Oz Clarke - The History of Wine in 100 Bottles : From Bacchus to Bordeaux and Beyond

For Sophia, with love.
Her first book.

T his isnt just a history of 100 bottles.

And its not just a history of wine. This book is 100 stories with wine at their centre, embracing all the history and culture of which wine is a part. The art, the politics, the science, the empire-building and the wars; the lucky mistakes, the brilliant guesses, the leaps in the dark, and the human frailties that have created our world of wine. And it cant all be about bottles, because a lot of the stories I want to tell are about times before the bottle had even been invented.

A 13th-century Venetian mosaic depicting the drunkenness of Noah. According to the Bible, Noah was our first vineyard owner.

But from the very first moment that someone in the distant past accidentally created wine, the vessel to hold it in, the vessel to store it in, the vessel to drink it out of has been of paramount importance. Wines a liquid. If you dont have a decent vessel, itll just splosh out onto the floor and be gone. Wines perishable. For thousands of years the biggest challenge in wine was to stop it turning to vinegar before youd had the chance to enjoy it. And wines valuable. How do you differentiate your priceless nectar from the run-of-the-mill stuff? The earthenware jar, the barrel, the bottle, the label, the cork the corkscrew, for that matter all of these have their part to play. And in the future, will we still use bottles? Will we still use corks? Will plastic or paper or tin replace glass?

A 5th-century BC Greek bowl for mixing wine and water. The Greeks were famous for diluting their wine. Homer favoured 20 parts water to one of wine.

Well, these are all the kinds of stories that I want to tell. Sometimes there is a physical bottle that is the story. Sometimes there is a single wine that significantly changed the course of wines history. We do have an example of the oldest wine that still exists a single bottle of the 1540 Steinwein from Germany, so I can base my tale on this. We do have examples of the blood vintages of Champagne those of 1914 and 1915 when the grapes were being harvested while German shells rained down all around; we have examples of the worlds most expensive wine, just as we have examples of Blue Nun Liebfraumilch and Montana New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, and so these bottles take pride of place because they represent significant steps forward in the world of wine.

But there are other steps forward and backwards where a particular bottle is not so important but the tale must be told. The scourge of the phylloxera aphid that destroyed Europes vineyards in the 19th century; the rise and fall of sherry, or Sherris sack as Shakespeares Falstaff dubbed it while he downed it by the gallon; the wines that were being drunk as Pompeii was destroyed; the scientific revolution brought about by Louis Pasteur; or the wine that Noah drank rather too much of as he set about repopulating the world after the Great Flood. There are no specific bottles that need to be shown for these entries, but I really wanted to tell the tales and a bottle, a flask, a jug or a jar make good illustrations.

This 1914 Pol Roger champagne is one of the very rare blood vintages, which were harvested under the fury of German guns. It was sold in 2014, at Bonhams in London, for 5640.

So I suppose it is a history of wine, but I unapologetically admit that it is my version of history its the events and the people that I find interesting or amusing, or both. There may be bottles missing which you would have included I freely accept that. To be honest, I could probably have written the history of wine in 200 bottles, had my editor not had the wisdom to say enoughs enough; and even then, I might still have missed a few gems. And it isnt just the big moments in wine that I celebrate its also the eccentric, the bombastic, the mundane. Do you really think its important to celebrate the first White Zinfandel, the first Liebfraumilch, or the first bag-in-box? Well, actually, yes I do. Such events are of massive importance in the spreading of our wine culture all around the world.

Are they as important as the invention of champagne; the creation of anti-fraud systems of controlled appellation, like the French Appellation Contrle; the development of the cork as the first airtight wine bottle stopper? Perhaps not, but without them, the story of wine would be a less colourful tale.

And wine has a very colourful history, because the purpose of wine is to make people happy, to make their life more enjoyable and bring laughter and wit, philosophy and romance to the party, rather than simply the flavour of a liquid in a glass. Yet I cant forget that wine has been of massive significance in trade and politics and in some places it still is. Wine has sometimes been the most valuable commodity a society has possessed, and a nations wealth has depended on it. Wars have been fought to keep supplies of it, colonies have been established to create supplies of it, and the plundering of Frances greatest wines in World War II was one of the most symbolic acts of the conqueror.

From earliest times, religion has drawn wine close to its heart. Initially because the inexplicable process of fermentation was seen as a divine gift, and whole religious cults were developed and enthusiastically based on wine, wine gods and goddesses, and conspicuous wine consumption. Later, wine became an integral part of the rituals of both Judaism and Christianity. If you notice a long gap in the book between the end of the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages well, thats the Dark Ages and not much culture survived them intact, but bishops and monks kept the flame of wine alive.

Staff at the Waldorf Astoria in New York celebrate the end of Prohibition. The infamous Volstead Act came into force on 17 January 1920 and lasted until 5 December 1933. The target was strong liquor, not wine, but eventually all alcohol got swept up in the national fervour to create an alcohol-free zone. That Dry Monopole 1923 would have been just ready to drink.

And once we reach the Middle Ages, the story of wine rapidly picks up pace, regaining its position throughout Europe, establishing itself in the Americas, Africa and the Antipodes, reaching ever further north and south, higher and colder and drier, inventing new wine styles, recreating old ones and pushing the boundaries as to how you package wine, how you label it, how you sell it and how you drink it. Its a wonderful story. And I hope these 100 bottled histories illustrate it and enrich it for you.