The history of wine

Neolithic

1. c. 9000–6000 BCE · Western Asia and the Caucasus

   The domestication of the grapevine

   Genomic research has revised the single-origin account of grape domestication towards multiple near-simultaneous events.

2. c. 6000 BCE · South Caucasus (Georgia)

   The earliest evidence for winemaking

   Chemical residues in Neolithic pottery from Georgia provide the earliest widely accepted evidence for grape wine.

3. c. 4100–4000 BCE · Vayots Dzor, Armenia

   The Areni-1 winery

   A cave in Armenia preserved what is currently the oldest known purpose-built winemaking installation.

Ancient

1. c. 3000 BCE · Nile Delta

   Wine in ancient Egypt

   Egyptian tombs record viticulture, winemaking and something close to a labelling system.

2. c. 1200–800 BCE · Mediterranean

   Phoenician trade spreads the vine

   Phoenician traders carried vines and winemaking across the Mediterranean, seeding much of what became European viticulture.

Classical

1. c. 800–300 BCE · Greece and the Aegean

   Wine in ancient Greece

   Greece developed wine as a cultural institution, with named regional wines and an elaborate drinking culture.

2. c. 200 BCE – 400 CE · The Roman Empire

   Roman wine culture and expansion

   Rome industrialised wine production and planted the vineyards that became the great European regions.

3. c. 160 BCE – 65 CE · Italy

   The Roman agricultural writers

   Roman writers left detailed, practical viticultural manuals — the earliest wine literature that reads like instruction rather than description.

4. c. 1st century BCE – 3rd century CE · Gaul and the Roman Empire

   The barrel replaces the amphora

   Celtic coopering displaced the amphora as the Roman wine container, with consequences nobody at the time was aware of.

Medieval

1. c. 8th–15th century · Iberia, North Africa and the Near East

   Viticulture under Islamic rule

   Grape growing continued across the Islamic world, for table grapes, raisins and — with more nuance than usually allowed — wine.

2. c. 800–1400 · Western Europe

   Monasteries and medieval viticulture

   Monastic orders preserved and systematised viticulture, and effectively invented the study of terroir.

3. 1152–1453 · Bordeaux and England

   Bordeaux and the English trade

   Three centuries of English rule over Aquitaine built Bordeaux into an export powerhouse.

4. c. 1250–1500 · The Rhine, the Low Countries and the Baltic

   The northern wine trade

   Rhine wine moved north by river and sea in commercial quantities, and northern Europe acquired a taste it has never lost.

5. 1395 · Burgundy

   Philip the Bold bans Gamay from the Côte d’Or

   A ducal decree ordered Gamay pulled up in favour of Pinot Noir, shaping Burgundy for six centuries.

Early modern

1. 16th–19th century · The Americas, South Africa, Australia

   Viticulture spreads to the New World

   European colonisation carried vines to the Americas, the Cape, Australia and New Zealand.

2. 16th–19th century · Andalusia and England

   The sherry trade

   Long-standing English demand shaped sherry into the fortified, solera-aged wine it became.

3. 17th century · England and Iberia

   Cork and the glass bottle

   Strong glass and cork together made it possible to age wine — which changed what wine could be.

4. 1662 · London

   Christopher Merret describes making wine sparkle

   A paper to the Royal Society described adding sugar to wine to make it sparkle — six years before Dom Pérignon arrived at Hautvillers.

5. 1668–1715 · Hautvillers, Champagne

   Pierre Pérignon at Hautvillers

   A Benedictine cellarer made real and lasting contributions to Champagne — none of which was inventing it.

6. 17th–19th century · England and Champagne

   The development of sparkling wine

   Deliberate sparkling wine emerged gradually from several contributions — and Dom Pérignon was working to prevent bubbles, not create them.

7. 17th–18th century · Madeira

   Madeira and the accidental discovery of heat ageing

   Wine shipped as ballast through the tropics arrived improved, and the effect was then reproduced deliberately.

8. 1703 · England and Portugal

   The Methuen Treaty redirects British drinking

   A trade treaty gave Portuguese wine a duty advantage over French, and built the British taste for Port.

9. 1737 · Hungary

   The Tokaj classification

   Tokaj received a royal classification of its vineyards, predating the more famous French systems.

10. 1756 · Portugal

    The Douro is demarcated

    The Marquês de Pombal established a demarcated Port region with boundaries, classification and quality control.

11. c. 1750–1800 · Madeira

    Madeira discovers what the voyage did to it

    Wine that crossed the tropics twice came back better, and the island set about reproducing the effect deliberately.

12. c. 1750–1850 · Douro and Oporto

    Port becomes a fortified wine

    Adding brandy shifted from a preservative measure at shipping to a deliberate interruption of fermentation, which is what makes Port sweet.

13. 1789–1804 · Burgundy

    The Revolution fragments Burgundy

    Church and noble estates were confiscated and sold, and inheritance law then divided them again every generation.

14. c. 1800–1850 · Jerez de la Frontera

    The solera system takes shape in Jerez

    Fractional blending replaced vintage Sherry, giving a consistent product for an export market that demanded one.

Nineteenth century

1. 1801 · France

   Chaptal publishes on winemaking

   A chemist and government minister systematised winemaking knowledge, and lent his name to sugar addition.

2. 1845 · Europe

   Powdery mildew reaches Europe

   The first of three American vine diseases to devastate European vineyards.

3. 1855 · Bordeaux

   The 1855 Bordeaux Classification

   A ranking compiled for a Paris exhibition, based largely on price — and barely changed since.

4. 1857–1866 · France

   Pasteur establishes what fermentation is

   Fermentation was shown to be the work of living organisms, and winemaking stopped being a mystery and became a process.

5. 1863–1900s · Europe and worldwide

   The phylloxera crisis

   An American aphid destroyed most of Europe's vineyards, and grafting onto American rootstock was the eventual solution.

6. c. 1860–1900 · Rioja

   Bordeaux refugees reshape Rioja

   French winemakers driven south by phylloxera brought barrel ageing to Rioja, and it never left.

7. 1872 · Tuscany

   Bettino Ricasoli sets down a Chianti formula

   A recipe combining Sangiovese with other varieties defined Chianti for a century — including the white grapes later removed.

8. 1878–1885 · France

   Downy mildew arrives, and Bordeaux mixture answers it

   A second American fungus arrived on phylloxera-resistant rootstock imports, and the fungicide developed against it is still used.

9. c. 1869–1890 · France and Europe

   Grafting settles the phylloxera argument

   After a decade of failed chemical remedies, grafting European varieties onto American roots became the answer — over fierce opposition.

Twentieth century

1. 1920–1933 · United States

   Prohibition in the United States

   Thirteen years of prohibition set American wine back by generations.

2. 1920–1933 · United States

   What Prohibition did to American vineyards

   The vineyards did not disappear — they were replanted to thick-skinned grapes that could survive a rail journey to home winemakers.

3. 1900s–1930s · France

   The birth of appellation systems

   Fraud after phylloxera drove the creation of legally defined appellations.

4. 1935 · France

   France creates the AOC system

   The Comité National — later the INAO — was established to define and police appellations, and the model spread worldwide.

5. 1950s–1970s · Worldwide

   Temperature control and modern white wine

   Refrigeration and stainless steel made fresh, aromatic white wine possible in warm climates.

6. 1950s–1980s · Worldwide

   Stainless steel and refrigeration change what is possible

   Temperature-controlled stainless steel made crisp white wine possible in hot countries, and remade the world wine map.

7. 1971 · Germany

   The 1971 German wine law

   A law that classified German wine by grape sugar at harvest rather than by site — and took fifty years to begin correcting.

8. 1968–1994 · Tuscany

   The Super Tuscans break the rules

   Producers made better wine than the rules allowed, sold it as table wine, and eventually forced the rules to change.

9. 1976 · Paris

   The Judgement of Paris

   A blind tasting in which Californian wines beat French benchmarks, and the credibility of New World wine changed overnight.

Modern

1. 1550s–2000s · Chile

   Chilean wine from conquest to export

   Spanish mission vines, then a nineteenth-century French graft, then an export industry built in thirty years.

2. 1659–2010s · South Africa

   South African wine: Constantia, isolation and reconstruction

   One of the oldest New World wine industries, a celebrated sweet wine, a century of cooperative control, and a difficult reckoning.

3. 1788–2010s · Australia

   Australia: fortified to table wine and back to place

   A century of fortified wine, then a table wine boom, then a deliberate turn towards regional identity.

4. 1819–2010s · New Zealand

   New Zealand: from nothing to Marlborough

   A tiny, hybrid-planted industry transformed within a generation — and not only by Sauvignon Blanc.

5. 1970s–2000s · Australia, Americas, South Africa, New Zealand

   The rise of New World wine

   Varietal labelling, consistent quality and aggressive export reshaped the global market.

6. 1950s onwards · England and Wales

   The modern English wine industry

   A restarted industry that found its footing by concentrating on traditional-method sparkling wine.

7. 1850s–2010s · Mendoza

   Argentina turns to Malbec and to export

   A French variety imported in the 1850s, ignored for a century, and then rebuilt into a national identity.

8. 1988–2020s · Southern England

   English sparkling wine finds its ground

   Chalk, a warming climate and the traditional method turned a hobby industry into a serious one.

9. 1994 · Chile

   Chile discovers its Merlot is Carménère

   A variety thought lost after phylloxera turned out to have been growing in Chile for over a century, mislabelled.

10. 1990s onwards · Worldwide

    DNA analysis rewrites grape genealogy

    Genetic testing overturned centuries of assumptions about where grape varieties came from.

11. 1990s onwards · Friuli, Slovenia and Georgia

    The orange wine revival

    Producers in north-east Italy and Slovenia revived extended skin-contact white winemaking, drawing on Georgian practice.

12. 1980s onwards · France and internationally

    The natural wine movement

    A reaction against industrial winemaking that has been both genuinely influential and genuinely contentious.

13. 2000s · Australia and New Zealand

    The screwcap decision

    Australian and New Zealand producers switched to screwcaps almost wholesale, to eliminate cork taint.

14. 1980s onwards · Worldwide

    Climate change reshapes the wine map

    Warming has moved harvest dates, raised alcohol levels and made new regions viable while pressuring old ones.

15. 2003–2020s · Australia and western North America

    Smoke taint becomes a recognised risk

    Major bushfire and wildfire seasons turned a curiosity into a category-scale commercial risk, and drove the research that explained it.

16. 2015–2020s · Worldwide

    The no- and low-alcohol category grows

    Dealcoholisation technology and changing drinking patterns created a category that wine law had to catch up with.

17. 2023 · Western Asia and the Caucasus

    Genomics revises the domestication story

    Sequencing thousands of vines indicated domestication happened in more than one place at around the same time.

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