Inventing Wine by Paul Lukacs

I do love a good wine and wish I could taste more great wines, but the challenge for people like me is to find good wines at low prices and today, more than at any time that can happen.  Why?  Well - glad you asked because Paul Lukacs takes a thousand year history and allows us to learn about the evolution of wine and the challenges that face this amazing drink that has been described as the liquid of the gods through numerous religions and cultures.

"In one cult or club, however, wine was even more central, being emblematic not only of why one came together in a certain place at a certain time, but also of why one existed in time and space at all. This was the cult of the wine god himself, significantly enough, it was the one association that spanned the two cultures. In Greece, it was called the cult of Dionysus, in Rome, the cult of Bacchus. But in both, people joined in order to be able to drink the god - not simply for intoxication, though that certainly happened, but for communion. Here the communion was less with one's fellows than with earth - specifically with nature and nature's fertile power, a power literally felt in the heat of the wine one drank, a power far greater than anything fabricated by human beings. Not surprisingly the political authorities often feared Bacchus and tried to ban his cult. Not surprisingly too, they failed."

Wine grew in importance because the alcohol (a word derived from the Arabic language) helped to purify the commonly putrid water and kill  the germs that human abuse was putting in the liquid that they depended upon.  That initial wine was terrible - but healthy and they drank it even when it was more vinegar than beverage.  The best way to drink wine in the ancient days was as soon as it was ready - before oxygen ignited the energy of bacteria and destroyed it.

Because of this other beverages eventually challenged the supremacy of wines.  "Coffee was introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century by Venetian merchants who purchased beans (and learned how to roast them) from Ottoman traders."

"...tea first came to Europe when Portugal established a trading company in Macao. Then both the Dutch and East India Companies imported it in volume and popularized its consumption."

"And by the mid-1600's, the Spanish, who had introduced chocolate to Europe's courts in the previous c enturye were using African slave labor to grow cacao plants on their Central American plantations."

"Europe's first coffeehouse opened in Venice in 1645." "London's first in Cornhill, opened in 1652. Twenty years later, one of its owners, a man named Pasqua Rosee, crossed the English Channel and started one in Paris."

Moving in to the 1800's we began to see the wine we would recognize today - a wine with some special qualities of both terroir and variety.  Thanks to Pasteur and other scientists yeast and bacteria were observed and identified and the mystery of fermentation became knowledge that could be used and manipulated.  No longer would wonderful additives like pine pitch be used to keep the wine from going bad (as if putting in pine pitch, lead or ash would not make it bad by themselves).

"Yet the seeds of change had been planted much earlier - initially in the swales and slopes of viticultural Burgundy, then on the steep hillsides along the Rhine and Mosel Rivers in Germany, and finally in gravelly vineyards near the city of Bordeaux. These were the three areas in which a special of fine wine's identity first became linked with the particularities of place, and in which people began to understand the complex interplay of soil, climate and culture, which constitute what contemporary enthusiasts call a wine's terroir."

The author does a wonderful job of presenting the time, the knowledge and the culture that impact the grapes and the wine.  It is truly a world summary with Africa, Australia, Asia, New Zealand, South America joining Europe and the US in the evolving storyline.

“…starting in the 1840’s, Baron Bettino Ricasoli, a prominent landowner in the region, began working to modernize and improve Chianti – or more precisely to improve the red wine from his estate, the Castello de Brolio.  He did this in part because, much like the Marchesa di Barolo [the first Italian to adopt the new wine processes that began in France] his discerning palate recognized the superiority of fine French wines, but also in part because his ancestral property was mortgaged severly. He hoped to inaugurate a new, profitable Tuscan tradition with a new wine.

“Riscaoli was an austere visionary known as the ‘Iron Baron’ who soon found an even more important calling as a political reformer.  He played a leading role in the unification of Italy, serving as the country’s second prime minister, but even when managing affairs of state in Rome, he always supervised agricultural and winemaking experiments at Brolio.  He tested different grape varieties, blending them in different percentages, and by 1872 had arrived at a formula for success.  It involved utilizing Pasteur’s principles in the winery and growing only select varieties in the vineyard, the state of a tradition that eventually would be sanctified in law. ‘Chianti wine draws most of its bouquet (which is what I aim for) from Sangiovese,’ he wrote, going on to advocate the addition of a small amount of red Canaiolo for wines meant to be aged.  Before his experiments, no one would have thought to cellar any Tuscan wine, for no one would have thought of it as being in the same league as fine Bordeaux – of for that matter, as Barolo.  But connoisseurs who tasted this new Chianti could tell that it was superior and Brolio was fully disencumbered of debt by the time the baron died in 1880.”

“After Riscasoli’s death, his tenants returned to their old methods, and both Brolio and Chianti fell back in to disrepute.  The wine once again was cheap, simple, and often acrid.  According to legend, it was tat this point that the baron’s ghost, accompanied by a white horse, began wandering forlornly across the Tuscan hills.”

The ghost can now rest peacefully, Brolio is back and my favorite chianti[Mike].  

By the time we get to the modern era Lukacs has presented us with the science of oenology and allows us to see why we should never drink another bad wine.  Not only is life too short, but the options are too great.