HΓ©rault area. The pips of grapes of a pre-vinifera vine have been found on many Mesolithic sites such as that at Castiona outside Parma. Vines in their wild state grew all over the central part of the northern hemisphere, a temperate zone which was divided when the continents drifted apart. The vines that continued growing in America evolved towards the species labrusca, or fox grape, the fruits of which have a taste, or rather an odour,