Can Greeks make wine or should they rather concentrate on Ouzo and leave wine for the French and the rest of the wine-making world – after all, what could they possibly know about it? Have I got news for you!!  The Greeks taught the world how to make decent wine. They may not have invented the process, but they certainly had a look at the rather pathetic attempts of the Babylonians and the Egyptians and discovered a way in which to make a sophisticated and very palatable drink out of grapes. They didn’t invent distillation – for that we have to thank the Arabs but they made, distributed and introduced the rest of the world

to good wine – and have done so since the Bronze Ages. The bloodthirsty Scythian men and woman and the so-called *Barbarians drank undiluted wine, which was considered unacceptable by the Greeks. In the late Neolithic era vines had already been domesticated and by the early Bronze Age they were, already, fully utilized and wine making was flourishing. Long before 2,000 BC  the Minoans of Crete were already producing very good wine. Installations for the production of the precious liquid had been

installed in the dwellings of most of the wealthy – some archeologists believe that there were many storage jars (amphorae) for wine and that they may have been used for religious and cultural rituals as well. The Minoans probably learnt viticulture from the Egyptians, improved hugely on it and then exported good wine right back to them and to the rest of Asia (much as they did with olive oil!). Such is learning and education.  By 1600 to 1150 BC Mycenaea also jumped on the wine-making bandwagon and we can be pretty sure that the Spartans, as preoccupied as they were with their Spartan lifestyle, were quenching their thirst with wine, along with all the other Greeks. Ancient Sparta today.

Viticulture is mentioned in many of the ancient writings – Homer (particularly in the Odyssey) mentions it frequently in his poetry. However, one notices here that wine is reserved for humans only – the gods got the nectar but wine was so good that the Greeks made darned sure they got it and not the gods. Or was the nectar something similar to the Greek Samos Nectar from the North Aegean made today? (a

spectacular sweet wine) Isn’t it ironic that the Trojans were drinking liters of the stuff and their descendants, the Turks, (in a sense) did everything in their power to stop the drinking of wine much later. (If the myths are to be believed, Paris chose his wife  on the slopes of what is now Mt. İda, just inland from Altınoluk on the northern shore of the Edremit Körfezi on Gulf of Edremit). Not directly – they were benevolent rulers and never stopped the Greeks from drinking or making wine.  They just taxed it to high heaven so that it became impossible to export it. The Greeks took viticulture to Sicily and the southern part of Italy -known then as Oenotria (land of trained vines), the south of France and the Black sea!  During that period they also exported wine to Etruria (Tuscany today) and to the lands of the Celts! Not only did they export widely, they were very fussy about the wine – the amphorae had to be of a standard size, the seals indicated where the wine came from and was certified by the annual magistrate to confirm the authenticity! Kings from some of the Greek city states even forbade the importation of foreign

wine in order to protect their own industry. Sadly none of the ancient Greek vine varieties are still used today – but quite a few of the varieties have been recorded. Later on in history, the Romans noted that the yields from the Greek varieties were too low to make planting them feasible – even though the quality was good and so the vines weren’t used for too long in Italy. Greek wines were black, red or white and drunk, diluted with water or cooled with snow (for the wealthy) most of the time. As I said earlier, they considered it barbaric to drink undiluted wine – one wonders just how strong their wine was. So dangerous was the drinking of the undiluted wine that the Spartans firmly believed the undiluted wine caused the insanity and death of their king, Cleomenes! (I think he may have been a raging alcoholic.)  Notwithstanding this, it was used for medical purposes – this habit continued throughout the ages and throughout the world.  In those days, already, hangovers were prevalent and cures for hangovers

popular! Dionysus (image above) was the god of wine and the Greeks made sure that they had plenty of festivals to honour him – Anthesteria was the festival of the year! Oschophoria was celebrated in September by the elite and Apotouria, in the same month, was reserved for the young males when they were divided up and registered in their various clans (phratries) and then they celebrated a little more the next morning with Epildon (the morning after).  Even the really important festivals of Athens, Panathenaia were celebrated with a goodly amount of wine.  During the Middle Ages, the monks took over the wine industry – but there were a few private individuals who could afford to plant and make wine. (Image, wine

made by the monks at St. Athos). The  best wines came from the Aegean Islands, Khíos and also Thásos and Crete. In the 1200 AD Constantinople, that was in Turkey, became the centre of the Byzantine empire’s wine trade until the Ottoman Turks arrived on the scene and destroyed Greek viticulture (so that it didn’t really recover until well into the 20th century) not by forbidding the viticulture and distribution, but by taxing it to high heaven.  So bad was the destruction of the industry that it was only until the 1960′s that any decent wine was bottled in Greece.  In the 1980′s the first generation of well trained winemakers made their appearance in Greece and I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before the Greeks will, once more, form part of the world of wine. There were legends in Greece that were believed so intensively that the myths became a religion. Dionysus, the most vibrant of Gods, gave the them wine. He voyaged over the oceans on ships (see a wine cup by Exekias of Dionysus sailing on the sea, created in 540 BC), over the land riding wild animals and in the skies where he flew with wings. See the image below. They firmly believed that he came from the East – from Anatolia (then Turkey) through Phoenicia, Palestine and Egypt a long time before there was history and in the time of Homer huge parties or symposia were held (attended by wealthy men only) where the celebrated Dionysus and Eros!!

*The Barbarians were anything but barbaric – they were fierce and cruel warriors but their religion, laws and indicate a culture that was well organised with a legal system that worked pretty well for them under the circumstances in which lived.