Eight millennia
A Brief History of Wine
Wine is older than writing. This is the short version — ten moments that carried it from a buried clay jar in the Caucasus to the bottle on your table.
c. 6000 BCE
Earliest Evidence of Wine
The oldest known winemaking residues come from clay vessels in the South Caucasus — modern Georgia and Armenia. Neolithic farmers there discovered that crushed grapes stored in buried jars fermented on their own, producing a stable, transportable drink. A cave complex in Areni, Armenia has yielded a complete 6,100-year-old winery: a press, fermentation vats and drinking cups.
c. 3000 BCE
Ancient Mesopotamia
Wine travelled south into Sumer and Babylon, where it was a luxury import from the northern hills rather than an everyday drink. Cuneiform tablets record its price, its use in temple offerings, and physicians prescribing it as medicine. The Code of Hammurabi even regulated wine merchants.
c. 2700 BCE
Ancient Egypt
Egyptians planted vineyards in the Nile Delta and produced wine largely for the pharaoh, the priesthood and the afterlife. Sealed amphorae were labelled with vintage, vineyard and winemaker — the world's first appellation system. Tomb paintings at Thebes show harvest, treading and pressing in remarkable detail.
c. 800 BCE
Ancient Greece
The Greeks turned wine into culture. It was central to the symposium, to the cult of Dionysus, and to trade across the Mediterranean, carried in amphorae to Sicily, southern Italy and the Black Sea. Greeks were the first to write systematically about vineyard sites, and typically diluted their wine with water.
c. 200 BCE – 400 CE
Ancient Rome
Rome industrialised wine. Roman growers pioneered trellising, pruning, grape classification and the wooden barrel, and identified prized crus such as Falernian. As the legions advanced, they planted vines throughout Gaul, Hispania, Germania and Britain — laying out the map of European wine that still exists today.
500 – 1300
Medieval Winemaking
After Rome's collapse, monasteries preserved viticulture. Benedictine and Cistercian monks in Burgundy kept meticulous records, observing that adjacent parcels of land yielded consistently different wines — the origin of the idea of terroir and of the walled clos.
1300 – 1700
The Rise of the Great Regions
Trade shaped reputations. Bordeaux grew wealthy shipping claret to England, Port emerged from British demand for fortified Douro wine, and Champagne mastered the second fermentation in bottle. Glass bottles and reliable corks arrived, and for the first time wine could improve with age.
1500 – 1900
Wine in the Americas
Spanish missionaries carried vines to Mexico, Peru, Chile and Argentina in the sixteenth century; Dutch and French settlers took them to the Cape and, later, to Australia. California's industry took shape in the nineteenth century, while European vineyards were devastated by the phylloxera louse and rebuilt on grafted American rootstock.
1900 – 1990
Modern Winemaking
The twentieth century brought science to the cellar: temperature-controlled fermentation, selected yeasts, stainless steel and appellation law. France's AOC system of the 1930s set the template for protected origin worldwide, and the 1976 Judgment of Paris proved that New World wine could match the classics.
1990 – today
Contemporary Wine Culture
Wine is now made on every continent except Antarctica. Organic, biodynamic and low-intervention methods have gained ground, ancient techniques such as amphora ageing have returned as orange wine, and a warming climate is pushing vineyards into England, Scandinavia and higher altitudes.