Wine

The oldest wine traces: Georgia

Big Neolithic jars at Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, south of Tbilisi, held tartaric acid and other grape acids. A 2017 PNAS study pushed the start of winemaking back 600 to 1,000 years.

Resin in the jar, Iran

A jar sunk into a Neolithic kitchen floor in the Zagros Mountains tested positive for wine and terebinth tree resin, an early preservative. It held about 2.5 gallons.

Areni-1: the oldest known winery

In a cave in Armenia, archaeologists found a grape press, fermentation vats, storage jars, cups, seeds and vines. The 2011 announcement called it the earliest reliable evidence of wine production.

A king's tomb, stocked with imports

The Abydos tomb of Scorpion I, one of Egypt's first kings, held hundreds of wine jars. Clay analysis traced many to the southern Levant. The wine was laced with terebinth resin.

Tutankhamun's wine came labeled

Jars buried with him named the product, the year, the source and even the vine grower. A 2005 chemical study found the king was given red wine.

Phoenicians take wine to sea

A wine press at Tell el-Burak, near Sidon in Lebanon, dates to at least the seventh century BCE. Phoenician traders carried winemaking and vineyards to North Africa, Sicily, Spain and France.

Greeks plant the vine at Marseille

Greek settlers founded Massalia, modern Marseille, around 600 BCE. By the late sixth century BCE its wine amphorae were all over southern Gaul.

Rome plants the provinces

Under Rome, Gaul and Spain grew so much wine that from the first century CE they overtook Italy as the Mediterranean's chief producers. In late antiquity, vines reached the Moselle.

Monks build Clos de Vougeot

The Cistercians of Cîteaux pieced together the Clos de Vougeot in Burgundy from donations made between 1109 and 1115. By the mid-fourteenth century the order owned hundreds of hectares of Burgundy vineyards.

A duke bans Gamay

Philip the Bold called Gamay a "very bad and disloyal" variety and ordered it uprooted. The edict helped make Pinot Noir Burgundy's red grape.

An Englishman explains the sparkle

Christopher Merret told the Royal Society that English coopers added sugar and molasses to wines to make them "brisk and sparkling." Strong coal-fired English glass could take the pressure.

Dom Pérignon, minus the myth

Cellar master at Hautvillers Abbey from 1668, Dom Pérignon blended grapes to improve still wines and likely fought bubbles. The legend that he invented Champagne showed up in the 1820s.

The widow cleans up Champagne

The Widow Clicquot developed remuage, or riddling, gathering sediment in the bottle neck so it could be removed. Clear sparkling Champagne became practical at scale.

Powdery mildew guts French harvests

Oidium, a North American fungus first seen in England in 1845, reached France in 1847. The 1854 harvest fell to 10.8 million hectolitres from over 50 million. Sulfur dusting restored output by 1858.

Bordeaux ranks itself, mostly by price

For the Paris Exposition Universelle, Bordeaux brokers ranked 58 estates into five growths, almost entirely by price. The list has changed little since; Mouton Rothschild was promoted to first growth in 1973.

Phylloxera lands in France

The damage from phylloxera, a tiny root-feeding aphid from North America, was first noted in France in 1863. Almost 2.5 million hectares of French vineyards were eventually destroyed.

Planchon names the devastator

Montpellier botanist Jules-Émile Planchon, working with Gaston Bazille and Félix Sahut, found yellow insects crusting the roots of dying vines. He named them Phylloxera vastatrix, the devastator.

American roots save European wine

Missouri entomologist Charles Valentine Riley saw that native American vines resisted the pest, and from 1870 he sent rootstocks to Planchon. Grafting European varieties onto them became the lasting cure.

Montpellier starts collecting vines

In the middle of the phylloxera crisis, Montpellier's school of agriculture began collecting grapevines. That collection is the ancestor of today's Vassal-Montpellier repository.

Downy mildew, another American import

Another North American disease, downy mildew, reached European vineyards in 1878. Planchon identified the fungus that same year.

Bordeaux mixture beats downy mildew

Pierre-Marie-Alexis Millardet found that a mix of copper sulfate, hydrated lime and water protected vines from downy mildew. It became the first fungicide used on a large scale worldwide.

France thanks a Texas grape breeder

Thomas Volney Munson of Denison, Texas, bred more than 300 grape varieties and supplied resistant rootstock to France. In 1888 a French delegation awarded him the Mérite Agricole.

Replanting brings glut and fraud

After phylloxera, France replanted and imported huge volumes, notably from Algeria. Overproduction and fraud collapsed prices and threatened the whole national wine trade.

France outlaws wine fraud

A founding law against fraud let authorities delimit areas entitled to a place name. Decrees followed for Champagne, Cognac and Bordeaux between 1908 and 1911.

The Languedoc growers revolt

Led by Marcelin Albert of Argeliers, growers protested collapsing prices, fraud, sugared wine and Algerian imports. More than 500,000 people rallied in Montpellier on 9 June 1907.

Appellation law is born

A decree-law created the national committee for appellations of origin, led by Joseph Capus. The first AOCs, including Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Arbois, followed in 1936; the committee became INAO in 1947.

The vine library moves to sand

The collection moved to the Domaine de Vassal at Marseillan-Plage, on sandy soil where phylloxera cannot spread. There the vines could grow on their own roots, no grafting needed.

Mondavi takes on France

Robert Mondavi founded his Napa Valley winery in 1966 to disprove the belief that only France could make great wine. His techniques and marketing raised California's global profile.

Judgment of Paris: California wins blind

In a blind tasting organized by Steven Spurrier, French judges ranked a 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay and a 1973 Stag's Leap Cabernet Sauvignon above top Burgundy and Bordeaux.

Draining Europe's wine lake

To cut chronic surpluses, European vine-pull schemes paid growers to rip out vines. About 300,000 hectares went in France and 400,000 in Italy from the late 1970s to 1991, with more after.

England gets warm enough for bubbles

UK vineyard area grew from 761 to about 3,800 hectares between 2004 and 2021. Growing seasons in southeast England have warmed by over 1°C since the 1980s, favoring Champagne grapes.

The vine library retreats inland

With rising seas and salinization closing in, INRAE launched the move of the Vassal collection to its Pech Rouge estate near Gruissan: about 5.1 million euros, planned to run into the 2030s.