I’ve been reading a lot about the ancients over the past month, and specifically ancient Roman wine. It started out as research for a bespoke wine tasting that I delivered in December, and then it got out of hand.
It’s quite astonishing how much was known about wine 2,000 years ago. Mago, the great agronomist of Carthage, recommended planting on north-facing slopes to moderate ripeness; Columella knew that yields of around 60hl/ha were good for both balancing quality and financial viability, and that leaf thinning created aeration and a good crop; Pliny recommended different cellar ageing times based on the source and style of wine.
Even the viticulture and winemaking wasn’t so much more primitive than ours. The Greco-Roman wine press was in use almost unchanged until the mid-20th century, and they understood as much about pruning in accordance with the moon cycles as many modern wine producers. In fact, armed only with Columella in translation, you could probably set up a vineyard in the Mediterranean today.
What does any of this have to do with drinks retailing, you might ask? At a time when pessimism about wine is rampant, in the gloomiest month of the year for wine merchants, I realised that there’s a certain reassurance and comfort to be taken from the millennia of making and trading wine. In theory, it is possible that wine will be killed off by the World Health Organisation and the moderation of Gen Z, but if I liked to gamble — as many Romans did — I wouldn’t put a denarius on it.
Today, we see everything up close; globalisation has brought every problem to our doorstep. Bewildered by information, overwhelmed with detail, everything seems more urgent, immediate and personal than ever before. In our inter-connected world, we struggle to step back and see the big picture, to sail out beyond the horizons of the algorithms that constrain us.
But it’s not time to fall on those swords just yet, or embrace the venomous asp. We haven’t lost our most important shipping port to volcanic eruption, as when Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii in 79CE. Our container shipments might be delayed, but we don’t lose whole cargoes to the sea like ancient wine merchants — the Mediterranean is littered with tens of thousands of sunken amphorae. Our taxes are increasing, as they do, but Emperor Nero hasn’t demanded that a major Grand Cru vineyard should be entirely dug up because he thought Dido had buried some treasure there when fleeing the city of Tyre. Even the EU’s vine pull schemes pale in comparison to Emperor Domitian’s 92CE edict banning the planting of new vineyards in Italy and requiring half the vineyards in the wider empire to be destroyed. Nor have we had to deal with anything like the scale of Prohibition or phylloxera, to take more recent crises, in our own times.
This isn’t to ignore the difficulties and the immediate economic impacts that things like increasing duty and National Insurance rises will have on businesses. No one can deny that it is tough out there and that there are challenges ahead. But knowing that challenges like these and more have already been encountered can provide, if not comfort, at least perspective, and help us to remain positive.
Wine is a little matter, in the end. Most serious histories of the ancient world don’t even bother with it. It’s a footnote at best, barely worth indexing, a cameo player in world events. But it’s a resilient one. If you are selling good wine at fair prices to the right people then take some comfort this January: there’s been a place for you in the world for millennia. Wine, after all, has endured for longer than the world’s greatest empires.
