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The History of Wine: 8,000-Years in a Glass (Deep Sleep Narration with Rain Sounds) · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Sleepless History, the show where we drift slowly through the corners of the past one quiet story at a time.
• 0:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you are new here, settle in and get comfortable.
• 0:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to spend our hour together tracing the long slow history of a drink that has followed human beings through nearly every chapter of civilization.
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: we are going to talk about wine, not the tasting notes, not the ventages, not which bottle to bring to a dinner party.
• 0:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, we are going to move gently backward across thousands of years, to the hillsides where the very first grapes were pressed.
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: and then we will walk forward again, century by century, watching as a simple, fermented juice became something tied to religion, to empires, to trade routes, to war, and eventually to the quiet ritual of a glass poured at the end of a long day.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is something fitting about telling this story as you fall asleep.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: wine after all has always been associated with the slowing down of the evening.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has marked the close of feasts, the end of harvests and the final hour before rest.
• 1:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 1.
• 1:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first fermentation.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: long before anyone wrote a word down, before any king raised a cup in celebration, wine already existed in a form we would barely recognise.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: To understand how it began,
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have to imagine a world without agriculture as we know it.
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: A world where humans were only beginning to settle in one place, instead of following herds and seasons across open land.
• 1:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The story most historians tell begins in a region that today spans parts of the countries of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: a mountainous stretch of land nestled between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, often called the South Caucasus.
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a place of steep valleys, mineral-rich soil and wild grape vines that had grown untended for longer than anyone could measure.
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The wild ancestor of the modern grape vine, a plant botanists called Vitis Vinifera, spelled out here simply as the wine grape vine.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: grew in tangled ropes through the forests of this region, climbing trees and spreading along river banks, producing small, tart, seed filled berries that were far from the plump grapes we know today.
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: At some point, and we will likely never know the exact moment.
• 2:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Someone gathered a basket of these wild grapes and either forgot about them or intentionally left them in a container.
• 2:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wild yeasts, invisible organisms that live naturally on the skins of grapes and drift through the air, began to feed on the sugars inside the crushed fruit.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: This process, fermentation, converts sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, and it happens almost automatically,
• 3:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wherever ripe fruit and warmth and time are allowed to meet.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: In other words, wine may have been discovered by accident, long before anyone understood the chemistry behind it.
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Someone tasted the strange, slightly fizzy, mildly intoxicating liquid that had formed the bottom of a jar of old grapes, and rather than throwing it away in disgust, they kept drinking.
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Archaeologists have found what many consider the oldest confirmed evidence of wine making in a cave complex in the country of Georgia.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: in a site now referred to as Gada Triligora.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Pottery fragments recovered from this site, dated to roughly 6,000 years before the common era, were tested using chemical analysis and found to contain tartaric acid.
• 4:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: a compound strongly associated with grapes, along with other organic markers consistent with fermented grape juice.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: This would place the origins of intentional wine making at nearly 8,000 years before our present moment.
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: making wine one of the oldest, deliberately produced beverages in human history, older than written language, older than the wheel, as we typically think of it.
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Older than most of the cities, whose ruins we still study today, what is remarkable is not simply that this discovery happened.
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: But how quickly it seems to have mattered to the people who made it, wine was not treated as an ordinary beverage, alongside water or milk.
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: From nearly the earliest evidence we have, wine appears connected to something larger, to ceremony, to status, to the marking of important occasions.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Large clay vessels, called Covevry, still used in traditional Georgian wine making today.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: were buried in the ground up to their necks, allowing the temperature inside to stay cool and stable while the grape juice, skins, stems and seeds, all fermented together inside.
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: This method, remarkably, has survived in an unbroken tradition for thousands of years, and modern Georgian wine makers still buried clay vessels in the earth using techniques
• 5:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the Caucasus region, the practice of cultivating great vines and producing wine seems to have spread outward in multiple directions, carried by trade, migration, and the gradual movement of agricultural knowledge.
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Evidence of early wine making has also been found further south, in the region historians call Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Sumerians, one of the earliest civilizations to develop writing.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: left behind clay tablets that mention wine.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though in this hot, dry landscape, wine was somewhat less common than beer, since barley grew more easily than grapes in much of the Mesopotamian floodplain.
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Still, wine appears in Sumerian texts, as a drink associated with the elite, with temples and with offerings to the gods.
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was in ancient Egypt, however,
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: that wine took on a particularly rich cultural and religious significance in the ancient world.
• 6:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: By around 3,000 years before the common era, the Egyptians were cultivating great vines along the fertile banks of the Nile River, particularly in the Nile Delta region.
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: where the soil and climate proved surprisingly hospitable to viticulture, the cultivation of grapevines, Egyptian tomb paintings, some of which have survived remarkably well over the millennia, depict the entire wine-making process in vivid detail.
• 7:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: We see workers trading grapes with their bare feet inside large vans.
• 7:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their arms often gripping ropes hung from a wooden frame above to help them keep their balance as the floor beneath them grew slick with juice.
• 7:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: We see the resulting liquid being funneled into tall clay jars sealed with clay stoppers and stored in cool underground sellers.
• 7:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Egyptians developed something that feels remarkably modern, labeling, wine jars recovered
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: including the Tomb of the Young Pharaoh Tutankhamen, Bear inscriptions, noting the vineyard of origin, the vintage year, the name of the wine maker, and sometimes even a quality assessment, phrases that might be loosely translated as very good or good written directly onto the jar.
• 8:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: This suggests that even 4,000 years ago, the Egyptians had already developed the beginnings of an idea we still hold today that not all wine is created equal and that where a wine came from and when it was made, mattered enough to write down and preserve for eternity.
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wine in ancient Egypt was closely associated with Osiris, the god of the afterlife, agriculture and rebirth.
• 8:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Egyptian mythology held that Osiris himself had taught humanity how to cultivate the great vine, linking the drink directly to divine knowledge.
• 8:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because of this connection, wine appeared frequently in funerary rituals, buried alongside the dead to accompany them into the next world, and used in temple offerings meant to honour and appease the gods.
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ordinary Egyptians, however, drank beer far more commonly than wine, since wine remained expensive and largely reserved for the wealthy, for priests and for the pharaoh's court.
• 9:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wine, in this sense, was as much a marker of social class in ancient Egypt as it would later become in nearly every civilization that adopted it afterward.
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: As trade routes spread across the ancient Mediterranean world, wine culture moved with them.
• 9:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Phoenicians, a seafaring people based along the coast of what is now Lebanon, became some of the most significant early distributors of both grapefines and wine-making knowledge.
• 9:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Phoenician traders sailed from Port to Port across the Mediterranean Sea, establishing colonies and trading posts, and everywhere they went, they seemed to have brought great vines along with their cargo.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some historians credit the Phoenicians with introducing viticulture to the island of Cyprus to parts of North Africa.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: and eventually to the Iberian peninsula, the region we now know as Spain and Portugal.
• 10:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was through this slow, patient spread of vine cuttings and wine-making techniques.
• 10:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Carried aboard wooden ships across Carmen stormy waters alike, that wine gradually became not an isolated regional practice.
• 10:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: But a shared thread running through the entire ancient Mediterranean world.
• 10:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time we reached the era of ancient Greece, wine had already travelled thousands of years and thousands of miles from its origins in the mountains of the Caucasus.
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was in Greece that wine would take on perhaps its most culturally elaborate and enduring identity in the ancient world.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: one that would shape how much of Western civilization would think about wine for centuries to come.
• 11:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter two, wine among the Greeks and Romans.
• 11:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ancient Greeks did not simply drink wine.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: They built philosophy, religion, medicine, and social ritual around it.
• 11:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: wine appears throughout Greek mythology as one of the great gifts bestowed upon humanity and it had its own dedicated god, Dionysus, sometimes called backers in later Roman tradition, the god of wine, fertility, ritual madness and theatre.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dionysus was worshiped through elaborate festivals,
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: that combined religious devotion with theatrical performance and communal drinking.
• 11:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And some scholars argue that Greek theatre itself, one of the great inventions of western culture, emerged directly out of these wine-soaked religious celebrations, held in honor of Dionysus.
• 12:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wine in ancient Greece was rarely consumed the way we drink it today.
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Greeks almost always diluted their wine with water.
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Often mixing it at a ratio of roughly two or three parts water to one part wine.
• 12:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And drinking wine completely undiluted was considered a mark of barbarism.
• 12:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Something associated with uncivilized foreign peoples, rather than proper Greek behavior.
• 12:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: This mixing took place in a large ceramic vessel called a crater, a wide mouth bowl, specifically designed for blending wine and water together, before it was ladled out into individual cups for guests.
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The most famous social institution built around wine in ancient Greece was the symposium.
• 12:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: a structured drinking party that took place after a meal had concluded.
• 12:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The word symposium itself comes from Greek roots meaning to drink together, and it was far more than a simple gathering for intoxication.
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: A symposium typically involved a group of men, usually free citizens of some social standing, reclining on couches arranged around the edges of a room.
• 13:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Drinking wine mix to a specific ratio determined by an elected symposium arc or master of ceremonies and engaging in conversation, poetry, music, philosophical debate and games.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Philosopher Plato
• 13:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: used the symposium as the literal setting for one of his most famous dialogues, in which several notable figures, including Socrates, take turns delivering speeches about the nature of love, all while wine is past among them.
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: This tells us something important, for the Greeks, wine was not separate from intellectual and cultural life.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was woven directly into it, understood as something that could loosen the tongue, sharp and wit, and open the mind to deeper conversation, so long as it was consumed with moderation and discipline.
• 14:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Greek wine-making techniques were relatively advanced for their time.
• 14:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grapes were grown across the rocky, sun-drenched hillside of the Greek mainland, and it's many islands.
• 14:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: particularly on islands such as Chios, Lesbos and Thassos, all of which developed reputations for producing especially prized wines that were exported across the Mediterranean world.
• 14:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Greek wine was often flavoured or preserved with the addition of substances, such as tree resin, herbs, sea water or honey, partly for taste, and partly because these additions may have helped slow the process of spoilage during long sea voyages in Clé Amphare.
• 14:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The tall, narrow-necked jars used to transport wine and other liquids by ship.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The practice of adding pine resin to wine survives today in the modern Greek wine known as retzina, a direct, if much refined, descendant of ancient preservation techniques.
• 15:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Greek city states established colonies across the Mediterranean, they carried their vines with them, planting vineyards in southern Italy, in Sicily, along the coast of southern France,
• 15:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the ancient Greeks referred to southern Italy as Oernotria, a name that can be translated roughly as land-of-trained vines, reflecting just how significant and widespread grape cultivation had already become in that region by the time Greek settlers arrived.
• 15:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a crucial detail because it means that when the Roman civilization began its own rise to power, it inherited a landscape already deeply planted with the vine, ready to be expanded upon on a scale the ancient world had never seen before.
• 16:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: If the Greeks gave wine, it's philosophical and religious depth, the Romans gave it its empire, Roman civilization took wine making and transformed it into a massive, highly organised agricultural and commercial enterprise.
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: One that stretched across an empire, spanning from Britain in the north to North Africa in the south, and from Spain in the west to the eastern edges of the Mediterranean.
• 16:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wherever Roman legions marched, and Roman settlers established new towns, vineyards tended to follow close behind.
• 16:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Roman writers took wine-making seriously enough to produce detailed agricultural manures on the subject.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The statesman and writer Kato the Elder wrote extensively about vineyard management in his treatise on farming.
• 17:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And later, the writer Colomela produced an even more comprehensive guide to agriculture that included detailed instructions on selecting vineyard sites, pruning vines, pressing grapes and storing wine.
• 17:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: These texts reveal a level of technical sophistication that would not be dramatically improved upon for well over a thousand years afterward.
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Romans understood, for instance, that different soil types and hillside orientations produced grapes of different qualities, an idea that modern wine makers today still describe using the French term T'erouard, referring to the complete natural environment in which a particular wine is produced.
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Romans' society, much like Greek society before it, associated wine closely with social status.
• 17:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: though the Romans extended wine drinking much further down the social ladder than the Greeks had.
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: While the wealthiest Romans drank wines imported from prestigious regions such as Felenum, a wine region in the area around modern day Naples that became legendary for producing some of the finest and most expensive wines in the ancient world.
• 18:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ordinary Roman soldiers and laborers drank a much rougher, cheaper wine, sometimes mixed generously with water, sometimes barely more than fermented grape skins soaked a second time to extract whatever flavor remained.
• 18:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Roman soldiers were even issued a wine ration as part of their standard provisions, a practice that meant wine travelled with the Roman army to nearly every corner of the empire, further spreading both the taste for wine and the knowledge of how to produce it.
• 18:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Romans also refined the technology of wine making in meaningful ways.
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: They expanded the use of wooden barrels.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: A technique they likely adopted from Celtic peoples in Gaul, the region roughly corresponding to modern France, who had been using wooden barrels for storage long before Roman conquest, would prove to be lighter, more durable during transport, and less prone to shattering
• 19:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: and over the following centuries, wooden barrels would gradually become the dominant storage vessel for wine across Europe.
• 19:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Eventually giving certain wines the toasted vanilla like flavours that come from aging inside chard oak, flavours that remain highly prized in wines today.
• 19:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the height of the Roman Empire,
• 19:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: wine had become so deeply embedded in daily life that emperors occasionally felt compelled to regulate it.
• 19:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Emperor Demission, ruling in the late first century of the common era, reportedly ordered the destruction of vineyards across the provinces at one point.
• 20:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: worried that too much land was being devoted to great cultivation at the expense of grain production needed to feed the empires growing population.
• 20:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: This edict, whether fully enforced or not, tells us something important.
• 20:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: wine production had grown so extensive across the Roman world that it was beginning to compete directly with the basic food supply.
• 20:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: A remarkable testament to just how central wine had become to Roman commerce and culture, but empires no matter how vast eventually decline.
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: and as the western Roman Empire began to crumble in the fifth century of the common era, much of the infrastructure that had supported large-scale wine production across Europe, the roads, the trade networks, the centralized authority began to crumble along with it.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yet why in itself did not disappear.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, it's survival passed into the hands of an institution that would carry it carefully through the long centuries that followed the Christian church.
• 21:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter three, monks, monarchs, and medieval vine.
• 21:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: When we imagine the period historians often call the Middle Ages, stretching roughly from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century of the Common Era to around the 14th or 15th century, we often picture a world in decline.
• 21:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cities shrinking, trade routes fraying, knowledge scattered and lost, and in many respects this picture holds some truth.
• 21:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: But wine production survived this turbulent period remarkably well.
• 21:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Largely because of one specific institution that had both the motivation and the organisational structure to keep it alive.
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The monasteries of the Christian Church, wine held deep religious significance within Christianity from its very earliest days.
• 22:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The New Testament describes wine at the last supper, where it becomes symbolically transformed into the blood of Christ during what would become the central ritual of Christian worship, the Eucharist, also known as Holy Communion.
• 22:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because of this, wine was not simply a beverage that monks might enjoy alongside their meals.
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a sacramental necessity required for the celebration of mass in churches across Christian Europe.
• 22:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: This religious requirement meant that monasteries had a powerful incentive to maintain reliable, high-quality wine production.
• 22:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: even during centuries when much of the surrounding society had fallen into disorder.
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Monasteries across Medieval Europe, particularly those belonging to orders such as the Benedictines and later the Cistercians, became some of the most sophisticated and successful wine-making operations of their era, monks had several advantages that made them particularly well-suited to this task.
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were literate at a time when literacy was rare, which meant they could record detailed observations about which vineyard plots produced better grapes, which methods yielded better results.
• 23:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And past this knowledge down through written records, rather than relying purely on oral tradition, they also tended to remain in one place for generations.
• 23:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: allowing them to observe the long-term patterns of a particular piece of land across many growing seasons, something a wandering farmer, or a frequently displaced peasant family, would rarely have the opportunity to do.
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Sistortion monks
• 24:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the region of Burgundy, in eastern France, are often credited with some of the most meticulous and influential vineyard work of the medieval period.
• 24:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the course of centuries, these monks carefully mapped and studied the hillside of the Burgundy region.
• 24:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: gradually identifying which specific parcels of land.
• 24:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes remarkably small in size, consistently produced grapes of superior quality.
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: This painstaking generations long process of observation eventually gave rise to the concept of the close.
• 24:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: A walled vineyard plot whose boundaries were determined not by property lines or
• 24:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: of soil and sun exposure.
• 24:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of these medieval vineyard boundaries, established by monks, working the land eight or nine centuries ago, remain in use as officially recognized vineyard designations in Burgundy to this very day.
• 25:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: A genuinely remarkable case of medieval agricultural knowledge, continuing to shape a modern industry.
• 25:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Monasteries were not the only medieval institution invested in wine, however, as feudal society stabilised across Europe in the centuries following the early medieval period.
• 25:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wine also became an important commercial commodity, tied closely to regional identity, taxation, and international trade.
• 25:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The region of Bordeaux in southwestern France offers one of the clearest examples of how medieval politics could directly shape the wine trade in ways still felt today.
• 25:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the 12th century, a woman named Elena of Aquitaine, one of the most powerful and influential figures of medieval Europe, married Henry II, who would soon become King of England.
• 26:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The extensive wine-producing regions surrounding Bordeaux came under English Royal Control, remaining part of the English Crown's territory for roughly the next 300 years.
• 26:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: This political arrangement had enormous commercial consequences.
• 26:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: English merchants developed a strong and lasting taste for the wines of Bordeaux, referred to at the time by the English term, Clarett, and a thriving trade relationship developed across the English channel with ships regularly carrying barrels of Bordeaux wine north to English ports.
• 26:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: This centuries-long trading relationship helped to establish Bordeaux as one of the most internationally recognized wine regions in the world.
• 26:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: A reputation the region still enjoys today, nearly 900 years after Eleanor's marriage first set this trade route into motion.
• 27:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Medieval wine was, by most accounts,
• 27:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: quite different from the wine produced today.
• 27:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Without modern methods of sterilization or reliable long-term storage, wine tended to spoil relatively quickly, often turning vinegary or cloudy within a year or two of production.
• 27:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because of this, medieval wine was typically consumed quite young, often within the same year it was harvested and it was frequently spiced or sweetened
• 27:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wealthy households commonly added ingredients such as honey, cinnamon, ginger, and other imported spices to their wine, creating a drink called hippocross, which bears very little resemblance to the wine we would recognize on a modern dinner table.
• 27:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Water quality across much of medieval Europe was often unreliable, particularly in crowded towns and cities where waste and drinking water sources were not always kept properly separated.
• 28:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because of this,
• 28:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: wine and beer served an important practical function beyond simple enjoyment.
• 28:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fermentation process involved in producing both beverages killed off many of the harmful microorganisms that might otherwise have been present in untreated water, making wine and beer in a very real sense somewhat safer to drink than plain water in many medieval towns.
• 28:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wine, of course, remained largely the beverage of wealthier households and of regions where grapes grew well, while beer made from grains that could be grown across a much wider range of climates, remained the more common daily beverage for ordinary people living in the cooler regions of northern Europe, where grape vines struggled to ripen properly.
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the medieval period gradually gave way to the era we now call the Renaissance, wine production continued to expand and refine itself across Europe.
• 29:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Advances in glass making eventually led to stronger, more reliable glass bottles.
• 29:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the reintroduction and refinement of cork as a ceiling material allowed wine to be stored and aged for much longer periods than had previously been possible.
• 29:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: These seemingly small technical developments would set the stage for one of the most transformative periods in the entire history of wine.
• 29:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: forever changing the map of where in the world wine was produced.
• 29:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4.
• 30:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wine crosses the ocean.
• 30:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beginning in the late 15th century and continuing for several centuries afterward, European explorers, colonizers and missionaries began establishing permanent settlements across the Americas and nearly everywhere they went, they attempted to bring the great vine along with them.
• 30:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: This period represents one of the most significant expansions in the entire history of wine.
• 30:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Vitticulture spread from its longest-ablished home in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, into entirely new continents on the other side of the world.
• 30:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Spanish conquistadors and missionaries were among the earliest Europeans to attempt wine-making in the Americas.
• 30:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Spanish colonists brought great vine cuttings to present day Mexico, as early as the 1540s.
• 30:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Catholic missionaries in particular had strong motivation to establish local wine production.
• 31:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Since, much like the medieval monasteries centuries earlier, they required a reliable supply of wine.
• 31:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: for the celebration of mass.
• 31:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Spanish missions expanded northward over the following two centuries, eventually reaching into present day California by the late 1700s.
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Franciscan missionaries planted vineyards at Mission after Mission, along the California coastline, using a great variety that came to be known simply as the Mission Grape.
• 31:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though the wine produced from this variety was generally considered fairly rough and unremarkable by European standards, these humble mission vineyards represent the earliest beginnings of what would eventually become
• 31:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: one of the largest and most celebrated wine-producing regions in the entire world.
• 31:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wine production also spread southwood into South America during this same period, particularly into regions of present-day Chile, Argentina and Peru, carried by Spanish colonizers who found the climates of certain areas
• 32:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: particularly the valleys near the base of the Andes Mountains, remarkably well-suited to grape cultivation.
• 32:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of these South American wine regions.
• 32:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: particularly in Chile and Argentina would go on to become major global wine producers in their own right by the 20th and 21st centuries.
• 32:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though this transformation would take several more centuries to fully unfold.
• 32:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, back in Europe, the wine trade itself was becoming increasingly globalised and commercially sophisticated, the Dutch,
• 32:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: who had built one of the most formidable merchant shipping networks in the world by the 1600s, played a particularly interesting role in the history of one especially famous wine region.
• 33:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: the cognac and charente areas of western France, as well as the duro valley in Portugal.
• 33:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dutch traders seeking wines that could survive long sea voyages without spoiling, encouraged local producers to fortify their wines, meaning that additional distilled spirit, typically brandy, was added to the wine during or after fermentation.
• 33:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: This addition raised the alcohol content significantly and helped stabilize the wine for long journeys by sea.
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: This practice directly contributed to the development of Port Wine, the fortified sweet wine of Portugal's Duro Valley, which became enormously popular in England.
• 33:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Particularly after political tensions with France, periodically disrupted the flow of French wine into English markets, pushing English merchants and consumers toward Portuguese alternatives instead.
• 33:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The 18th and 19th centuries brought increasing scientific attention to wine making.
• 34:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps the most significant scientific contribution came from the French chemist, Louis Pasteur,
• 34:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: was asked by the French wine industry to investigate why so much French wine was spoiling and turning sour during storage and transport.
• 34:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Pastors researched revealed that fermentation and spoilage were both caused by living microorganisms.
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeasts responsible for the desirable transformation of grape juice into wine and unwanted bacteria responsible for spoilage.
• 34:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: His subsequent development of a gentle heating process now known as pasteurization.
• 34:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: offered producers a method of stabilizing wine and killing off harmful bacteria without significantly damaging the wine's flavor.
• 34:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though pasteurization would eventually find its most famous and widespread application in the dairy industry rather than in fine wine making.
• 35:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Pastors underlying scientific discoveries about fermentation,
• 35:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fundamentally transformed the entire wine industry's understanding of its own most basic process.
• 35:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yet the 19th century also brought one of the most devastating crises in the entire history of wine.
• 35:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: an event that came remarkably close to ending European wine making altogether.
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the 1860s, French vineyard owners began noticing something alarming.
• 35:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Vines across the country were mysteriously weakening, their leaves yellowing, their roots rotting, and entire vineyards dying within a few short years, with no obvious cause.
• 35:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: This mysterious blight, which came to be called filoxera, was eventually identified as a tiny, nearly microscopic insect, a type of aphid that fed on the roots of European grapefines gradually destroying the root system and killing the plant.
• 36:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The insect had almost certainly arrived in Europe accidentally, carried on grapevine cuttings imported from North America.
• 36:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: when Native American grapevine species had evolved natural resistance to the pest over thousands of years of coexistence.
• 36:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: European grapevines having no such evolutionary defense proved catastrophically vulnerable.
• 36:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the following two to three decades.
• 36:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Philoxorous spread relentlessly across nearly every wine producing region in France, and then into Spain, Italy, Germany and beyond.
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Destroying and estimated two thirds or more of all European vineyards before the crisis was finally brought under control.
• 36:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Entire wine-making families lost generations of accumulated vineyard land in the span of just a few growing seasons and some historic vineyard sites along with certain traditional grape varieties were lost permanently and never successfully replanted.
• 37:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The solution to this seemingly unstoppable crisis, somewhat ironically, came from the very continent that had accidentally caused the problem in the first place.
• 37:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Scientists and binyard owners eventually discovered that if European grapevine varieties were grafted onto the rootstock of resistant American grapevine species.
• 37:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The resulting plants could grow European grapes above ground, while relying on naturally faloxera resistant American roots below ground, this grafting technique, requiring vineyard owners across Europe to essentially uproot and replant nearly their entire vineyard holdings using this new hybrid approach was slow, expensive, and disruptive.
• 38:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it ultimately saved European vitticulture
• 38:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Remarkably, the vast majority of European vineyards planted today.
• 38:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even in historic regions with wine-making traditions stretching back many centuries, still rely on this same grafting technique, meaning that nearly every bottle of European wine produced in the modern era owes its existence in a very literal botanical sense to American rootstock brought across the Atlantic Ocean generations ago.
• 38:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the close of the 19th century, then, the world of wine looked dramatically different than it had just a hundred years before.
• 38:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Vineyards now stretched across multiple continents, scientific understanding of fermentation had been transformed.
• 38:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And European literature had survived its most serious existential threat, only through a combination of international scientific collaboration and sheer agricultural persistence.
• 39:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: This set the stage for the final chapter of our story tonight.
• 39:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: the emergence of the modern global wine industry, as we understand it today.
• 39:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter five, the modern age of wine.
• 39:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The 20th century
• 39:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: brought both extraordinary disruption and extraordinary growth to the world of wine.
• 39:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two devastating world wars swept across the European continent during the first half of the century, and vineyards, like nearly every other form of agriculture and industry in the affected regions, suffered tremendously.
• 39:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Vineyards were trampled by advancing and retreating armies.
• 39:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sellers were looted or destroyed, and an entire generation of vineyard workers was lost to military conscription and combat.
• 40:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Recovery, particularly in regions of France, that had experienced some of the heaviest fighting, took years and in some cases decades of patient replanting and rebuilding.
• 40:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the United States, the wine industry faced its own uniquely disruptive challenge during this same general period, one that had nothing to do with warfare and everything to do with domestic politics.
• 40:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the year 1920, the United States government enacted a nationwide prohibition on the production, sale and transportation of alcoholic beverages, following the ratification of a
• 40:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: This prohibition, which lasted for roughly 13 years, devastated the American wine industry almost completely.
• 40:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The vast majority of California's commercial wineries, which had grown substantially since the days of the early Spanish missions, were forced to shut down entirely.
• 41:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And many vineyard owners either abandoned their land or replanted their vineyards with thicker-skinned
• 41:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Better suited to being shipped long distances by rail to home-wine makers.
• 41:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Since a specific legal exception, allowed individual households to produce a limited quantity of wine for personal consumption.
• 41:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: When prohibition was finally repealed in 1933,
• 41:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The American wine industry had to essentially rebuild itself from a badly weakened foundation and it would take several more decades before American wine regained anything resembling its former scale or reputation.
• 41:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: That slow rebuilding process reached a remarkable turning point in the year 1976 in an event that has since become legendary within the wine industry often referred to simply
• 42:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: A British wine merchant organized a blind tasting competition in Paris, in which a panel of highly respected French wine judges was asked to evaluate a selection of top French wines, alongside a selection of relatively unknown California wines, without knowing which wine came from which country.
• 42:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: to the shock of nearly everyone involved, including the judges themselves, California wines took the top rankings in both the red wine and white wine categories, beating out some of the most prestigious and historically celebrated wine producers in all of France.
• 42:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: This single tasting event, when it became widely publicized,
• 42:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: fundamentally altered global perceptions of new world wine, meaning wine produced outside the traditional wine growing regions of Europe.
• 42:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Almost overnight, California and by extension other emerging wine regions around the world.
• 43:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: gained international credibility as serious producers of high-quality wine, no longer dismissed as merely inferior imitations of European tradition.
• 43:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: This shift helped fuel what became a truly global expansion of the wine industry over the following decades.
• 43:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Regions that had produced wine for only a relatively short time by historical standards, including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile and Argentina, invested heavily and improved wine-making technology, scientific literature.
• 43:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: and international marketing, gradually establishing themselves as serious and respected wine-producing nations in their own right.
• 43:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, traditional European wine regions, facing this new global competition, were pushed to modernize many of their own techniques as well, adopting improvements in vineyard management, fermentation control.
• 44:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: and quality regulation, while still working to preserve the historical traditions and regional identities that had taken centuries to establish.
• 44:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Modern science has also continued to reshape our understanding of wine in ways the ancient wine makers of Georgia or Egypt or Rome could never have imagined.
• 44:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Today's wine makers have access to precise chemical analysis of grape, sugar and acid levels.
• 44:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Climate-controlled fermentation tanks, capable of maintaining exact temperatures throughout the entire wine-making process.
• 44:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: and a deep scientific understanding of the specific yeast strains responsible for different flavour characteristics in the finished wine.
• 44:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Satellite imagery and soil mapping technology now allow vineyard managers to study variations in soil composition and water drainage across a single vineyard in extraordinary detail.
• 45:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Information that ancient and medieval winemakers could only have approximated through generations of patient hands-on observation and yet for all of this remarkable technological advancement.
• 45:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fundamental process at the heart of wine making has changed remarkably little across the thousands of years we have traveled together tonight.
• 45:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grapes are still harvested, typically by hand in many of the world's most respected vineyards.
• 45:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Still crushed to release their juice, still left to ferment through the action of yeast converting sugar into alcohol, and still aged, whether in ancient clay vessels buried in the earth, wooden barrels crafted from oak or modern stainless steel tanks, before finally being poured into a glass and shared among family, friends, or simply enjoyed alone at the
• 46:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: the specific tools have changed.
• 46:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The underlying transformation has not.
• 46:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth sitting with, for a moment, just how long this thread stretches.
• 46:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere in the mountains of the South
• 46:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: A person we will never know the name of, noticed that a jar of forgotten grapes had become something new, something warm and strange and pleasant.
• 46:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: That same basic transformation, sugar becoming alcohol through the quiet, invisible work of yeast, has continued uninterrupted ever since, through the rise and fall of the Egyptian
• 46:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: through the vast trading networks of the Roman Empire, through the patient, careful, record-keeping of medieval monks, through ships crossing entire oceans to plant vines in soil, no European vine had ever touched before, through a devastating insect that nearly ended it all and into the modern, scientifically refined industry we know today.
• 47:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wine has outlasted empires.
• 47:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has outlasted religions in some of the forms they once took.
• 47:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has travelled further and longer than almost any other agricultural product humans have ever cultivated.
• 47:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And on that thought, we will let tonight's story come gently to its end.
• 47:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the rain continues outside, think, if you like, of a hillside somewhere far away, rows of vines stretching toward a horizon, heavy with fruit that has been quietly ripening under a warm sun, following a rhythm older than written history itself.
• 47:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is nothing you need to do with this thought.
• 47:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Simply let it settle over you.
• 48:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: the way morning mist settles over a valley, soft and slow and without hurry.
• 48:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending this hour with sleepless history.
• 48:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: If this story helped carry you towards sleep, that is exactly what it was made to do.
• 48:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rest well and we will meet again next time with another quiet corner of the past to explore together.