The history of the world in six glasses

History Of the World in Six Glasses

For most of the people in countries where wine is a legal beverage today, wine means civilization and sophistication, along with the pleasure of celebrating, enjoying company of people or just of a good film or a book. Vineyards in wine producing countries are famous touristy places where the visitors are introduced to a few of the secrets of wine production, storage and most importantly, to its sophisticated numerous ways of consumption. In spite of the fact that wine is a mass produced beverage, it is definitely associated with sophistication and gourmet meals. It kept its status from ancient times, when beer was the one drink affordable to everyone, in Mesopotamia, for example, while wine was only available for a few chosen ones who could afford it.

Tom Standage continues the journey thorough the history of the human kind following the story of the wine making. As its more popular and older alcoholic counterpart, beer, wine was most probably discovered and not invented. The author first places the wine into a kingly setting in the company of the royal court of King Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria, I the year 870 BCE. In those times, wine was "at least ten times more expensive than beer" (a History of the World in Six Glasses, p. 45) because the wines necessary for its production could only be grown in certain parts of the kingdom, and the closest wine producing region was in the mountains of the Northeast Mesopotamia. Wine was thus an indication of wealth and the hosts that offered wine to their guests were showing their high praise for these. or, as in the case of the feast offered by kind Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria, it was an extreme display of wealth and power for thousands of guests coming form all corners of his kingdom.

The origins of wine, like those of beer, go as far back as the Paleolithic era. People stored wild grapes the same way must have probably stored the wild grains they in the planes. Once moisture got to the storage places and into the recipients, it was only a matter of who was the first to taste the liquid resulted this way. Historians and anthropologists usually agree that the origins of wine making are similar to those of beer making, in the dark layers of the stone age.

The conclusion of the historians and archeologists who have studied the origins of wine and wine making is that by the time reached the Neolithic age, "hundreds, if not thousands of years of experimentation in vine cultivation and winemaking technology were needed to achieve the level of sophistication displayed in the upland Neolithic settlements of the Ancient Near East" (Ancient Wine: the Search for the Origins of Viniculture, p. 16). Wine making, as beer making required the efforts of the wine producers at its earlier stages of development, compared to beer making that remained the same for thousands of years except for the filtering methods that were developed at around 6000 BCE.

There are peoples today who claim to have been the very first to grow vine for the purpose of wine making, like the Georgians. According to some sources, it was around 4000 BCE that the ancestors of the Georgians started growing vine and made wine from it (Historical Timeline, http://www.georgianspring.com/timeline.php). It is of lesser importance if wine was actually first produced by the Armenians or the Georgians or some other peoples from the region; the fact that wine is so closely liked with the development of human civilization and is recognized as the enabler of human interaction is more to the point when considering its importance and place in the history of the development of human societies.

What comes to mind when thinking of wine, compared to the five other beverages that Tom Standage found of vital importance in the history of the world, is that technology did not play the same role, later on during its existence, but rather at earlier stages of its production stages. Anyone can virtually make wine out of grapes. The quality of the grapes is the first and most important feature in the wine production and only after that are there other factors involved that influence the final product.

Standage considers the first distinction between Eastern and Western thught and civilization closely linked to the attitude the two cultures from two opposite regions of the globe had when it came to wine consuming. While Greeks drank wine at formal parties, making it more a part of a ritual destined to loosen tongues and relax while sharpening the minds and setting imagination loose, the Persians, mostly drank beer as a part of their nourishment and even when they drank wine, it was not for intellectual purposes of for the pleasure of savoring it, but more as a display of wealth and power, as it was the case mentioned before. Based on such judgments, the Greeks considered themselves superior in every respect to their eastern contemporaries.

To pinpoint the mark in the evolution of human history, Tom Standage quotes Thucydides who is among the most reputed historians of the world, with his words referring to two of the most important sources of nourishment of the Mediterranean world, where the cradle of western civilization lays: "the people of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learnt to cultivate olive and the vine" (Thucydides, quoted in a History of the World in Six Glasses, p. 52). The cuture of vine rapidly spread throughout the Greek islands due to the vine growing friendly climate and it became thus a beverage affordable to all.