Wine in Antiquity: In Praise of Old Roman Wine
Figs. 1, 2 Bacchus, Pompeian Wall Painting, House of the Centenary lararium
Dr. Patrick Hunt, Stanford University
“And I know how to lead off the sprightly dance
of the Lord Dionysus, the dithyramb,
I do it thunderstruck with wine.” Archilochos, 7th c. BC
Brushing dirt off the old Roman wine amphora handle that had clung to it for 2,000 years was exciting for me as an archaeologist. Buried so long in shallow, rocky soil at the top of an alpine pass around 8,000 feet in elevation, it now saw intermittent sunlight and shadow as racing clouds sifted through the high peaks all around me. I turned the old amphora piece over and placed my fingers through the handle as a natural fit. I’ll never forget pondering how it arrived at such a remote place and hoped its wine was consumed there before it was broken in the rocks. I knew the Gauls loved wine and that this pass was a major trading route between Gauls and Romans where wine was a prized trade commodity.
What would be a dream vintage for an archaeologist? I find the idea of vintage appealing since “ancient” and “vintage” seem to pair well. The very ideas of vintage and select growths are ancient. Modern connoisseurs usually trace Bordeaux wine pedigrees to a few generations before the 1855 Gironde Classification. Bordeaux itself was known to the Romans as Burdigala and was an important municipality even then, with its first commercial vines apparently planted between 40-60 AD.
Turning the sundials back a few millennia we can listen to Roman writers like Varro, 1st c BC, Horace, 1st c. BC, Columella, 1st c. AD, and Pliny the Elder, 1st c. AD. Their praise of select Classical wines like Falernian, Caecuban and Massic sounds amusingly like our modern purple prose enthusing and celebrating premium 20th century vintages. Where we thought A.O.C. (Appellation d’origine contrôlée) was relatively venerable, Pliny devotes many pages of his Historia Naturalis, especially Books 14, 17 & 23, to Roman wine cultivation and regional classifications. That wines had daily importance and easy accessibility in Pompeii is confirmed by the presence of at least 59 different commercialthermopolium vendors selling wine and food at many street corner stalls in Pompeii (Fig. 3). Other local places like Herculaneum even had the prices listed on painted walls in coinage for different qualities of a cup of wine (1 as, 2 asses, etc.). But how were Roman wines qualitatively scaled and evaluated?
Fig. 3 Thermopolium, Pompeii
Take, for example, one of the Roman “first growth” Aminaean vines producing wines that improve greatly with age, according to Pliny. (1) There was a local Aminaean grape varietal grown on Mt. Vesuvius whose wine was sometimes called Pompeiana, coming from the rich volcanic slopes of Vesuvius. (2) This wine grown even on the fateful mountain just above Pompeii was a great source of local income until AD 79 when all the liquid assets went up in smoke like everything else in the vicinity. Prior to the cataclysmic volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, vintners of Pompeiana, like their modern counterparts, could obtain bank loans on the future strength of an upcoming vintage if Roman banking practices are any indication.
The Roman fresco [55 by 40 inches] shown above and below (Figs. 1, 2,4) is from the House of the Centenary, Pompeii, and now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples. It is almost a Roman-style late “Impressionist” wall painting, finished not long before Vesuvius made Pompeiana an, alas, extinct treasure. The Roman wine god Bacchus stands at the left in an amusing but perfectly logical designer garb: his body is a racemus (3), a cluster of ruby grapes that are shining and glabrous, translucent with juice and high in brix. While the best Roman wines were mostly white, this must have been a red-skinned grape if the painting is not overly imaginary here. Wreathed with grape leaves and ivy, Bacchus holds his thyrsus wand, symbol of his divine vegetative prowess, in his left hand. From the thyrsushe unfurls his protective ribbon-like banner circling the mountain and its vineyards. The right hand of Bacchus holds a wine jug from which a stream of Pompeiana pours into the throat of a thirsty golden panthera, his animal totem. The panther’s dyspeptic leap for the cascade of wine is understandable given the Romans’ high regard for wine. This pouring of wine down a panther’s throat is an image appearing in several surviving Roman paintings from extant walls, if this and a counterpart painting in the British Museum are representative. It may also be important to note from the original Greek [pan + thera] that the word panther means “all wild”. This wild cat is appropriate as a totem for Bacchus who is the dissolver of inhibitions. Below the main grouping on the Roman painting, a great bearded snake sacred to Bacchus rears up before an altar to the wine god. Birds also flit about the garland festoon at the top of the painting, but our attention is drawn to the mountain itself in one of its few pre-AD 79 images.
This is no cameo appearance because the mountain is center stage, not yet having blown its “cork” in the huge volcanic event that buried Pompeii and neighboring towns under tons of ash in AD 79 as many as 30 feet or more deep. In the Roman painting between the grape cluster of Bacchus (Fig. 2) (who could even be a living advertisement for the wine) and the peaceful-for-the-moment peak, there are multiple rows of trained trellis vineyards. In a vinous excerpt of his country gentleman treatise, (4) the Roman writer Columella describes such trained vines as either “staked” [characatus] or “horsed” [canteriatus] with trellises framing vines much like our own vineyards today (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4 Details of Pompeian painting with vineyard on Vesuvius
While Pompeiana may not have been at the top tier of Roman wines, what was the value of one of the more fabled Roman wines? Some were very expensive like those of the year 121 BC, which was the so-called Opimian vintage named after a 2nd c. BC Roman consul, Lucius Opimius. It had the ancient equivalent value of a venerable Petrus, Batard-Montrachet or Romanée-Conti. By Pliny’s time this vintage could easily occasion a valuation of 1000 sesterces a cask and, according to Pliny, it was somewhat bitter but still drinkable after almost 200 years, although said to be reduced to the viscosity of very thin honey. (5) While it had an initial price tag of 100 silver sesterces per amphorae, interest accumulated up to 6 percent per annum - calculate that after a century or so! - nearly the equivalent of $16,000 today for what volume might be in a case, although some doubt the wine could have lasted this long and retain any drinkability. (6) From Campania and thus not too far from Pompeii,Falernian was often the most highly regarded Roman wine. It could continue improving after several decades, which suggests a late harvest grape to some. Varro (7) writes in 37 BC when he was 80 years old that Falernian becomes more valuable the longer it is cellared. While Pompeiana shone best at around 10 years vintage, (8) Falernian would turn amber as it increased in drinkable vintage up to 25 years or more.
The Romans were probably also the first to classify terra or context based not just on soil but local conditions - including facing directional (e.g., southerly toward sun or not), wind, slope and elevation, etc. - for wine production, although the word terra suggests that soil was at least as important as grape type or even more so, anticipating the sagacious French by at least a thousand years with the concept of terroire (and maybe even the textual source of the later idea), as Pliny says of Campania felix, “Happy Campania” (Fig. 5), the province around Naples:
Fig. 5 Campanian vineyard near Luogosano, Avellino
“These instances, if I am not mistaken, show it is the country and the soil, not the grape, that matter...since the same vine has a different value in different locations.” (9)
The wine in western Europe first brought by the Greeks through colonies like Massalia (Marseilles) and exported up the Rhone valley was highly desirable by Celtic tribes in Gaul and the Rhine and Danube plains (both Hallstatt and La Tène cultures) from at least the 6th c. BC, evidenced by wine vessels found throughout archaeological contexts in northern Europe (Austria and Switzerland as well as France). The circa 500 BC grave of a Celtic princess from Vix – now in the local museum at Chatillon-sûr Seine - in central France has yielded an enormous decorated bronze wine krater 1.63 meters (about 5'4" feet) in height - the largest known krater anywhere - as a burial good which was her ticket to celebration in the afterlife, insuring she would be well-received in the halls of the gods with such a divine gift for eternal vintages (Fig. 6). While most likely Rhodian Greek in its make, the huge Vix wine krater was also buried with many Greek and Etruscan wine vessels for immediate use. (10)
Fig. 6 Vix Krater, Chatillon-sûr-Seine Museum, France, 1.63 meters (5'4") high, circa 500 BC
Some scholars have theorized that wine itself was the vehicle for establishing the status of the Celtic warlords and chieftains who could thus convene social events for their vassals around wine consumption and distribution to “civilize” as well as confer noble favor through this luxury good, as shown on Celtic bronze situlae (Fig. 7). (11)
Fig. 7 Benvenuti Situla from Este, with Venetic Celtic Lord drinking, Late 7th c. BC
The Celts probably consumed thousands of tons of wine via this social mechanism between 600-100 BC, and apparently preferred wooden casks to clay amphorae. Well-known to archaeology, the Rhone valley itself and ultimately Burgundy were soon colonized for Roman wine growth, which, according to Jasper Morris, editor of the Journal of Wine Research may even account for the name domaine of La Romanée alongside Roman and Burgundian archaeological sites, so named in 1651 “presumably on account of Roman finds being found nearby”. (12) The wine village of Vosne-Romanée is perhaps the premium viticultural context in the prestigious Côte-d'Or, the heartland of Burgundy, with a lion's share of great monopoles and many Grand Crus and the famous Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Here some of the world's most esteemed wines - often costing thousands of dollars for a single bottle (13) - are made from the Pinot Noir grape, and local wines have been especially appreciated and renowned since medieval Benedictine and Cluniac times. That this single village's great vintages and millennia-old viticulture harks back to the Romans are logical outcomes of such deep-rooted winemaking tradition since antiquity.
Fig. 8 Village of Vosne-Romanée, context of La Romanée (and likely Roman origins)
Confirming that wine was a well-traveled commodity for over 2,000 years, alpine sites at 8200 ft like the Great-St-Bernard pass between Italy and Switzerland have yielded fragmentary wine vessels, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, where my own archaeological project there has excavated Roman ceramic wine cups and ceramic amphorae from such high and remote ruins. This clearly shows Roman wine traveled far and was appreciated everywhere as one of the hallmarks of civilization. (14)
In the Côte-d'Or of Burgundy, soils are rich in calcaire (French for limestone and related calcium carbonates) and clay and other components. In Campania, geological sources are at times mixed with volcanic ash, soil that the vine roots probed and from which they drew sustenance in the heat of the Italian sun. While finding extant ancient Roman wine names in France may be difficult, the best Roman wines in antiquity from Italy were Falernian and its compatriots, the marvelous Caecuban or Massic which have also long been the toast of Roman poets. In his odes, often written in praise of wine, Horace nostalgically remembers such classics two thousand years ago:
"Aulon, now cherished by fertile Bacchus, envies less the clusters of Falernum" [Carmen II.6]
"A worthier heir will drink your Caecuban now guarded by a hundred keys...glorious wine more choice than that drunk at pontiffs’ feasts" [Carmen II.14]
"Since Corvinus orders a far mellower wine, fetch the Massicum that you guard, fit to be brought out on some auspicious day!" [Carmen III.21]
Notes:
(1) Pliny, Hist. Nat. 14.4.21-22
(2) ibid. 14.4.35
(3) as in Virgil's Georgic 2.60
(4) Columella, de Re Rustica 5.4.1 & 5.5.16
(5) Pliny, op. cit. 14.6.57
(6) W. Arrowsmith. Petronius’ Satyricon. University of Michigan, 1959, 192, where Arrowsmith suggests Trimalchio’s attempts to impress his guests display more ignorance than gourmandaise because the wine would not have survived well. Taste may not have been the most important criterion if connoisseurship was as important then as now: Christie's Wine Auction in London a decade or so ago (around 1997) had one bottle of 1945 La Tache DRC with an opening bid for £ 1100.00 sterling or around $1780.00.
(7) Varro, de Rerum Rusticarum, Libri III, Bk. I.
(8) Pliny, op. cit. 14.8.70
(9) ibid. 14.8.70.
(10) J. Boardman. Greek Art. Thames and Hudson, 1985 ed., 14, figure 103 on 104
(11) Pliny, Hist. Nat.. 22.2.5; K. Kristiansen. Europe before history. Cambridge, 1998, 328; S. J. Fleming. Vinum: The Story of Roman Wine. Glen Mils, PA: Art Flair, 2001, 3,5, 22,96,101.
(12) Jasper Morris in Jancis Robinson, ed. Oxford Companion to Wine, 1994, 1053.
(13) Bruce Sanderson. "Heaven on Earth", Wine Spectator, May, 2010, 49. In New York, 2007, Sotheby's auctioned a case of Romanée-Conti 1990 for $262,900, each bottle at $22,000.
(14) Patrick Hunt. “Summus Poeninus in the Grand-St-Bernard Pass.” Journal of Roman Archaeology XI (1998) 265-74; Patrick Hunt. “A Roman refuge in the Plan de Barasson: Field reports for 1998-2000” Vallesia: Chronique du découvertes archéologiques dans le canton du Valais LIV (Sion, 1999) 300-08; Patrick Hunt, “Bronze Tabulae Ansatae at Roman Summus Poeninus in the Roman Alps” Acta: From the Parts to the Whole, vol. 2, Proceedings of XIIIth Int’l. Bronze Congress, Harvard University Art Museums, JRA Suppl. 2002.
Image Credits: Figs. 1-4: public domain; Fig. 5: by courtesy of I Trulli and La Molara, vinonyc.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/; Figs. 6-7: public domain, Wikimedia; Fig. 8: photo courtesy of Deborah Concklin/Fred Concklin, August, 2010, on Treasures of Medieval Burgundy trip (with Dr. Patrick Hunt).
Copyright © 2007 Dr. Patrick Hunt
Stanford University
phunt@stanford.edu
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