666. Wine and the Birth of Civilisation

19:45Dominic Sandbrook:Because it's a giant marketplace.

19:48Tom Holland:Globalized single market. Yes. Exactly.

19:51Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah.

19:51Tom Holland:Now, to begin with, I guess a bit like Americans in the 19th or 20th century visiting the vineyards of Bordeaux, the Romans are very, very conscious of themselves as kind of parvenues. They're anxious about whether they're doing the right thing. A bit like me going and displaying my mastery of wine tasting in the Napa Valley. They have a default assumption that the best wines are Greek. And because of that, Greek wines become the most expensive. They are also people who listen to our episode on Carthage. We did one on the destruction of the city. And they may remember that all the Carthaginian libraries kind of get disposed of.

20:31Tom Holland:But the Romans keep one volume by an agronomist called Mago. And one of the reasons they wanted to keep him is that Mago was a very famous writer on how you grow wines. And so that was translated from Carthaginian into Latin and became a very important influence on the growth of vineyards in Italy. But actually, what happens is that wine beds down so deeply into the soil of Roman Italy that as the legions start expanding beyond the limits of the Mediterranean, wine becomes a marker of Roman civilization. It becomes one of the kind of the key leitmotifs of what it is to be Roman. And actually, a bit like whiskey in the expansion of the American West, wine plays a role in Rome's imperial expansion, say, into Gaul.

21:22Tom Holland:So in the second century BC, Rome has occupied the south. Massilia, Marseille, is a part of the Roman Empire. And the Romans are kind of looking northwards, wondering about how they're going to pacify all these terrifying tribes that live there. And so merchants start traveling up the rivers into the interior of Gaul and they take wine with them. And the Gauls absolutely love it. They end up completely addicted. Like Polyphemus, they're barbarians, so they don't dilute it. They kind of wallow in drunken binges. To quote one Greek historian, they end up so inebriated that they either fall asleep or go mad.

22:00Tom Holland:and essentially what the roman merchants are doing is to create a market of alcoholics and by doing that because the gauls have become alcoholics the merchants can then inflate their prices perfect and to make sure that it's only the romans who can provide the wine the senate passes of an official decree banning the selling of vines to the gauls so the manufacturing of wine remains in Roman hands. And the result of that is that by the time of Julius Caesar, who's going to conquer Gaul, the exchange rate, I mean, is insane. It's one and four of wine basically equates to a slave, you know, and a slave is worth a lot.

22:41Tom Holland:And so this in turn generates fighting among the Gauls because they need to capture slaves if they're going to get the wine. So it makes any notion of Gallic unity against the advance of the Romans impossible. While for the romans it's a virtuous circle because you you buy the you get these slaves in return for the wine you can then sell it to viticulturalists who can then use the slaves to make more wine which then gets the gauls even more pissed and that in turn fosters more wars which results in more slaves and you know it's brilliant so basically wine is what enables julius easter to conquer gaul unexpected dimension of the history of wine perhaps that is an unexpected

23:17Dominic Sandbrook:dimension so by the time pliny is writing what did we say the first century a.d was it yeah first century AD the Roman kind of wine world encompasses quite a lot of the areas that we now associate with wine so you mentioned you've got Greece I mean Greece is not a massive wine powerhouse now although there are some nice wines from Greece the Becker Valley in in Lebanon there's some very nice wines made in Lebanon wine has spread into France so it's already in Burgundy the Loire the Moselle and the Rhine for example so those areas that are kind of slightly on the periphery the roman world but above all italy by the time augustus tiberius and co are in charge italy is the home and the heartland of wine isn't it's taken over from greece and indeed from georgia

24:02Tom Holland:yeah uh so greek winemakers are basically basically kind of artisanal winemakers right the romans are doing it on an industrial scale i mean they got all these slaves for instance but they're not just kind of mass producing they also have really superb wines of which the classic is called Falernian. So Pliny loves Falernian. I mean, basically all the Romans love Falernian. That is the best. As it had done in Greece, it has become part of Roman culture. So it absolutely saturates the work of all the great Roman poets. And one of the most famous phrases from Roman poetry, still in use, Carpe Diem from the poet Horace, I mean, that's an allusion to viticulture.

24:40Tom Holland:it's um you know pluck the day as though the day is kind of a bunch of grapes on the vine um so there is you know in our kind of everyday language still used today is a kind of trace element of how deeply the romans were influenced by their relationship with wine now of course the collapse of roman power when it comes in the west ends this sense of a common civilization that had been bonded by the drinking of wine amid the chaos of Rome's fall vineyards are either destroyed or they're abandoned completely the barbarians who are the new masters of the western provinces tend to drink beer in preference to wine well beer is easier to produce you don't

25:24Dominic Sandbrook:need such a sophisticated system to produce beer and it's better suited to the kind of cold colder

25:29Tom Holland:climates of the north but the main factor is just the destruction of the Roman single market You know, they just aren't the kind of the trade networks that had previously existed. However, all that said, the wine culture is not obliterated. It does survive. And there are two things really that make that possible. The first is that there are kind of trade links. They do survive. So the Rhine in particular is absolutely crucial. It comes to be called a river of wine. So much wine flows down it. And it is from the wine that it ends up reaching Scandinavia, for instance, where wine becomes very popular with the Viking elites, despite the fact, or actually maybe because of the fact that it is so expensive.

26:10Tom Holland:I mean, everyone who's been to Scandinavia knows that wine in Scandinavia is madly expensive.

26:15Dominic Sandbrook:Isn't the point that wine then, as now, is a marker of sophistication? It's seen as, it's identified with Roman culture, and therefore it's prestigious.

26:23Tom Holland:Yeah. And so it maintains this prestige throughout the kind of the early Middle Ages. The other reason, of course, is Christianity, because wine is incredibly important to Christian ritual. If you're going to celebrate the Eucharist, the Mass, you need wine. And so abbeys in particular in the early Middle Ages are great enthusiasts for vineyards, again, particularly in Germany. So all along the length of the Rhine, you have these abbeys with vineyards, and that's what enables the Rhine to become this kind of great channel for the wine trade. And the aristocracy, for the reasons that You said, Dominic, they become great enthusiasts for it.

26:58Tom Holland:And as early as the sixth century, the law of the Franks with its kind of notion of wear guilds, the idea that if you kill someone, you have to kind of pay a set amount of money, which is determined legally. The wear guild of someone who's working on a vineyard is set at twice the level of a ploughman or a cowherd, which suggests how prestigious and how important vineyards are already coming to seem to the Franks. and over the course of the early middle ages what will become france starts to recover quicker from the chaos of the time than italy and france comes to replace italy as the center of the wine trade but you still all the way through the early middle ages into the high middle ages there's still no real sense of a wine culture that is international in its scale of the kind that it existed under the Roman Empire.

27:50Tom Holland:And it's as late as 1596. So, you know, well into the Renaissance when you have an Italian scholar who's a guy called Andrea Bacci. And he published a great seven volume survey of wine. And this is the first great survey of wine that has been written since Pliny 1500 years before. And of course, Pliny is a massive influence on it.

28:12Dominic Sandbrook:But of course, we've talked about the Roman continuity though, Tom. So areas that produced wine under the Romans or were celebrated for their wine are still celebrated today. But there are obvious exceptions to that. And that's partly because much of what was once the Eastern Roman Empire has been taken over by the armies of Islam. And obviously, wine has a very different place in Islamic culture than it does in Christian.

28:38Tom Holland:Yeah, well, we mentioned already how amphorae, which had been around since, you know, the early Cernanat period, they vanish in the 7th century, which is the period that sees the caliphate established over much of what had been the Roman and Persian empires, both of which have been very keen on wine. And I think the repudiation of the culture of wine under the caliphate is a very dramatic marker of just how transformative Islam inspired to be and would obviously have been one that was experienced as such by people who come under the caliphate so in islam the mainstream legal position on wine is unambiguous you you shouldn't drink it so according to the quran which for muslims is i mean literally it's divinity in the form of language wine is an abomination and it's been invented by satan to encourage people to kind of brawl and fight and to distract the faithful from and I quote from the Quran from the remembrance of God and from prayer will ye not then abstain and this Quranic verdict is buttressed by the hadiths which are the sayings above all of Muhammad the prophet so the prophet is supposed to have spoken as follows about wine God has cursed wine the one who drinks it the one who pours it the one who sells it the one who buys it the one who squeezes the grape to make it the one for whom it is made the one who transports it the one to whom it is brought.

30:07Tom Holland:And then there are the four legal schools that you get in Sunni Islam that emerge in the first centuries of the caliphate. And all four of these are very strict in their attitude to punishments for drinking wine, the sanctions. So the general consensus is that if you drink wine and you are a free person, you get 80 lashes of the whip. And if you are a slave, you get 40 lashes. some schools emphasize a saying of the prophet a hadith which say that you should be lashed with palm branches stripped of their leaves um and also spanked with a slipper quirky that's probably better than than getting a whip i would guess but i mean neither of them sound fun slipper swappens

30:50Dominic Sandbrook:to like billy bunter that seems like a very peculiar punishment dorm feasts yeah for having feasts and stealing jam and stuff wine drinking does persist though no yeah partly because there are moments in the Quran where wine is described in a more positive way.

31:07Tom Holland:So there are absolutely, there are ambivalences in the Islamic attitude to wine. So I've given the kind of the hardcore perspective. You are right. There are verses in the Quran that have a slightly less strict attitude to wine. So there's one that kind of seems to imply that wine might have positives as well as negatives. And there's also one that seems to imply that it's okay to get drunk as long as you're not going to then go and pray. The problem is that these verses, according to Islamic scholarly tradition, had preceded the verse that explicitly bans alcohol and therefore, according to Islamic scholarship, are abrogated.

31:47Tom Holland:However, if you want to drink and you go to heaven, there's great news because the Quran promises that up in heaven, there will be rivers of wine and they will be a joy to those who drink. Superb. And I think you're right that those verses do provide scope for those in the Islamic world who do want to have an occasional taste of wine, among whom rank a large number of the caliphs. I mean, a lot of caliphs are very keen on wine. And the scope also for lawyers to do what lawyers do, which is always to try and get round legal prescriptions. So one of the four legal schools in Sunni Islam, the Hanafis, they point out that the Quran has banned wine that has been made from grapes, but not from dates.

32:37Tom Holland:And so they suggest that maybe if you make wine from dates, that would be fine. And they also rule that it's not the actual drinking of wine that annoys God. It's the getting drunk. So basically, if you can drink wine but not get drunk, then you're okay. I'll quote from Sadikat Qadri in his wonderful book on Sharia law, Heaven on Earth. This, according to these jurists, meant that Muslims could legally drink as much wine as they liked, and I quote, until they became incapable of telling a slave girl from a beardless boy.

33:11Dominic Sandbrook:So bad news for lightweights, but good news for the rest of us.

33:14Tom Holland:Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, I suppose the question that's left open is how do you become so inured to wine that you can drink four bottles and still tell a slave girl from a beardless boy apart?

33:26Dominic Sandbrook:If you know, you know. So we did an episode about the golden age of Baghdad, didn't we? And Baghdad at its peak, its kind of medieval peak, there are loads of taverns serving wine. But interestingly, they're run not by Muslims, but by Christians. So the wine trade is monopolized by Christians, right?

33:43Tom Holland:Yeah, because Christians need it for the mass. And so that's fine. And they're not kind of bound by Quranic prescriptions and legal prescriptions. And Harun al-Rashid, who is the caliph of the golden age of Baghdad, the caliph of lots of the stories in the Arabian Nights. He sponsored a famous poet called Abu Nawas. So he of the dangling locks of hair. And he was notoriously transgressive, very dissolute, very fond of wine. And he wrote a notorious piece of poetry about the rivers of wine that flow in heaven, according to the Koran. As for that which is forbidden, whatever could be dafter, a thing banned in this world yet abounds in the hereafter.

34:28Tom Holland:Yeah. Amazing. Rhymes in English as well as Arabic. Who knew? Yes. Yes. In other words, Islam is a kind of an amazingly rich civilization in which there are enormous shades of opinion and behavior. Right. And by the 13th, by the 14th centuries, the tension in the attitudes to wine in the Islamic world have come to foster kind of very sophisticated cultures within the overall civilization of Islam. And there are two kind of representative figures of these cultures. So the first, this is the guy who's not in favour of wine, is a bloke called Ibn Taymiyyah. He is a hardline Sunni reformist. He's trying to reform the Islamic world in the wake of the catastrophe of the Mongol invasions.

35:14Tom Holland:And so he says, get rid of all this legal quibbling and attempts to soft soap the Quran and the hadiths. We've got to go back to basics. So he's absolutely dogmatically opposed to wine. He's also very opposed to a kind of hip new intoxicant that's appeared on the scene called hashish. And Ibn Tamir describes hashish as being to wine as feces are to urine. So there's a marketing slogan. And he says that anyone who disagrees with his judgment is an apostate and therefore subject to the penalties of apostasy, which would include death. And Ibn Taymiyyah is basically he's the godfather of Salafism, of kind of Islamism.

35:57Tom Holland:Right. Very hardcore, radical, jihadi Islam. Against that, there's a much more kind of hippie, 1960s friendly kind of Islam called Sufism. And one of the great representative figures of Sufism is a Persian mystic and poet called Rumi, who is a massive bestseller throughout the 60s and 70s in America. and in rumi's poetry wine serves as a metaphor for the experience of divine love and so rumi in kind of poetry that is designed to seem shocking to its readers says that um the image of the soul that has opened itself up to the love of god is that of the drunk someone who staggers around he's so kind of overcome by intoxicants right this is not because rumi is saying, it's brilliant, go and get drunk.

36:47Tom Holland:He's not offering this metaphor literally. He doesn't seem to have drunk wine himself, but he's using it kind of to imply that wine is the best metaphor that believers have for how God should be experienced. And so he writes these famous lines, before garden, vine and grape were in the world. Our soul was drunk with immortal wine. So So wine is almost kind of, it's a platonic notion of wine, something that has always existed. And he frames the spiritual path of the believer as being a journey back to the tasting of that primordial wine. So you can see why it would appeal to hippies, I guess, in the 60s and why it appealed to lots of Muslims and has appealed to lots of Muslims throughout the course of Islamic history.

37:36Tom Holland:Now, Ibn Taymiyyah obviously sees this as rubbish. He's very opposed to the Sufis. He Rumi, in turn, he sees the sobriety of the conventionally pious people like Ibn Tameyya as a form of spiritual death, as not really being Islam at all. And I think that what this illustrates is that even when wine is banned, it can still have a kind of massive, massive cultural influence. And of course, when it's not banned, well, the sky's the limit.

38:05Dominic Sandbrook:All right. So let's take a break and we'll come back after the break to delve deeper into the limitless bottle of wine history.

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38:58Dominic Sandbrook:This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know, history is full of long, arduous journeys. Voyages of discovery. Campaigns of conquest.

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40:43Dominic Sandbrook:Welcome back to The Rest is History and you have not yet drunk your fill because we have talked about four of the key moments in the history of wine from prehistory to the present and we have three to go. And one thing that we have been lacking is one of the world's great wine heavyweights, and that is our own dear country of England. Some people listening to this may raise an eyebrow at that and say, England, wine? They're quite wrong, of course, because if England doesn't necessarily produce the greatest wine, surely we rank among the world's great consumers. And actually, now, an Englishman, am I right in thinking it is the English that gave us bottles of wine, Tom?

41:22Tom Holland:The first modern wine bottle, not the first wine bottle. so wine bottles are actually uh 2000 years old um they seem to have originated in syria in the first century bc they get picked up by the romans roman glass blowers kind of refined them but they're never used for transportation because the glass is too fragile they would smash they're purely decorative um kind of markers of status and in 1867 one of these wine bottles was found in a tomb in spea on the rhine tellingly again you know this the river of of wine and it dated from the 4th century and it contained liquid wine and it is the world's oldest unopened wine bottle although the wine within it is not the oldest wine to have been found because that was discovered two years ago in a tomb in Spain it was in an urn and that dates back to the 1st century AD Crikey Some vintages there God knows what it would taste like

42:21Dominic Sandbrook:But the problem with wine bottles up to this point well certainly for centuries is that the the glass is too delicate right so there's a huge problem you're gonna you're basically they're gonna break and it is english glass makers who solve this this difficult technical issue hooray for us um so this happens in the early

42:43Tom Holland:17th century um so in the 1620s english glass makers start to develop um furnaces that are by coal rather than wood and then the following decade they introduced wind tunnels which apparently produce even higher furnace heat and at the same time the recipe for making glass was changed and i'm going to quote kathleen burke here because i don't entirely understand what it means but technologically minded people would so the recipe for making glass was changed by raising the ratio of sand to potash and lime if you have more sand you just got a better bottle

43:17Dominic Sandbrook:basically.

43:17Tom Holland:You can't have too much potash. No. Too much potash is never good.

43:22Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, definitely.

43:23Tom Holland:So who's behind this? History records the name of one inventor in particular. He gets named in a parliamentary inquiry that was held in 1662 to identify who had basically invented this new unbreakable form of grass. And they fingered this absolute top lad called Ken Elm Digby. oh yeah and digby is a tremendous character so he was raised catholic he was actually the son of um one of the conspirators in the gunpowder plot who'd been executed he becomes a privateer he goes around capturing um dutch merchantmen which dominic i'm sure you approve of i do splendidly he sells into the mediterranean and he negotiates the release of um 50 english slaves from the Barbary pirates of Algiers.

44:09Tom Holland:So that reflects well on him. He's then briefly imprisoned for killing a French nobleman in a duel. He has an absolutely shambolic record in the civil war. He's kind of always herring around, losing battles left, right and centre. But he becomes a massive favourite of Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I, and accompanies her into exile after her husband is executed. And then Henrietta Maria's son, Charles II, is restored to the English throne after the death of Cromwell in 1660. And it's in the wake of the restoration, so two years after the restoration, that this parliamentary inquiry is held and Digby gets the credit for it.

44:49Tom Holland:And I suspect that part of that is because he's the favourite of Henrietta Maria.

44:54Dominic Sandbrook:Yes, this is slightly undeserved, isn't it? Aren't loads of people working on this and he's basically just the figurehead? Yeah, but he's a fun figurehead.

45:01Tom Holland:And so I think we should celebrate him. So these bottles that Digby and various other entrepreneurs who are less interesting have developed, they come to be called English bottles across Europe. And an English bottle has glass that is thicker, it's heavier, it's stronger, and also crucially, it's cheap to manufacture. And the glass is very dark because of the coal fumes. And this comes to be seen by consumers as a kind of mark of quality. Essentially, that is why wine bottles tend to be dark to this day it's a kind of legacy of its origins in the

45:38Dominic Sandbrook:17th century that is so interesting and that never occurred to me before but yeah why are they murky

45:44Tom Holland:and that's the reason well yeah it's because of us so hooray um and crucially the glass is strong enough to contain sparkling wine because that sparkling wine has got co2 that is trying to get out and if the wine if the glass isn't solid enough then it will kind of explode and send shards of glass flying through the air and up until the invention of english glass if you kept sparkling wine in a cellar you'd have to wear a helmet because it might explode at any moment you know you might end up with a shard of glass in your eye so very dangerous but now hooray english glass has appeared on the scene initially they're pear-shaped then onion-shaped and then by the 1740s they've come to take on the shape that everyone will be familiar with now.

46:29Tom Holland:And because you can then lie them down in rows, this facilitates the emergence of wine cellars in the form that people will recognise today. And these wine bottles, they have very narrow tops, and so they can be stoppered. And what you use to stopper it increasingly is cork. And cork is produced in Portugal and in England access to Cork is facilitated in 1703 by the signing of what is very much a friend of the rest is history and that's the Methuen Treaty and Dominic we've had the Methuen Treaty quite a lot on the rest is history haven't we we have we did a whole episode

47:06Dominic Sandbrook:about the Methuen Treaty I think when we did the 12 days of Christmas or something like that I can't remember exactly what it was but just remind people who who who may not remember what the methouine treaty is so england is at war with uh france so access to french wine has been cut off the methouine treaty is a treaty that allows wool to go to portugal england's oldest ally and at the same time england cuts import duties on portuguese wine so portuguese wine comes the other way this is the sort of genesis of the english fascination with port port wine isn't it yeah exactly so when you go to porto and you go up the banks of the river duro you see all the great port wine lodges, tailors and sandamins.

47:47Dominic Sandbrook:But also in the Alentejo, which is the kind of Portuguese rural heartland, there are these great forests. I was actually only there a couple of weeks ago. There are all these forests that produce cork. And Portugal still to this day is the world's great producer of corks. And again, the cork is a little bit like the dark wine bottle, isn't it? There are lots of people, particularly in the new world in Australia and in California, who say, why are we still using cork? A screw top is just as good. But cork is seen as a marker of prestige and quality. And if you buy a very expensive bottle of wine, you don't expect it to have a screw cap, you expect it to have a Portuguese cork.

48:24Tom Holland:I mean, of course, in the early 18th century, cork does present a problem, which is how do you get the cork out? And so the English, as well as inventing the modern wine bottle, also invent the corkscrew. And so the first mention of a corkscrew it's described as a silver worm comes in 1681 and then brilliantly in 1720 there's the first poem about a corkscrew and i will quote from it so roger set his teeth to work this way and that the cork he plied and wrenched in vain from side to side so he can't open it then bacchus the god of wine appears to him in a dream and gives him a corkscrew and then the poem continues he to the cork applied the point then bending earthward low betwixt his knees the bottle firmly fixed and giving it a sudden jerk from its close prison wrenched the cork to be fair

49:15Dominic Sandbrook:everyone's anyone who's you know drinks wine has had a moment like that with the cork where basically something's gone hideously wrong and you can't get it out and you're just shaming yourself in front of your guests but the corkscrew so at this point the corkscrew is not a patented thing it's not the first patent for it is not granted until the end of the 18th century right

49:34Tom Holland:to a clergyman 1795 and the clergyman is called samuel henschel and i know about this because i went down a corkscrew shaped uh rabbit hole because it turns out there are antique corkscrew obsessives online of course there are most of them seem to live in canada for some reason and they all came over and um set up a plaque to um samuel henschel in bow church in the east end because that's where he'd been and there are very detailed descriptions as to exactly what is revolutionary about this corkscrew that i've read about 10 times and i still don't really understand but anyway well done samuel henschel he invents the corkscrew but i'm afraid dominic that that's probably all we've got time for when it comes to english inventiveness on this particular episode because that was number five in our top seven moments in the history of wine now we need to come on to uh number six which is the invention of the language of wine and the language of wine of course is french so now we come to our beloved neighbor across the channel so the french have been producing wine all through this period well since the romans yeah we talked about the the

50:40Dominic Sandbrook:gallic enthusiasm for wine they've been producing it through the roman period bordeaux when the english controlled bordeaux in the middle ages yeah that is producing claret for english tables

50:51Tom Holland:and um you were you were you were sneering at my inability to tell between a light and a heavy red wine i wasn't sneering i was just remarking so um claret comes from claret it means lighter and that becomes anglicized to claret and um it's a reflection of the way in which claret in the middle ages was a light red and now tends to be associated with kind of much heavier yeah kind of richer red wines. But of course, the English lose control of Bordeaux at the end of the Hundred Years' War. And going into the 16th and then into the 17th century, and it may be because that umbilical cord with England has been broken, France's kind of role in the wine trade, it ceases to be as absolutely central as it had been in the Middle Ages.

51:40Tom Holland:So it's not just the Hundred Years' War that's having an impact. There's also the rise of the Dutch as the great global commercial power they do invest very heavily in french wine but they are also out reconnoitering portugal uh reconnoiting spain um they make a trade agreement with the ottomans to buy greek wines and then of course the methewin treaty coming in between england and portugal means that port wine is much cheaper in um in england than french wine and of course it doesn't happen that that france and britain are just constantly at war throughout the late 17th into the 18th centuries.

52:15Tom Holland:So I think all of that impairs the notion of France as being economically central to the wine trade in the kind of the early modern period. But even as it's going into retreat, perhaps economically, its cultural centrality is going on by leaps and bounds. And the legacy of that cultural centrality is with us today, and it spreads around the world. So it's why there are winemakers in New Zealand who will talk about their terroir. It's why you have wines in South Africa that will be labeled Gancroux. And it's why in California, a land famously without castles, there are chateaux. And the thing I find so fascinating about this process is it's a little bit like the emergence of the suit.

53:03Tom Holland:And we did an episode on that. And you can kind of pinpoint the moment when the suit is invented thanks to the diaries of Samuel Pepys who was writing in post-restoration London so in the 1660s and Samuel Pepys pops up again with reference to this process whereby French comes to be the language of wine and it's a diary entry for the 10th of April 1663 and Dominic you're a very Pepysian figure I mean not in every sense no but the pleasant senses

53:36Dominic Sandbrook:the conviviality there's a dark side's peeps that i don't that i don't endorse anyway off the exchange with sir j cutler and mr grant to the royal oak tavern in lombard street where broom the poet was a merry and witty man i believe if he'd be not a little conceited and here drank a sort of french wine called ho brian that hath a good and most particular taste that i never met with now this is so interesting isn't it because what's he call it ho brian yeah he's his approach to pronouncing foreign languages is very much mine so it's actually obriant which was the first this is so interesting the first bordeaux wine so the first claret to be sold in london not labeled as bordeaux or as claret and not labeled because they always used to have the label well often on the label they would have the name of the wine merchant wouldn't they yeah but this bottle that peeps has been drinking has the name of the estate that made the wine so oprient it's

54:41Tom Holland:the first and it's been produced by this guy called annaud de pontac um back in bordeaux he's president of the provincial parliament there he's not particularly interested in wine but what he has a complete genius for is marketing um and in 1666 he's capitalizing on this kind of enthusiasm in london for ho brian you know this kind of marketing of his own estate um and he sends his son to open what effectively becomes london's first restaurant and it's a very luxurious tavern that is modestly called pontac's head after honad de pontac himself um and it becomes a hugely hugely fashionable. And that means that the Pontacs can massively raise the price that they can charge for the wine.

55:27Tom Holland:So the normal price for wine in Restoration London is about two shillings, but the Haute Brion at Pontac's head can be sold for seven shillings. Wow. And what Pontac is demonstrating is that ultimately a wine is worth what people are prepared to pay for it. Of course. So that ultimately is the only objective way of measuring a wine. And he realizes he's really onto something. So he wants to sell a second wine. So how is he going to do that? He starts to market Haute-Brillant as his first growth, which in French is Grand Cru. And then he markets that stuff from his second estate as being his deuxième cru so his second growth um and this again is establishing a template for classifying wine that will have a very very long existence um and it's one that gets taken up by other estates in the bordeaux region so uh by the 1720s there are three other estates that are marketing themselves as um had been marketing itself this is lafitte la tour and margot very famous names if you're interested in wine so these estates are in the medoc which is on the left side of the gironde which is the um the estuary which leads to bordeaux aute brion itself is i mean today it's basically a suburb of bordeaux but they're all kind of roughly in the same area and they establish themselves as the absolute aristocracy of bordeaux vineyards and the revolution comes and goes terrible slaughter in the region but the vineyards survive and by 1855 napoleon the third who is emperor in france by then he's staging a great universal exposition in paris and he wants to use it to showcase the very best wines that france has and so he asks the wine brokers to come up with a list of the best wines they get down to it and they draw up a list of the 60 best reds and each one is classified as a grand cru and they're placed in one of five separate classes and the top class there are only four wines and these are the original vineyards so that's haute brignan lafitte la tour and margot and it's a status that they have never lost and only one other vineyard has been added to it in all that time and that was chateau Mouton Rothschild in 1973, which was promoted from Premier Cru to Premier Grand Cru.

58:12Tom Holland:So a tremendous honour. And this is language that is understood by wine enthusiasts around the world. And it's an incredible manifestation of France's enduring cultural prestige, I think. I mean, not just in the field of wine, but more generally, it's a kind of emblem of luxury. But Dominic, sticking up for our own beloved country, I think it's also emblematic of England's cultural prestige because the rankings when they were drawn up in 1855 weren't based on kind of objective standards of quality. they were based on how much people in england were prepared to pay for the wine so to quote kathleen burke the english had long been admired for having what were considered to be the best palates in the world and so therefore what the english were prepared to pay for these wines provided the french with their standard for judging what the best wines were isn't that

59:12Dominic Sandbrook:interesting so the french make the best wines but the people who decide which those wines are are English consumers. Yes. And I think that's still true today. I mean, when you say English consumers, it's obviously aristocratic consumers. Well, do you know what? It's funny, we're talking about the English palate, but as late as the 1950s, most English people never, ever drank wine in any given year. It's such an elite, exclusive thing.

59:42Tom Holland:Yeah, so it's very much the kind of the upper classes. but um you know this this works well for bordeaux but what about other regions now the french are as good at marketing wine as they are at making it so in 1677 the philosopher john locke he he goes on one of the first recorded wine tours of bordeaux so he's the the ancestor of our tours around napa valley and so on and of course he goes to visit uh what he describes as pontax vineyard at haute brian and he goes there and he's expecting kind of rich fertile soil to produce such a kind of exquisite wine and he's really puzzled but the soil is terrible he writes it's nothing but pure white sand mixed with a little gravel one would imagine it scarce fit to bear anything and then he goes south he tours the longer dock and again he notes that the more kind of barren and gravelly a slope looks, the better the wine tends to be that's produced on that slope.

1:00:43Tom Holland:And he's told by the wine growers in the Languedoc that ultimately nothing matters more than the quality, and I quote, of the soil they plant in, on which very much depends the goodness of the wine. And this, of course, is a concept that goes back to Pliny. He's obsessed by this, the quality of the soil. But in France, particularly in the 19th and especially in the 20th century, this notion of the soil and its relationship to the wine it produces comes to have an almost spiritual quality and it comes to be focused in a word that is essentially untranslatable and this is terroir so there have been attempts so the geologist james wilson he describes terroir as being the totality of the elements of the vineyard habitat but i think for the for the french it's important that it's untranslatable because the more that France industrializes through the 19th century, so the more terroir comes to signify for conservatives.

1:01:42Tom Holland:And I think most people who own vineyards tend to be conservative. It comes to signify something that they are afraid is under attack. And that is the roots of la patrie, of ancient France. The attachment of the French to their ancient soil, the sense of being under threat from industrialization from foreigners, from Germans, from whoever. It matters to them that terroir is something that only the French can properly understand.

1:02:16Dominic Sandbrook:Well, of course, becomes very useful later in the 20th century when they're facing competition from the new world. And they can say, well, look, you may have this, you may have that, but you don't have our tradition and our terroir. Right.

1:02:28Tom Holland:Just because something is deeply felt on a kind of spiritual dimension doesn't mean that you can't use it to flog wine, which is exactly what the French are doing, particularly in places where they don't have exclusive chateau, like in Bordeaux. So Burgundy would be the perfect example. Again, a very, very famous area of France, but because it's not connected by the sea to England, it doesn't have this kind of history, this pedigree. And so they, in Burgundy, they market their vineyards, which tend to be on a very small scale, as being embodiments of kind of ancient Gallic tradition. These traditions are basically an invention of the 1920s.

1:03:10Tom Holland:It's very like the episode we did on the history of Italian food. I mean, you discover that all these traditions are completely you know complete marketing inventions in the 20th century and they're marketed because tourists love them and it helps to sell you know all these wines from burgundy that otherwise wouldn't have perhaps a ready market and as you say it's also a way in the world that follows the second world war of slapping down competition in the new world because there you were starting to get pretenders in California, in Australia, in New Zealand, in South Africa, all of which are places without ancient chateau, without kind of jovial peasants deeply rooted in the soil with traditional festivities that have been invented in the 1920s.

1:03:57Tom Holland:And it's a way of saying to the world, there is no way that any wine can compete with a wine that has been grown in the terroir of burgundy or of beauger lay or the longer dark or wherever well people genuinely believe that

1:04:15Dominic Sandbrook:didn't they for a long time until the 1970s the most interesting decade in history and we come to our final moment which is the judgment of paris so that's 1976 and actually members of the rest history club will be hearing a bit more about this on our bonus episode on wednesday with the great wine writer, Henry Jeffries, who will be talking about this and indeed about wine in the New World and the history behind it and the relationship with the British Empire and so on. So that's on Wednesday. But Tom, tell us a little bit about the judgment of Paris, because this is probably the most celebrated moment, one of the most controversial moments in the entire modern history of winemaking.

1:04:56Tom Holland:So it's a wine tasting competition that's staged in 1976 in Paris by an English wine merchant called Stephen Spurrier. And it's interesting that the English are still kind of hanging around in France as arbiters of taste, even in the 70s. And he's opened up a wine shop in Paris and a wine school. And he's very keen to market New World wines to the French who are very reluctant to buy them. And so essentially, he's trying to think of some kind of wheeze that would enable him to promote the New World wines in a way that the French might respond to. The problem he faces is that the French are convinced that Californian wines and American wines more generally are terrible.

1:05:36Tom Holland:And in the 1970s, you can kind of see why the French would assume this, because essentially the story of Californian wine focuses pretty much everything that the French despise about America more generally. You know, there's a lot of anti-americanism in france in this period so californian wine it's all about vulgarity the french think and the archetype for this vulgarity is a guy called leland stanford who was a railroad entrepreneur yeah he became governor of california and of course he's the founder of the university that is named after him stanford university and um stanford goes on holiday to bordeaux and he tours all the great vineyards and he thinks i'd like a bit of this I could have this in California.

1:06:26Tom Holland:And he goes back home. Not only does he want a bit of Bordeaux, he wants to do it on a much larger scale. And so he plants these massive vineyards. But the problem is he doesn't know about terroir. He plants it on very kind of rich soil on an enormous scale. He hasn't scoped out the climate. And the problem is that the vines just don't give the grapes of the standard that he requires. So by 1890, it's his fourth vintage. and it's terrible and he produces two million gallons of wine um and the standard is so low that it um all of it has to be distilled into brandy so you know when the news of that reaches bought everyone thinks it's hilarious and confirms them in all their darkest suspicions of to be

1:07:08Dominic Sandbrook:fair we've all had american wines that taste like that but then so a huge problem for american winemakers is that a lot of americans think they shouldn't be making wine at all because they don't think alcohol should have any place in American culture.

1:07:20Tom Holland:Right. And so this, of course, is the strain of Puritanism in American culture, which French wine growers also despise. And the great manifestation of this is the prohibition of alcohol between 1920 and 1933, which completely destroys the Californian wine industry, which had just been starting to kind of get on its feet at that point. Americans are superb at selling stuff, and they have lawyers who are superb at kind of getting around legal restrictions. So there's a lot of entrepreneurial ingenuity invested into attempts to try and get around prohibition. So would-be winemakers in America can order packages of pressed grapes from the vineyards that have survived in California.

1:08:06Tom Holland:And these will be sent to you and they're called wine bricks. And they will be accompanied by a yeast pill. there's a warning accompanies this yeast pill it says on no account use this wheat yeast pill whatever you do and i quote if you do use it this will turn into wine which would be illegal

1:08:25Dominic Sandbrook:so don't do it yeah i mean to be fair it sounds like the wine would be terrible that you're making

1:08:29Tom Holland:with a pill and a brick of grapes yeah but it's alcoholic i guess would be the would be the take and the other thing that people do is to register as rabbis so to quote kathleen burke in her forthcoming book on the history of wine the jewish faith requires the religious use of wine in the home anybody could call himself a rabbi and get a permit to buy wine legally merely by presenting a list of his congregation millions of all faiths and no faith became members of fake synagogues some without their knowledge when the lists were copied from telephone directories um there's also quite a lot of people uh in this period who are who are registering themselves as priests and so or making wine for the Eucharist.

1:09:08Tom Holland:That's nothing that helps the French to think that Californian winemakers will be good. And then there's the whole kind of the sense that Americans are willing to sacrifice quality on the altar of commercialism. I mean, they are all over very sweet wines, wines flavoured with chocolate, cranberry flavoured wines. I mean, basically whatever the consumer wants. God. And French wine drinkers just throw their hands up and kind of say the horror, the horror. so steven spurrier realizing the scale of the challenge decides the stage this blind tasting of french and californian wines and he brings in nine french wine experts who will do it blind

1:09:46Dominic Sandbrook:i mean by the way wine experts some of these people are the arbiters of french wine yeah so i mean there's the head of the enological institute of france there is the head of the wine academy there is the inspector general of the appellation d 'origine control board which is basically the board that decides whether your wine you know gets appellation status gets the sort of the sort of badge of quality so these are not just like the wine critic of le figaro or something

1:10:16Tom Holland:these are like proper people yeah so their decisions will echo and reverberate around france and perhaps beyond um so what do they what do they decide so they're presented with the whites first and um you know this kind of wine equivalent of the academy francaise deliver their opinion and it's a shocker a californian chardonnay comes in first then a burgundy and then two more californian chardonnays so sacre bleu then it's time for the reds and surely this time French wine will step up to the plate. But no, again, the result is a bombshell. So the 1970 Chateau Mouton Rothschild comes in second.

1:11:04Tom Holland:And remember, it's just been promoted to the top league by this point. So it really should be, you know, at the top. But it isn't because the wine that is voted number one comes from a californian vineyard that had only been planted in 1970 yeah stag's leap and it had

1:11:25Dominic Sandbrook:been planted brilliantly by a man called warren winniarski couldn't be more american it's new

1:11:32Tom Holland:and it's printed by a bloke called warren and um spurrier had invited actually i think spurrier's partner uh who is american had invited uh the paris correspondent of time magazine to watch it And he writes it up last week in Paris, France, at a formal wine tasting organized by Spuria. The unthinkable happened. California defeated all Gaul. And there is a tone there of, you know, maybe a Roman crowing over the Greeks after they've been defeated by Italian wines in 50 BC. or a Canaanite perhaps celebrating the victory of the Bekar Valley over a rainy in 3000 BC. And I mean, it's had a pretty seismic impact, I think, hasn't it, on the prestige, not just of Californian wines, but of New World wines generally.

1:12:25Tom Holland:Oh, totally. And I guess Henry will be talking more about that. But I think, I mean, I think it's important to emphasize it isn't just the story of the new world, vanquishing the old, because I think France definitely retains its prestige even today. So we've said already that there are lots of vineyards in California with the name Chateau in the title.

1:12:46Dominic Sandbrook:Well, one of those wines in the Judgment of Paris was from a winery, I think founded in something like 1971 or 1972, called Claude Duval. So given a kind of artificial,

1:12:57Tom Holland:contrived french name to denote quality yeah and the americans um you know have massively invested in bordeaux as the british had done before them and as the chinese are doing now and it's kind of interesting that a setback maybe you can kind of track the uh the course of superpower status by the degree to which um a country can invest in bordeaux so britain in its great imperial age was investing in america now china yeah um and the notion of terroir we've we've said you know it's like a cutting from burgundy has been transplanted to the opposite ends of the world so new z in new zealand um that wine growers there are particularly keen on the notion of terroir and um it's uh been mingled with and i hope i get the pronunciation of this right uh it's a maori notion of belonging to a particular place called to run a why why i mean that trips off the tongue i probably haven't pronounced that right but um and it means literally a place to stand apparently okay so ending on a kind of a renic note um i like to think that the history of wine isn't just

1:14:05Dominic Sandbrook:about competition but it's about partnership oh isn't that kind that's a nice note on which to end i think it's about competition frankly but there you go you're probably right

1:14:16Tom Holland:But I think, I mean, I think ultimately if you're not a kind of wine chauvinist, but just someone who enjoys wine, then it doesn't really matter. You know, carpe diem. And so I think it would be nice to end on a note of poetry. We've had quite a lot of poetry. And this is poetry that says, ultimately, it doesn't matter what the history of wine has been. And it doesn't matter what will be. And this comes from a Persian like Rumi, another great devotee of wine. And this is Omar Khayyam. Ah, fill the cup. What boots it to repeat? How time is slipping underneath our feet. Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday.

1:14:59Tom Holland:Why fret about them if today be sweet? Lovely.

1:15:03Dominic Sandbrook:Such an interesting story. And if you're interested in hearing more about the history of wine, We will be talking about wine in the new world and its relationship to deeper historical changes, not least the rise and fall of the British Empire. In Wednesday's bonus episode for Restless History Club members with the great wine writer and friend of the show, Henry Jeffries. And if you're not a member of the club and you'd like to hear that episode, you merely need to head to therestishistory.com to sign up. And of course, if you're keen to hear more about the history of wine or indeed about the subject of our next regular episode, which is about the Mona Lisa, then there will be lots more in our Super Soro A newsletter, to which I'm very much looking forward.

1:15:46Dominic Sandbrook:All right. Thank you very much, Tom. Cheers and santé, everybody. Bye bye. Goodbye, everyone.

1:16:03Tom Holland:we've got some brilliant news a new the rest is history book is heading your way and it is called a history of the world in 51 heroes and villains and it's got everything that you would expect it's got mad battles it's got sensational sex scandals it's got lots of machiavellian wheeling and dealing

1:16:21Dominic Sandbrook:it's brilliant and along the way tom and i will be debating some of the most important questions of history so for example was caligula an irredeemable monster or was he simply an early example of an influencer was voitek the bear a true hero of the second world war or was he more of a cuddly mascot and was elizabeth the first really a virgin queen or was she just brilliant

1:16:47Tom Holland:at branding so polish up your armor twirl your massive first world war general's mustache and prepared to take a side between heroes and villains.

1:16:58Dominic Sandbrook:Yes, A History of the World in 51. Heroes and Villains is available to pre-order now. Don't miss out. It is out of control in the White House right now.

1:17:11Tom Holland:Welcome to The Rest is Politics US. I'm Katty Kay. I'm Anthony Scaramucci.

1:17:15Dominic Sandbrook:Who is the worst politician in Washington right now? They don't know how to manage Donald Trump. I talked to the people that organized the abduction. I'm telling you why they did it. The White House is in a bind, Anthony. Here's what I would say to you about FAFA. The chaos is the strategy. It should not have happened, and it is a violation of international law.

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1:17:50Dominic Sandbrook:The big issue for the United States is going to be we were once seen as a benevolent superpower, and now we're seen as an aggressor.

1:17:59Tom Holland:You know, he can lie about a lot of things, but he can't lie about what people are feeling about the economy.

1:18:06Dominic Sandbrook:If you really want to understand what's going on in Trump's mind, just search The Rest is Politics U.S. wherever you get your podcasts.