Eight Thousand Years in the Glass
From the ancient amphoras of the Caucasus to the grand châteaux of Bordeaux — tracing wine's extraordinary journey through civilization
Wine is older than recorded history. Archaeological evidence from the South Caucasus — the modern nations of Georgia and Armenia — places the first deliberate viticulture at around 6000 BCE. Clay vessels unearthed at sites like Areni-1 in Armenia bear tartaric acid residues and grape seeds, testifying to a winemaking tradition stretching back eight millennia.
From those mountain valleys, wine followed the great civilizations westward. The Phoenicians carried vines across the Mediterranean. Greek colonists planted them in southern Italy and France — what would become Magna Graecia and then, eventually, Provence and Languedoc. Roman legionaries drank wine on campaign and planted vineyards wherever they settled, establishing the foundations of regions we still revere: Moselle, Rhineland, Burgundy, Bordeaux.
The medieval Church preserved winemaking through centuries of upheaval. Benedictine and Cistercian monks in Burgundy painstakingly mapped the vineyards of the Côte d'Or, identifying the individual parcels — the crus — that produced wines of distinct and superior character. Their records gave us the concept of terroir.
The modern wine era began in earnest in the nineteenth century, when scientific advances in understanding fermentation, coupled with the advent of the glass bottle and cork closure, allowed wines to age, travel, and command serious prices. The classification of 1855 — still largely in force today — codified Bordeaux's hierarchy. And though phylloxera nearly destroyed European viticulture in the 1870s and 1880s, grafting onto American rootstock saved the vineyards of the world.
Every bottle of wine carries this history in its DNA.
“Every bottle of wine carries eight thousand years of human civilization in its DNA — a living artifact of our oldest cultivated relationship with the land.”