Wine through the Centuries

Wine was an important commodity for medieval people.  As I've previously noted, wine and beer, not coffee and tea, much less milk and soft drinks, were the principal medieval drinks.  Near the Mediterranean, wine predominated, slowly giving way to beer as one moved north, because wine grapes won't grow where it's too cold.  Wine was also required for the liturgy, so it had to be imported for the purpose to places like the British Isles.

Wine making seems to have begun somewhere around 1000 BC.  In the west, it began with the Etruscans, who were already there in Italy when the Celtic ancestors of the Romans came wandering into the peninsula.  (The Etruscans gave their name to Tuscany, the hilly area of northern Italy around Florence and Siena.)

The Etruscan god of wine was called Foonfel or something like that (written Etruscan presents, shall we say, challenges to the modern archaeologist).  He was depicted as a young, sexually active male, naked and ready for drinking and action.  He was remembered in folklore in Italy well into the twentieth century, when people whose vineyards were not bearing well would chant a poem in which they asked "Fafnel" to come make their vines bear abundantly.

The Etruscan wine god was often depicted with Uni, the Etruscan goddess of love.  In the images she was often larger and more mature than he was, but he seemed to be very happy with this older woman.  She was often depicted on Etruscan wine cups.  She inspired the Roman goddess Juno, who got to be Jupiter's wife in the Roman pantheon, but was really not the same person as the Greek goddess Hera, Zeus's wife.

You will notice here a strong connection between sex, fertility, abundance, and wine.  There was also sometimes a connotation of blood.  We think of wine as something to enjoy with a good French meal, or something to sip while relaxing in the evening.  Ancient people thought of it as connected with great religious festivals and reproduction.

Under the Roman empire, wine grapes were grown all around the Mediterranean.  With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, wine disappeared (at least theoretically) from the Middle East and North Africa, because Islam forbids alcohol along with pork.  Christians however continued to include wine in their religious ceremonies, though without the sex part.  After all, according to the Bible at the Last Supper Jesus had said that liturgical wine was his blood.

Different regions produced different sorts of wine, everything from light white wines to heavy reds that were so dark as to be nearly brown.  Not surprisingly, wine could be an excellent cash crop, and it didn't need nearly as big fields as did grain.  Even today, the wine-growing areas of Alsace have villages only a few miles apart, because they don't need large empty tracts for crops, and the buildings stop abruptly at the edge of the village—no malls or quicky-fills at the edge of town, as that would destroy valuable vineyard space.

In the twelfth century in France, landlords with a piece of land that would make a good vineyard (good soil, right slope facing the right direction) would buy rootstock and tools, then go into an agreement with a peasant, an arrangement called complant.  The peasant would undertake all the labor of planting the vines and tending them as they grew, but once they started to bear in a few years, he and the landlord would split the profits of the wine.

Medieval wine was highly sought out when it first appeared in the fall, because without modern bottling wine didn't keep well and might be close to vinegar by the time the new wine came in.  A good sprinkling of spice helped but not a lot.  Some powerful lords enforced a "wine ban," where they and only they could sell their new wine in the fall for the first three weeks, thus taking advantage of everyone's eagerness to buy.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval crops and food,  see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.