A Few Interesting Important Events in the History of Wine

The biggest event is of course the discovery of wine sometime before 8000 BCE. I use the term discover because It was not the original intention to make wine. Iit was hunter and gatherers in modern day Georgia trying to keep grapes in ceramic jars to be able to eat them following year. What they found the following spring was no longer grapes but wine. It was safe to consume because the type of pathogens that affect humans cannot survive in wine. The wine was created by the natural yeast that was on the grapes. Still today many wineries use the natural native yeasts that cling to grape skins to make the wine. Most however use commercially produced yeast strains. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing by any means.

Another big event is the phylloxera epidemic in 1870. Imagine the Black Plaque but worse except that it is regarding grapes. Phylloxera is a type of pest that attacks the roots. One day they just went crazy and spread like wildfire. No one could stop it or fight against no matter how meticulous a farmer was. Nearly all vineyards in all of Europe were completely wiped out. There was no more wine for anybody and most wineries had to close. This went on for about a decade. The good thing that happened was that it very highly incentivized many other countries to start producing there own wines and even export wines to France! The problem was eventually resolved thanks to the invention of grafting. They would take the specific winemaking varietals of the grape but graft them on to rootstocks from other varieties that had thicker rootstocks that were much more resistance to the phylloxera pest. Now nearly all wines are grafted onto other rootstocks except a some areas in Chile and on the Island of Sardinia, Italy.

The other would be the Judgement of Paris in 1976. I wine store owner in France refused to sell American wines and really very few of anything not French no matter how many times his customers would ask. He would just tell them it's all crap and French wines are the best. I might be paraphrasing. But they kept askin, so to shut them up he staged a grand wine-off between American wines and French wines. He got together some of the most famous wine journalists and sommeliers and had them to a series of blind tastings between the finest wines from France and California. They tasted California Canernet against right bank Bordeaux (which are dominated by Cabernet) and white Burgundy (Chardonnay) against California Chardonnay. California one first place in both the Reds and whites. They even did a follow up study 30 years later because of the following claims that French wines age better. They were also wrong again and we won both. The results from this small event of maybe around 50 people changed the entire wine landscape. France was kind of up on this podium that no one could get there. All other wines were basically considered a joke until this day. Because of this event there was an explosion of wineries all over the world and instead of it being automatically considered second class wines, they could compete against France on equal ground.