Wine carries such ceremony and care in its presentation
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- June 19, 2019
- 1099
The Romans, we’re told, drank a lot of wine, and when the topic of wine history comes up, which it does when you don’t know anything at all about baseball, someone will usually say, “Yes, but wine was very different then, more like grape juice.” I always want to give those people such a smack.
Now we have science that puts the lie to such thinking.
In another nifty piece of information sprung from ancient DNA — in this case the DNA of grapes — the BBC reports ancient Romans drank something very close to what we know as Pinot Noir and Syrah.
In France the current wines drunk there are, in many regions, identical to those consumed nearly 1,000 years ago. Somehow, they were able to trace ancient grape seeds from across France directly to modern grapes and the resulting wines.
Because grapes are propagated by cuttings, people have been taking cuttings from the same grape vines for 900 years, generation upon generation. The plants grown today are clones of the originals. It follows that many of the wine varieties drunk around the world today are virtually identical to those served with meals by our very ancient ancestors — or at least the grapes from which they’re made are the same.
That means that with the singular exception of the never-to-be-equalled wine enjoyed by the guests at the big wedding in Cana when Jesus took a few gallons of water and turned it into wine for the guests, wine then is wine now. Pretty fascinating.
Of course the seeds we find preserved from ancient times may have been from grapes simply used for snacking, but given what is known about Roman and other cultures and their wine-making skills, that seems unlikely, especially because they’re grape varieties commonly associated with wines even today.
Wine, and similarly beer, connects us directly to our origins in the way singing very old songs or reading masterful poetry joins our voices with those who’ve come before us. But even those experiences can’t touch the depth of wine and the practice of pairing it with meals.
Fermenting grapes to make wine as a human practice began more than 4,000 years ago. As general agriculture is roughly 20,000 years older than that, one wonders what took them so long to get going with the cabernet.
It points up something still hard to get our minds around today, in our 21st century. Humans took an enormous amount of time, relatively speaking, to get much farther than growing a few crops and living in huts.
Then another long stretch before real architecture appeared. And then most people lived a peasant life and went outdoors to relieve themselves for another several centuries. Just about everything we know and take for granted has developed in the last 100 years or less, and in our world, in less time than it takes for a package of hamburger buns to grow hair on the counter, a hundred new developments and advances will be announced. We’re moving fast now, man, and it makes us dizzy at times.
Maybe it’s a little comforting the wines we drink now are the wines on the banquet tables in the dining halls of Rome with Nero, or even Pilate. The wines served at court with French monarchs, available to the elite at that time, you can now pick up as an afterthought at the grocery store to have with that night’s chicken casserole.
I am beginning to see why wine carries such ceremony and care in its presentation. The cork pop, the pour, the swirl, the slow sips with friends. Wine deserves that kind of respect.