Pod Insights The Rest Is History 666. Wine and the Birth of Civilisation About this episode What does The Odyssey teach us about the history of wine in the ancient world? How did Julius Caesar use wine to conquer the world? And, why was The Judgement of Paris - when America took on France - the most controversial incident in the history of wine?
Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the long history of wine; from ancient Jordan, to Bronze Age Greece, to the Vikings, and beyond…
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Transcript 13,455 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Tom Holland? This episode is brought to you by Lloyds, which has been backing British ambition for over 250 years. 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.
0:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, it's a great story, isn't it, Tom? A great lesson in leadership, I think, for anybody. So Alfred and his heirs, they marry idealism and pragmatism. They're brilliant at alliances, they're brilliant at managing power, they're brilliant, of course, at 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.
1:16 Tom Holland? Based on Lloyds' internal customer data from March 2026.
1:27 Tom Holland? This episode is brought to you by AutoTrader. Now, if car shopping feels like a massive faff, buying your car online at AutoTrader makes it way easier, really.
1:39 Dominic Sandbrook? So you can shop loads and loads of cars online, you can compare prices, you can check the financing and trade-in options, and of course, you can do it from wherever you are. You start online, go to the dealer for your test drive, and finish wherever works for you. Your information, your data stays with you, so there is no starting over. Plus, you are working with local dealers, and there are real people there to help.
2:05 Tom Holland? So buy your car online on AutoTrader, really.
2:12 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Tom, as you know, I spend all my time working and in a dream world, I would clone a sort of Tom Holland who would do all the work for me. But sadly, technology has not advanced to that point. If it did, I wish there was a recruiting company that I could use to hire that clone for me.
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3:26 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 vat, 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 at after many years, hmm, there can be no accounting for personal taste. A famous story is told which illustrates this. One of the freedmen in the household of the deified Augustus, a man celebrated for his
4:06 Dominic Sandbrook? connoisseurship and his palate, accompanied 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.
4:50 Dominic Sandbrook? And anyone who knows the work of Alan Partridge will know that 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 viticulture, 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 why, like your hero Pliny the Elder.
5:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Because I have seen you sampling wines in the Napa Valley, in Sonoma, twice, in the Barossa Valley, in Australia, and I will never forget the occasion in the, I think it was the Sonoma Valley, when the guy doing the wine tour put down two wines. He said, "Now, one of these is a very heavy, rich red and the other is a very light Pinot Noir. Please identify which is which." And unerringly, 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.
6:10 Tom Holland? 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 it. I have an incredible ability to taste and all of that.
6:23 Dominic Sandbrook? What was it? The man, the bloke said that you got it wrong because you were, and I quote, were you a supertaster?
6:28 Tom Holland? I was a supertaster.
6:29 Dominic Sandbrook? So a supertaster is somebody who unerringly will get it wrong every time. Is that right?
6:34 Tom Holland? No, I'm so right that I'm wrong. And in being wrong, I'm right. I think that's how it works.
6:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Because your taste buds are so overdeveloped.
6:40 Tom Holland? Yeah.
6:40 Dominic Sandbrook? That you don't taste as ordinary mortals.
6:42 Tom Holland? Correct.
6:43 Dominic Sandbrook? So somebody could give you a glass of the cheapest rosé and you would identify it as the most expensive claret. And that's because you're too good at tasting.
6:50 Tom Holland? 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. And I love the fact that, um, you know, Pliny is the, the, the prototype for Alan Partridge and indeed for you, Dominic, and indeed for me, and for everyone who fancies themselves as a wine snob.
7:11 Dominic Sandbrook? I'm a little bit of a wine buff.
7:13 Tom Holland? 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, have grown it, have drunk it, have been unable to taste it correctly, have enjoyed it, and even on occasion have tried to ban it. I think it's, you know, it's a great theme for history podcasts. But there's another reason too, why the history of wine, I think, is so interesting. And you mentioned all the, um, 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.
7:55 Tom Holland? And there would obviously have been no wine grown 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, uh, 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, there were no convicts who ever wanted to go there. And loads of Germans went, didn't they? And they set up weird German bowling courts.
8:26 Dominic Sandbrook? It's like being back in the Barossa Valley with our 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.
8:37 Tom Holland? Brilliant. So the Baros Valley was settled by Germans and they brought their own traditions of viticulture. 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. Whoa, 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 reaches back a very, very long way. Some might say all the way back to the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period and also incinerated many of the forests
9:21 Tom Holland? 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 asteroid Earth by filling gaps in the ecosystem. And I commend Jean Baptiste Bosque, who is my daughter Katie's new French boyfriend for that information. He's not only a wine expert, a sommelier, but he's also very knowledgeable about dinosaurs. And so I commend Katie's taste. But we're not the rest is prehistory. Let's stick to the history.
10:01 Tom Holland? And of course, there is a lot of it because the history of wine spans at least 8,000 years. So 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, its spread, its evolution into what it is now, which is basically a kind of $500 billion industry. You know, there are, as you said, wineries in California and in Australia and New Zealand and South Africa and all across the world. So it's a huge story. Where does it begin?
10:42 Tom Holland? 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 ark, 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.
10:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Let himself down.
11:02 Tom Holland? Let himself very badly down. So anyone who's got paralytic may have some sympathies there for Noah. And presumably he planted his vineyard on Mount Ararat, which is where the ark had come to rest. And Ararat 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 Taurus 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 binifera grape, which is basically the grape from which all the great types of grape have descended today.
11:44 Tom Holland? And because I'm not entirely confident of 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, Wine, the Global History, which is coming out, I think, in September, and I saw a preview of it. And it's fantastic and go and preorder it. And she writes, wild grapevines are male or female. I didn'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 cross breeding, 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?
12:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Everyone knows that, don't they?
12:24 Tom Holland? Don't, no, they don't. I've never heard that before.
12:26 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
12:43 Tom Holland? Well, I think they argue it. I mean, I think
12:45 Dominic Sandbrook? They're right.
12:45 Tom Holland? Because there is firm archaeological evidence. And this was found very near Tbilisi, 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 6000 B.C. And then 2000 years later, a village called Araini 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 Araini to this day. And I went and looked up to see what they have to offer. And apparently they, there's a Zulal Araini Dry Red, which is
13:30 Tom Holland? described as balanced, pure and lush.
13:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Lush. Wow. I know what people in the Holland household will be drinking. Those Armenian Reds.
13:39 Tom Holland? I'm quite tempted to, quite tempted to try that.
13:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, of course you are. I know your methods. I know you bought a bottle, massive bottle of wine in California purely because it had Richard III's head on it or something. Isn't that right?
13:52 Tom Holland? There was some historical reason I bought it. It was, and that was very nice as well. I think the, the thing that's interesting about the Araini 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, 4000 B.C., wine is being made on a scale large enough that it can be kind of 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.
14:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
14:27 Tom Holland? And the Canaanites are the forebears of the Phoenicians. And they rank as the first mass exporters of wine. And 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 sixth millennium B.C., is the Bekar Valley in Lebanon.
14:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Big wine place now. Chateau Musar, Messiah, very big.
14:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Pungent, heavy reds, but very nice, I would say, weirdly produced in Hezbollah-controlled territory.
14:56 Tom Holland? Yeah, because it's where Baalbek is, isn't it? The kind of the great Roman temple complex.
15:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
15:01 Tom Holland? So it's 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 2000 B.C. 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 2000 B.C. 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 transport it 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, it has two handles, it's got a kind of pointed base, so you can stick it in sand or mud or whatever.
15:45 Tom Holland? 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 seventh century A.D.
15:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Have you ever had wine that was kept in an amphora? Because I have, there's a winery in the Alentejo in Portugal called Esparao. And there they, you know, you go and do a tasting and they have wine that's kept in steel, that's in, been kept in oak barrels, obviously, so it tastes a little bit oaky. And then they've got wine that's been kept in a clay amphora.
16:18 Tom Holland? Because that's what Pliny's talking about, isn't it? It's the difference between wood and clay.
16:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course, the different flavours that it gives you. And 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.
16:36 Tom Holland? 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 Canaanite civilisation in the Bronze Age collapse in the early 1100s B.C. Everything is kind of left in rubble in Canaan, but then you have like flowers emerging from, from the frosts of winter. You have Phoenician civilisation. And the Phoenicians are great merchants, they export even more wine over even greater distances than the Canaanites done. And in 1997, I read in Kathleen Burke's book, two Phoenician ships were found off Gaza, about 50 miles off, by a U.S. submarine.
17:18 Tom Holland? And this contained 781 amphorae, which is equivalent to 20,000 wine bottles. So I mean, that's a, that's a huge amount of trade and other ships have been found that contained 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 Gardes, this Phoenician settlement, and wine amphorae have been found there dating from around 800 B.C. So they must be the oldest known amphorae in Iberia, I would guess. And of course, the Phoenicians are in direct competition with another ancient people who are very keen on wine.
18:00 Tom Holland? 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 to Ithaca from Troy, and they've picked up some 12 jars of a very precious red wine from a place in Thrace, the North Aegean, 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 Polyphemus, the Cyclops, who turns out to be the host of Odysseus and his guys and
18:43 Tom Holland? ends up kind of trying to eat them all, he necks 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. Right. The kind of sociability that wine fuels. So the symposia in ancient Greek, you kind of lie around and drink wine and talk philosophy. Yeah. And this is part of what is being exported. So the Phoenicians are exporting this to Spain, the Greeks are taking it to France.
19:27 Tom Holland? So they establish a colony, Massilia, which will become Marseille around 600 B.C. And of course, wine is going to have a very, very promising future in Gaul, AKA France. So. By the time the Roman Empire emerges, there is a wine culture that has spread from its homelands 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.
20:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Because it's a giant marketplace.
20:09 Tom Holland? Globalised, single market, yes.
20:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly, yeah.
20:13 Tom Holland? 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 parvenus. They're anxious about whether they're doing the right thing, a bit like me going and displaying my mastery of wine tasting in the Napa Valley. They have a default assumption that the best wines are Greek, and because of that, Greek wines become the most expensive.
20:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
20:42 Tom Holland? 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 the Carthaginian libraries kind of get disposed of, but the Romans keep one volume by an agronomist called Mago. And one of the reasons they wanted to keep him is that Mago was a very famous writer on how you grow wines. And so that was translated from Carthaginian into Latin and became a 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 legions start expanding beyond the limits of the Mediterranean, wine becomes a marker
21:25 Tom Holland? of Roman civilisation. It becomes one of the kind of the key light motifs of what it is to be Roman. And actually, a bit like whisky in the expansion of the American West, wine plays a role in Rome's imperial expansion, say, into Gaul. So in the second century B.C., Rome has occupied the south. Massilia, Marseille, 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 travelling up the rivers.
22:01 Tom Holland? Into the interior of Gaul and they take wine with them. And the Gauls absolutely love it. They end up completely addicted. Like polyphemus, they're barbarians, so they don't dilute it. 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 Gauls have become alcoholics, the merchants can then inflate their prices.
22:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Perfect.
22:35 Tom Holland? 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 Gauls. 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 unity against the advance of the Romans impossible. While for the Romans, it's a virtuous circle because you buy the, you get these slaves in return for the wine.
23:19 Tom Holland? 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 fosters more wars, which results in more slaves. And, you know, it's brilliant. So basically wine is what enables Julius Caesar to conquer Gaul. Unexpected dimension of the history of wine, perhaps.
23:38 Dominic Sandbrook? That is an unexpected dimension. 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 from Greece. The Bekah Valley in Lebanon, there's some very nice wines made in Lebanon. Wine has spread into France, so it's already in Burgundy, the Loire, the Moselle and the Rhine, for example. So those 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.
24:23 Tom Holland? Yeah, so Greek winemakers are basically artisanal winemakers.
24:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
24:28 Tom Holland? 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 Philenian. So Pliny loves Philenian. I mean, basically, all the Romans love Philenian. That is, 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, still in use, Carpe Diem, from the poet Horace. I mean, that's an allusion to viticulture. It's, you know, pluck the day as though the day is kind of a bunch of grapes on the vine. So there is,
25:10 Tom Holland? you know, in our 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 civilisation that had been bonded by the drinking of wine. Amid 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.
25:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, beer is easier to produce. You don't need such a sophisticated system to produce beer.
25:48 Tom Holland? And it's better suited to the kind of colder climates of the north. But the main factor is just the destruction of the Roman single market. You know, there just aren't the kind of the trade networks 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's 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.
26:31 Tom Holland? I mean, everyone who's been to Scandinavia knows that wine in Scandinavia is madly expensive.
26:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Isn't the point that wine then, as now, is a marker of sophistication? It's seen as it's identified with Roman culture and therefore it's prestigious.
26:44 Tom Holland? Yeah. 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 abbeys 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 abbeys with vineyards. And that's what enables the Rhine to become this kind of great channel for for the wine trade. And the aristocracy, for the reasons that you said, Dominic, they become great enthusiasts for it. And as early as the sixth century, the law of the Franks with its kind of notion of vergils,
27:25 Tom Holland? the the idea that if you kill someone, you have to kind of pay a set amount of money, which is determined legally. The vergil of someone who's working on a vineyard is set at twice the level of a ploughman or a cowherd, which suggests, you know, 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 than 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,
28:03 Tom Holland? there's still no real sense of a wine culture that is international in its scale of the kind that had existed under the Roman Empire. And it's as late as 1596, so, you know, well into the Renaissance, when you have an Italian scholar, who's a guy called Andrea Bacci, 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.
28:32 Tom Holland? Pliny is a massive influence on it.
28:33 Dominic Sandbrook? But of course, we've talked about the Roman continuity though, Tom. So areas that produced wine under the Romans or were celebrated for their 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.
28:59 Tom Holland? Yeah, well, we mentioned already how Amphorae, which had been around since, you know, the early Cuninak period. They vanish in the seventh century, which is the period that sees the Caliphate established over much of what had been the Roman and Persian empires, both of which have 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 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.
29:43 Tom Holland? 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, and I quote from the Quran, "from the remembrance of God and from prayer. Will ye not then abstain?" And this Koranic verdict is buttressed by the Hadiths, which are the sayings 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."
30:28 Tom Holland? 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.
30:42 Tom Holland? Sanctions. So the general consensus is that if you drink wine and you are a free person, you get eighty lashes of the whip. And if you are a slave, you get forty 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.
31:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Crikey.
31:05 Tom Holland? That's probably better than than getting a whip, I would guess. But I mean, neither of them sound fun.
31:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Slipper's what happens to like Billy Bunter. That seems like a very peculiar punishment.
31:14 Tom Holland? Dorm feasts.
31:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, for having feasts and stealing jam and stuff. Wine drinking does persist though, no?
31:20 Tom Holland? Yeah.
31:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Partly because there are moments in the Quran where wine is described in a more positive way.
31:28 Tom Holland? So there are absolutely, there are ambivalences in the Islamic attitude to wine. So I've given the kind of the hardcore 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 bans alcohol and therefore, according to Islamic scholarship, are abrogated. However, if you want
32:10 Tom Holland? 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.
32:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Superb.
32:21 Tom Holland? And I think you're right that those verses do provide scope for those in the Islamic world who who do want to have an occasional taste of wine.
32:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
32:33 Tom Holland? Among whom rank a large number of the caliphs. I mean, 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 prescriptions. So one of the four legal schools in Sunni Islam, the Hanafis, they point out that the Quran has banned wine that has been made from grapes, but not from dates.
32:58 Tom Holland? And so they suggest that maybe if you make wine from dates, that would be fine. And they also rule that it's not the actual drinking of wine that annoys God. It's it's the getting drunk. So basically, if you can drink wine but not get drunk, then you're okay. I'll quote from Sadakat Qadri in his 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.
33:32 Dominic Sandbrook? So bad news for lightweights, but good news for the rest of us.
33:35 Tom Holland? Yeah, exactly. I mean, but I suppose the question that's left open is how do you? How do you become so inured to wine that you you can drink four bottles and still tell a slave girl from a beardless boy apart?
33:47 Dominic Sandbrook? If you know, you know. So we did a we did an episode about the Golden Age of Baghdad, didn't we? And Baghdad at its peak, its kind of medieval peak, there are loads of taverns serving wine. But interestingly, they're run not by Muslims but by Christians. So the wine trade is monopolized by Christians, right?
34:05 Tom Holland? Yeah, because Christians need it for that for the mass. And so that's fine. And they're not they're not kind of bound by Quranic prescriptions and legal prescriptions. And Harun al Rashid, who is the the caliph of the Golden Age of Baghdad, the caliph of lots of the stories in the Arabian Nights. He sponsored a famous poet called Abu Nawas, so he of the dangling locks of hair. And he was notoriously transgressive, very dissolute, 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 daft, a thing banned in this world, yet abounds in the hereafter.
34:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
34:49 Tom Holland? Amazing, he rhymes in English as well as Arabic, who knew?
34:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
34:53 Tom Holland? In other words, Islam is a kind of an amazingly rich civilization in which there are enormous shades of opinion and behaviour.
35:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
35:04 Tom Holland? 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, 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 Tameer. He is a hardline 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, you know, legal quibbling and attempts to soft soap the Quran and the Hades. We've got to go back to basics. So he's absolutely dogmatically opposed to wine.
35:49 Tom Holland? He's also very opposed to a kind of hip new intoxicant that's appeared on the scene called hashish. And Ibn Tameer describes hashish as being to wine as feces are to urine. So there's a marketing slogan. And he says that anyone who disagrees with his judgment is an apostate and therefore subject to the penalties of apostasy, which would include death. And Ibn Tameer is basically, he's the godfather of Salafism, of kind of Islamism. Right. Very hardcore radical Jahadi Islam. Against that, there's a much more kind of hippie 1960s friendly kind of Islam called Sufism.
36:30 Tom Holland? And one of the great representative figures of Sufism is a Persian mystic and poet called Rumi, who was 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, someone who staggers around. He's so kind of overcome by intoxicants. Right. This is not because Rumi is saying, it's brilliant, go and get drunk. He's not offering this metaphor literally.
37:12 Tom Holland? He, 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 so he writes these famous lines, before garden, vine and grape were in the world, our soul was drunk with immortal wine. So wine is almost kind of, it's a platonic notion of wine, something that has always existed. 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 sixties and why it appealed to lots of Muslims and has appealed to lots of Muslims throughout the course of Islamic history.
37:58 Tom Holland? Now Ibn Tameer obviously sees this as rubbish. He's very opposed to the Sufis. He thinks they're basically not Muslim at all. And Rumi, in turn, he sees the sobriety of the conventionally pious people like Ibn Tameer 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.
38:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
38:23 Tom Holland? And of course, when it's not banned, well, the sky's the limit.
38:26 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
38:39 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. We obviously love history here. It's always a treat to make a new discovery, especially in unexpected ways.
38:48 Tom Holland? Which is exactly what happens on TikTok. Like, you know, coffee, you make it, add milk, drink it, nothing more, except.
38:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Except when you hop on TikTok, you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino. You can also discover videos about how in the 1700s, people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it.
39:15 Tom Holland? And suddenly you're imagining how people lived, drank, socialized. Makes you wonder what will baffle historians about us. And that's the joy of TikTok. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different.
39:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok.
39:33 Tom Holland? Visit tiktok.com forward slash discover more.
39:42 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria.
40:03 Tom Holland? For thousands of years, humanity was defenseless against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity. And American scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the Gates Foundation.
40:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, so they're creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90% of mosquitoes. That leads to a 50% drop in malaria, saving lives and protecting vulnerable communities. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.
40:43 Tom Holland? This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.
40:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realizes, or rather, everybody else realizes, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?
41:25 Tom Holland? So they asked over 100,000 people. And what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.
41:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Ask yours at claude.ai/restishistory and keep thinking.
41:51 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 heavyweights and that is our own dear country of England. Some people listening to this may raise an eyebrow at 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 it, am I right in thinking the, it is the English that gave us bottles of wine, Tom?
42:29 Tom Holland? 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 B.C. They get picked up by the Romans. Roman glass blowers kind of refined them, but they're never used for transportation because the glass is too fragile. They would smash. They're purely decorative, kind of markers of status. And in 1867, one of these wine bottles was found in a tomb in Spea on the Rhine, tellingly, again, you know, this, the river of wine. And it dated from the fourth century and it contained liquid wine. And it is the world's
43:09 Tom Holland? 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 urn and that dates back to the first century A.D.
43:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Okay.
43:24 Tom Holland? Some vintages there. God knows what it would taste like.
43:28 Dominic Sandbrook? But the problem with, with wine bottles up to this point, well, certainly for centuries, is that the, the glass is too delicate, right? So there's a huge problem. You're gonna, you're basically, they're gonna break. And it is English glassmakers
43:44 Tom Holland? It is.
43:44 Dominic Sandbrook? who solve this, this difficult technical issue.
43:47 Tom Holland? Hooray for us. So this, this happens in the early 17th century. So in the 1620s, English glassmakers start to develop furnaces that are fired by coal rather than wood. And then the following decade, they introduced 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.
44:22 Dominic Sandbrook? If you have more sand, you've just got a better bottle, basically.
44:25 Tom Holland? You can't have too much potash.
44:26 Dominic Sandbrook? No.
44:27 Tom Holland? Too much potash is never, never good.
44:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Definitely.
44:30 Tom Holland? 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 glass. And they fingered this absolute top lad called Kenelm Digby.
44:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, yeah.
44:51 Tom Holland? And Digby is a tremendous character. So he was raised Catholic. He was actually the son of one of the conspirators in the gunpowder plot who'd been executed. He becomes a privateer. He goes around capturing Dutch merchantmen, which Dominic, I'm sure you approve of.
45:07 Dominic Sandbrook? I do.
45:07 Tom Holland? Splendidly, he sells into the Mediterranean and he negotiates the release of 50 English slaves from the Barbary Pirates of Algiers. 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 haring around, losing battles left, right and centre. But he becomes a massive favourite of Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles the First, and accompanies her into exile after her husband is executed. And then Henrietta Maria's son, Charles the Second, is restored to the English throne after the death of Cromwell in 1660. And it's in the wake of the Restoration, so two years after the Restoration, that this parliamentary
45:51 Tom Holland? inquiry is held and Digby gets the credit for it. And I suspect that that part of that is because he's the favourite of Henrietta Maria.
46:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, this is slightly undeserved, isn't it? There aren't loads of people working on this and he's basically just the figurehead.
46:06 Tom Holland? 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 an 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.
46:46 Dominic Sandbrook? That is so interesting. It never occurred to me before, but yeah, why are they murky? And that's the reason.
46:53 Tom Holland? 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 shard of glass in your eye. So very dangerous. But now, hooray, English glass has appeared on the scene. Initially, they're pear shaped, then onion shaped. And then by the 1740s, they've come to take on the, the, the shape that everyone will be familiar with now.
47:36 Tom Holland? And because you can then lie them down in rows, this facilitates the emergence of wine cellars in the form that people will recognise today. And these wine bottles, they have very narrow tops and so they can be stoppered. And what you use to stopper 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 Methuen Treaty. And Dominic, we've had the Methuen Treaty quite a lot on the rest is history, haven't we?
48:12 Dominic Sandbrook? We have, we did a whole episode about the Methuen Treaty. I think when we did the 12 days of Christmas or something like that. I can't remember exactly what it was.
48:18 Tom Holland? But just remind people who, who, who may not remember what the Methuen Treaty is.
48:22 Dominic Sandbrook? So England is at war with France. So access to French wine has been cut off. The Methuen 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 the other way. This is the sort of genesis of the English fascination with port.
48:45 Tom Holland? Port wine, isn't it? Yeah.
48:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So when you go to Porto and you go to the banks of the Rivadouro, you see all the great, you know, port wine lodges, tailors and sandermans. But also in the Alentejo, 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.
49:07 Tom Holland? Yeah.
49:08 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 are we still using cork? You know, a screw top is just as good. But cork is seen as a marker 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.
49:31 Tom Holland? I mean, of course, in the early 18th century, cork does present a problem, which is how do you get the cork out?
49:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
49:37 Tom Holland? And so the English, as well as inventing the modern wine bottle, also invent the corkscrew. And so the first mention of a corkscrew, it's described as a silver worm, comes in 1681. And then brilliantly, in 1720, there's the first poem about a corkscrew. And I will quote from it. Sir Roger set his teeth to work this way and that the cork he plied and wrenched in vain from side to side. So he can't open it. Then Bacchus, the god of wine, appears to him in a dream and gives him a corkscrew. And then the poem continues, he to the cork applied the point. Then bending earthward lobe betwixt his knees, the bottle firmly fixed, and giving it a sudden jerk, from its close prison wrenched the cork.
50:22 Dominic Sandbrook? And to be fair, everyone's, anyone who's, you know, drinks wine has had a moment like that with a cork, where basically something's gone hideously wrong and you can't get it out. And you're just shaming yourself in front of your guests. But. The corkscrew, so at this point, the corkscrew is not a patented thing. It's not, the first patent for it is not granted until the end of the 18th century, right, to a clergyman?
50:42 Tom Holland? 1795, and the clergyman is called Samuel Henshaw. And I know about this because I went down a corkscrew-shaped rabbit hole, because it turns out there are antique corkscrew obsessives online.
50:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course there are.
50:55 Tom Holland? Most of them seem to live in Canada for some reason. And they all came over and set up a plaque to Samuel Henshaw in Beauchamp in the East End, because that's where he'd been. And there are very detailed descriptions as to exactly what is revolutionary about this corkscrew that I've read about 10 times and I still don't really understand. But anyway, well done, Samuel Henshaw. He invents the corkscrew.
51:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Mm-hmm.
51:17 Tom Holland? 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. 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 neighbour across the channel.
51:41 Dominic Sandbrook? So the French have been producing wine all through this period?
51:44 Tom Holland? Well, since the Romans.
51:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, we talked about the Gallic enthusiasm for wine. They've been producing it through the Roman period. Bordeaux, when the English controlled Bordeaux in the Middle Ages.
51:55 Tom Holland? Yeah.
51:55 Dominic Sandbrook? That is producing claret for English tables.
51:59 Tom Holland? And you were sneering at my inability to tell between a light and a heavy red wine.
52:04 Dominic Sandbrook? I wasn't sneering, I was just remarking.
52:07 Tom Holland? So, claret comes from claret, it means lighter, and that becomes Anglicised claret. And it's a reflection of the way in which claret in the Middle Ages was a light red, and now tends to be associated with kind of much heavier.
52:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
52:23 Tom Holland? Kind of richer red wines. But of course, the English lose control of Bordeaux at the end of the Hundred Years' War, and going into the 16th and then into the 17th century. And it may be because that umbilical cord with England has been has been broken. France's kind of role 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 Dutch as the great global commercial power. They do invest very heavily in French wine, but they are also out reconnoitering Portugal, reconnoiting Spain. Yeah. They make a trade agreement with the Ottomans to buy Greek wines.
53:07 Tom Holland? And then, of course, the Methuen Treaty coming in between England and Portugal means that port wine is much cheaper in in England than French wine. And of course, it doesn't happen that that France and Britain are just constantly at war throughout the late 17th into the 18th centuries. So I think all of that impairs the the notion of France as being economically central to the wine trade in the in the kind of 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 terroir.
53:52 Tom Holland? It's why you have wines in South Africa that will be labelled gourc. And it's why in California, a land famously without castles, there are chateaux. 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. Yeah. And you can kind of pinpoint the moment when the suit is invented, thanks to the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who was writing in post Restoration London, so in the 1660s. And Samuel Pepys 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 10th of April, 1663.
54:35 Tom Holland? And Dominic, you're a very Pepysian figure. I mean, not in every sense. No. But the pleasant senses. The conviviality, there's a dark side to Peeps that I don't that I don't endorse. Anyway, off the exchange was Sir Jay Cutler and Mr Grant to the Royal Oak Tavern in Lombard Street, where Broom the poet was, a merry and witty man, I believe, if he be not a little conceited. And here drank a sort of French wine called Ho Brian, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with. Now, this is so interesting, isn't it? Because, what's he call it? Ho Brian?
55:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, his approach to pronouncing foreign languages is very much mine.
55:17 Tom Holland? 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 labelled as Bordeaux or as claret, and not labelled, because they always used to have the label, or often on the label, they would have the name of the wine merchant, wouldn't they?
55:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
55:39 Tom Holland? But this bottle that Peeps has been drinking has the name of the estate that made the wine. So O'Brien, it's the first, and it's been produced by this guy called Anno 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 capitalising on this kind of enthusiasm in London for Ho Brian, 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
56:21 Tom Holland? called Pontac's Head, after Onad de Pontac himself. And it becomes hugely, hugely fashionable. And that means that the Pontacs 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.
56:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Wow.
56:46 Tom Holland? And what Pontac is demonstrating is that ultimately, a wine is worth what people are prepared to pay for it.
56:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course.
56:55 Tom Holland? That that ultimately is the only objective way of measuring a wine. And he realises he's really on to something. So he wants to sell a second wine. So how's he going to do that? He starts to market Hauts de Brion as his first growth, which in French is grand cru.
57:17 Tom Holland? And then he markets that stuff from his second estate as being his deuxième cru. 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 as Hauts de Brion had been marketing itself. This is Lafitte, Latour and Margaux, very famous names if you're interested in wine. So these estates are in the Medoc, which is on the left side of the Gironde, which is the viestery which leads to Bordeaux.
57:59 Tom Holland? Hauts de Brion 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.
58:45 Tom Holland? And each one is classified as a grand cru. 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 Hauts de Brion, Lafitte, Latour and Margaux. 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 Château Mouton Rothschild in 1973.
59:15 Tom Holland? Which was promoted from Premier Crew to Premier Grand Crew. So a 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 but more generally, it's a kind of emblem of 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.
59:56 Tom Holland? 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 palates 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."
1:00:18 Dominic Sandbrook? It's not interesting. So the French make the best wines, but the people who decide which those wines are are English consumers.
1:00:27 Tom Holland? Yes.
1:00:27 Dominic Sandbrook? And I think that's still true today.
1:00:31 Tom Holland? I mean, when you say English consumers, it's obviously aristocratic consumers.
1:00:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, do you know what? It's funny, we're talking about the English palate, but as late as the 1950s, most English people never ever drank wine in any given year. It's such an elite exclusive thing.
1:00:49 Tom Holland? Yeah, so it's it's it's it's very much the kind of the the upper classes. But, you know, this this works well for Bordeaux, 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 he goes on one of the first recorded wine tours of Bordeaux. So he's the 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 Hoth 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.
1:01:33 Tom Holland? One would imagine it scarce fit to bear anything. And then he goes south, he tours the Longue d'Arc. And again, he notes that The more kind of barren and gravelly a slope looks, the better the wine tends to be that's produced on that slope. And he's told by the winegrowers 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
1:02:18 Tom Holland? quality, and it comes to be focused in a word that is essentially untranslatable, and this is terroir. So there have been attempts. So the geologist James Wilson, he describes terroir 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 industrialises through the 19th century, so the more terroir comes to signify for conservatives, and I think most people who own vineyards tend to be conservative, it comes to signify something that they are afraid is under attack, and that is the roots
1:03:02 Tom Holland? of la patrie, of ancient France. The attachment of the French to their ancient soil, the sense of being under threat from industrialisation, from foreigners, from Germans, from whoever.
1:03:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:03:16 Tom Holland? It matters to them that terroir is something that only the French can properly understand.
1:03:23 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 and our terroir."
1:03:34 Tom Holland? Right, because just because something is...
1:03:38 Tom Holland? Deeply felt on a kind of spiritual dimension doesn't mean that you can't use it to flog wine, which is exactly what the French are doing, particularly in places where they don't have exclusive chateau 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 embodiments of kind of ancient Gaelic tradition. These traditions are basically an invention of the 1920s. It's very like the episode we did on the history of Italian
1:04:21 Tom Holland? food. I mean, you discover that all these traditions are completely, you know, complete marketing inventions in the 20th century. And they're marketed because tourists love them. And it helps to sell, you know, 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 there you were starting to get pretenders in California, in Australia, in New Zealand, in South Africa, all of which are places without ancient chateau, without kind of jovial peasants, deeply rooted in the soil with traditional festivities that have been invented in the
1:05:03 Tom Holland? 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 terroir of Burgundy, or of Beaujolais, or of the Longue d'Arc, or wherever.
1:05:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, people genuinely believed 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. So that's 1976. And actually, members of the Rest is History Club will be hearing a bit more about this on our bonus episode on Wednesday with the 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 the 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, one of the most controversial moments, in the entire modern history of winemaking.
1:06:03 Tom Holland? So it's a wine tasting competition that staged in 1976 in Paris by an English wine merchant called Stephen Spurrier. And it's interesting that the English are still kind of hanging around in France as arbiters of taste, even in the 70s. And he's opened up a wine shop in Paris and a wine school. And he's very keen to market New World wines to the French, who are very reluctant to buy them. And so essentially, he's trying to think of some kind of wheeze 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.
1:06:43 Tom Holland? 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 this period. So Californian wine, it's all about vulgarity, the French think. And the archetype for this vulgarity is a guy called Leland Stanford, who was a railroad entrepreneur.
1:07:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:07:17 Tom Holland? He became governor of California, and of course, he's the founder of the university that is named after him, Stanford University. And 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 terroir, 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- The vines just don't give the grapes off the standard that he requires. So by eighteen ninety,
1:07:58 Tom Holland? 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. So, you know, when the news of that reaches, everyone thinks it's hilarious and confirms them in all their darkest suspicions of.
1:08:15 Dominic Sandbrook? To be fair, we've all had American wines that taste like that. But then, so a huge problem for American winemakers is that 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.
1:08:28 Tom Holland? Right. And so this, of course, is the strain of puritanism in American culture, which French winegrowers also despise. And the, the great manifestation of this is the prohibition of alcohol between nineteen twenty and nineteen thirty-three, which completely destroys the Californian wine industry, which had 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 around legal restrictions. So there's a lot of entrepreneurial ingenuity invested into attempts to try and get around prohibition. So would be winemakers in, in America can order
1:09:09 Tom Holland? 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 accompanies this yeast pill. It says, on no account 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.
1:09:34 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
1:09:39 Tom Holland? Yeah, but it's alcoholic, I guess, would be the, would be the take. And the other thing that people do is to register as rabbis. So to quote Kathleen Burke 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, making wine for the Eucharist. That's nothing that helps the French to think that Californian winemakers will be good.
1:10:19 Tom Holland? And then there's the whole kind of, the sense that Americans are willing to sacrifice quality on the altar of commercialism. I mean, they are all over very sweet wines, wines flavoured with chocolate, cranberry flavoured wines, I mean, basically whatever the consumer wants.
1:10:35 Dominic Sandbrook? God.
1:10:36 Tom Holland? And French wine drinkers just throw their hands up and kind of say, 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.
1:10:54 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, by the way, wine experts, some of these people are the arbiters of French wine.
1:10:59 Tom Holland? Yeah.
1:10:59 Dominic Sandbrook? So, I mean, there's the head of the Enological Institute of France, there is the head of the Wine Academy, there is the Inspector General of the Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée Board, which is basically the board that decides whether your wine, you know, gets Appellation status, gets the sort of badge of quality. So, these are not just like the wine critic of Le Figaro or something, these are like proper people.
1:11:25 Tom Holland? Yeah, so their decisions will echo and reverberate around France and perhaps beyond. So, what do they decide? So, they're presented with the whites first, and, you know, this kind of wine equivalent of the Academy Français deliver their opinion.
1:11:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Hmm.
1:11:44 Tom Holland? And it's a shocker. A Californian Chardonnay comes in first, then a Burgundy, and then two more Californian Chardonnays. So, sacre bleu. 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 Chateau Mouton Rothschild comes in second. And remember, it's just been 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
1:12:23 Tom Holland? number one comes from a Californian vineyard that had only been planted in 1970.
1:12:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, stag's leap and it had been planted brilliantly by a man called Warren Winioski. Couldn't be more American. It's new and it's planted by a bloke called Warren.
1:12:43 Tom Holland? And Spurrier had invited, actually, I think Spurrier's 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 organised by Spurrier, the unthinkable happened. California defeated all Gaul. 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 B.C. or a Canaanite perhaps celebrating the victory of the Becare Valley over a rainy in 3000 B.C.
1:13:24 Tom Holland? And I mean, it's had a pretty seismic impact, I think, hasn't it, on the prestige, not just of Californian wines, but of New World wines generally.
1:13:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Totally.
1:13:33 Tom Holland? And I guess Henry will be talking more about that. But I think, I mean, I think it's important to emphasise, it isn't just a story of the new world vanquishing 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 Chateau in the title.
1:13:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, one of those wines in the Judgment of Paris was from a winery, I think founded in something like 1971 or 1972, called Claude Yuval. So given a kind of artificial, contrived French name to denote quality.
1:14:07 Tom Holland? 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 a setback, maybe you can kind of track the course of superpower status by the degree to which. A country can invest in Bordeaux. So Britain in its great imperial age was investing in America, now China.
1:14:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:14:33 Tom Holland? And the notion of terroir, we've, we've said, you know, it's like a cutting from Burgundy has been transplanted to the opposite ends of the world. So New Zeal- in New Zealand, that winegrowers there are particularly keen on the notion of terroir. And it's been mingled with, and I hope I get the pronunciation of this right, it's a Maori notion of belonging to a particular place called turungu way way.
1:14:59 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, that trips off the tongue.
1:15:01 Tom Holland? I probably haven't pronounced that right, but, and it means literally a place to stand, apparently.
1:15:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Okay.
1:15:06 Tom Holland? So, ending on a kind of a Rennick note, I like to think that the history of wine isn't just about competition, but it's about partnership.
1:15:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, isn't that kind? That's a nice note on which to end. I think it's about competition, frankly, but there you go.
1:15:22 Tom Holland? You're probably right. But I think, I mean, I think ultimately, if you're, if you're not a kind of wine chauvinist, but just someone who enjoys wine, then it doesn't really matter, you know, carpe diem. And so 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. And this comes from a Persian like Rumi, another great devotee of wine. And this is Omar Khayyam. Ah, fill the cup. What boots it to repeat? How time is slipping underneath
1:16:02 Tom Holland? our feet. Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday. Why fret about them if today be sweet?
1:16:10 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, not least the rise and fall of the British Empire. In Wednesday's bonus episode for Rest is History Club members with the great wine writer and friend of the show, Henry Jeffries. And if you're not a member of the club and you'd like to hear that episode, you merely need to head to the rest is history. To sign up. And of course, if you're keen to hear more about the history of wine, or indeed about the subject of our next regular episode, which is about the Mona Lisa, then there will be lots more in our Super Sora A newsletter, to which I'm very much
1:16:52 Dominic Sandbrook? looking forward. All right. Thank you very much, Tom. Cheers and Sante, everybody. Bye bye.
1:16:58 Tom Holland? Goodbye, everyone.
1:17:11 Tom Holland? We've got some brilliant news. A new The Rest Is History book is heading your way, and it is called A History of the World in Fifty One: Heroes and Villains. And it's got everything that you would expect. It's got mad battles. It's got sensational sex scandals. It's got lots of Machiavellian wheeling and dealing. It's brilliant.
1:17:30 Dominic Sandbrook? And along the way, Tom and I will be debating some of the most important questions of history. So, for example, was Caligula an irredeemable monster? Or was he simply an early example of an influencer? Was Wojtek the Bear a true hero of the Second World War? Or was he more of a cuddly mascot? And was Elizabeth I really a virgin queen? Or was she just brilliant at branding?
1:17:56 Tom Holland? So polish up your armour, twirl your massive First World War generals moustache, and prepare to take a side between heroes and villains.
1:18:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, A History of the World in Fifty One: Heroes and Villains is available to preorder now. Don't miss out.
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