Where does wine come from historically?

Wine culture is several thousand years old. Even in ancient times (from 8000 or 6000 BC), people knew about the fermentation of grapes into an intoxicating drink; the discovery may well have been a coincidence.

Even then, wine developed into an important agricultural product that had economic as well as medical, social and ritual significance. In ancient times, every advanced civilisation had a deity who represented wine and the enjoyment of wine, such as Osiris in Egypt, Dionysus in Greece and Bacchus in Rome. According to the Bible (Book of Genesis), Noah is considered the first person to cultivate wine.

According to the latest scientific findings, viticulture probably has its geographical origins in the Near East, in the area of present-day Georgia (where the history of viticulture goes back over 7,000 years), Armenia and south-east Anatolia, i.e. in Transcaucasia and historical Mesopotamia. Over the centuries, wine culture spread from ancient Persia across the Mediterranean region to Central Europe and finally to the New World.

The roots of European viticulture lie largely in the wine culture of ancient Greece. Professional viticulture already existed in the Mycenaean civilisation in the 16th century BC, and in the 8th century BC the Greek poet Homer described wine as the drink of heroes in his "Iliad". Both the Greeks and the Romans then brought the knowledge of viticulture and winemaking to the areas they conquered in Europe and North Africa. Wine played an important social and religious role in Greek and Roman drinking culture.

In the Middle Ages, wine culture flourished in Central Europe, partly due to the influence of the Church. From the 11th and 12th centuries AD, the wine trade and production in France began to flourish in the south-west regions(Gascony, Bordelais, Cahors) and Burgundy. In the 16th century, wines from Portugal(Douro), Spain(Andalusia) and Hungary(Tokay) became better known across borders, and the 18th century saw the triumphant rise of fine sparkling wines from the French Champagne region. A milestone in European wine history was the classification of vineyards in the Bordeaux region in 1855. In Italy, the wines from Piedmont(Barolo) became increasingly famous from the second half of the 19th century onwards.

The German name "Wein" comes from the Latin word "vinum", which was also the inspiration for the names in numerous other European languages: "wine" (English), "vin" (French), "vino" (Italian and Spanish), "vinho" (Portuguese); the Greek word "oinos" is also related to this.