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.
What happened
Cato’s De Agri Cultura, from around 160 BCE, is the earliest surviving Latin prose work of any kind, and much of it is about running a vineyard: trellising, pressing, the economics of slave labour, and how to treat a wine that has gone wrong.
Columella’s De Re Rustica, a century and a half later, devotes three books to the vine and discusses variety selection, site, spacing and yields in terms a modern grower would recognise.
Pliny the Elder catalogued named wines and their reputations, effectively producing the first wine classification: Falernian at the top, with vintages, price differentials and complaints about fashion.
These texts matter because they show that by the first century the Romans were already treating viticulture as a technical discipline with variables to be optimised, rather than as agriculture with a by-product.
How firmly this is dated
Documented. Recorded contemporaneously. The date is not in question.
Surviving texts, transmitted through manuscript copying. The works exist; how widely their advice was followed is inference.
People: Cato the Elder, Columella, Pliny the Elder, Virgil
What this follows from, and leads to
A timeline is a list; these are the links between its entries.
Sources
Sources consulted
- Archaeological research on the origins of viticulture and fermented beverages — University of Pennsylvania Museum / peer-reviewed archaeological literature
- The Oxford Companion to Wine — Oxford University Press
Along the timeline
Before · c. 200 BCE – 400 CE
Roman wine culture and expansion
Rome industrialised wine production and planted the vineyards that became the great European regions.
After · c. 1st century BCE – 3rd century CE
The barrel replaces the amphora
Celtic coopering displaced the amphora as the Roman wine container, with consequences nobody at the time was aware of.