The Vineyard Olympics
Part 2
Wine in Ancient Greece was far more than an ordinary drink. Viticulture and winemaking, the trade in famous island wines, amphorae and symposia made it an important part of Greek economy, culture and everyday life. It was here that wine became not only a product of the land, but also a part of human conversation and thought.
Battle of the Terroirs
A large bowl filled with soil gathered from some of the world’s great vineyards was carried onto the central podium of the Colosseum. In it, volcanic ash from Campania mingled with Burgundy limestone, Mosel slate, Médoc gravel and the red earth of the Barossa.
It was here that the fate of the Vineyard Olympics was to be decided.
Ancient Greece: Antiquity — Wine of the Gods
The ancient Greeks were the first to step up to the improvised rostrum. The other delegations expected them to produce maps of their islands, samples of soil, or at least a list of celebrated vineyards. But the Greeks had brought nothing of the kind.
Only three amphorae were placed before the rostrum, containing wines from Chios, Thasos and Lesbos.
The Greeks placed three amphorae side by side—Chios, Thasos, and Lesbos—a reminder that long before the modern concept of “terroir” emerged, a wine’s origin already had a name, a reputation, and a price
👉 The wines of Chios were rich, aromatic and so highly prized that their amphorae could be recognised by their shape far beyond the borders of Hellas. These were wines of prestige and high price. Thasos produced powerful, spicy wines that ancient authors described as capable of withstanding long sea voyages. The wines of Thasos stood for commercial reputation and the regulation of origin. Lesbos, meanwhile, was renowned for its aromatic wines, with those of Mytilene and Methymna held in particularly high regard. The finest Lesbian wines could be aged for long periods, gaining additional value with time. These wines stood for aroma, quality and ageability.
These great wines of the ancient world were considered worthy not only of feasts, but also of conversations about nature, beauty, memory and the gods.
👉 When speaking of the great vineyards of Ancient Greece, one important qualification must be made. The ancient world did not yet possess the concept of an individual, named terroir that would emerge many centuries later in Burgundy or Bordeaux. Fame belonged above all to a particular wine-producing place—an island, city or region. Chios, Thasos, Lesbos and other celebrated centres were more than mere points on a map to the ancient buyer: the wine’s origin itself was already becoming a mark of its quality, reputation, and price.
The Greek orator observed:
— For us, greatness did not yet belong to an individual plot of land. A place became great when its wine acquired a name and reputation of its own.
🌿 Before Wine Became the Drink of the Gods
…The Aegean Sea. Early spring, around 450 BC.
An ancient Greek vineyard bore little resemblance to a modern wine estate. Greece was, for the most part, a difficult land for farmers. Rocky slopes, poor soils and dry summers forced people to adapt to the land far more often than they could make the land adapt to them.
Where the terrain allowed, the soil was worked with a simple plough drawn by oxen. On small plots and hillsides, the principal tools remained human hands and the hoe. The vines were pruned, the soil around them was loosened and cleared of weeds, while young shoots were trained and tied.
Early morning. The sun is only beginning to rise above the sea. A father and son are working among the vines. The boy has a small hoe in his hands. His father has already stopped him several times.
— Not so deep, — he says. — You’ll damage the roots.
The Aegean Sea, around 450 BC. Wine began not with an amphora or a philosophical conversation, but with rocky soil, the vine, and the winegrower’s daily labor
The boy straightens up and looks at the stony ground.
— Why did we plant vines here at all? The soil down below is much better.
— Because down there, on the good land, we grow what we cannot live without. Up here grows what sometimes makes life worth living.
History, of course, has preserved no record of this conversation. Nor has it preserved the names of the thousands of people who grew grapes for those whose names history did preserve.
Somewhere far from here, philosophers will debate moderation and pleasure, merchants will put a price on an amphora, and poets will sing the praises of the god Dionysus.
But here, none of that exists yet.
There is stony ground. There is a vine. And there is a man bending over it.
This is where the wine of the gods began
…🏛️ On the Other Shore
Far from the nameless vineyard, an entirely different Greece was alive and thriving. In Athens in the mid-fifth century BC, people debated politics, listened to orators, watched tragedies and comedies, built temples and struck commercial deals. Ships carrying goods from all corners of the Mediterranean sailed into Piraeus.
Among those goods was wine.
For a wealthy Athenian, an amphora of fine island wine could be a commodity with a recognised origin, reputation and price. Later, its contents would appear at a symposium, be mixed with water in a krater, poured into cups and become the companion of conversation, quiet music and endless debate.
But the man raising that cup in Athens probably gave little thought to how many times another man had bent over stony ground before the wine reached him.
Between them lay the sea.
On one shore, wine was still hard labour. On the other, it was already becoming Greek culture
🍇 From Vine to Must
Several months passed. The same vineyard. Late summer—early autumn.
The vines that had seemed almost bare in spring were now heavy with ripe bunches of grapes. The grapes were harvested by hand, placed in baskets and taken to the place where they would be processed as quickly as possible.
Our boy was once again working beside his father. He cut a bunch, examined it carefully, then plucked off a grape and popped it into his mouth.
— Are you working or having breakfast?
— I’m checking whether the grapes are ripe.
The boy tasted another.
— This one’s ripe too.
His father watched him for a moment.
— At this rate, by evening we’ll discover that our entire ripe harvest has ended up in your stomach.
It was the simplest way of judging ripeness: look and taste.
The baskets gradually filled. When the harvest was over, the boy followed the adults to the place where the grapes they had gathered were about to become something else for the first time.
The winepress looked nothing like the place where, in his imagination, the drink of the gods ought to be born. There were certainly no gods here.
The simplest way to extract the juice was to tread the grapes barefoot on a specially prepared pressing floor. The juice ran down into a collecting basin below. Various simple devices were used for further pressing and, later, mechanical presses made it possible to extract the liquid remaining in the mass of crushed grapes.
To modern eyes, the scene may look almost folkloric. To an ancient winemaker, however, the human foot was a perfectly practical tool: heavy enough to crush a grape, yet considerably gentler for the job than stone or wood.
The boy stopped beside the pressing floor.
— Can I?
His father looked at his feet.
— Wash them.
A few minutes later, the boy was carefully stepping through the grapes. Berries burst beneath his feet, and sweet juice seeped between his toes.
Ancient Greece, 5th century BC. Grapes were crushed barefoot on specially prepared pressing floors, and the juice that flowed from them was collected in containers below. This was the beginning of the journey from grape to wine
He tasted it.
— And this is going to become wine?
— If we do everything right.
— And if we don’t?
His father shrugged.
— Then the gods will get some very good vinegar.
By evening, the grapes that had still been hanging on the vines that morning had become cloudy, sweet must.
The boy tasted it again.
— But this is just grape juice. Where’s the wine?
His father smiled.
— Now we wait.
🏺 “Now We Wait”: How Grape Juice Became Wine
The must was poured into large ceramic vessels known as pithoi. Some were so large that they remained permanently in place and could be partly sunk into the ground.
At first, the boy found it strange that after months of work, the adults suddenly seemed to be doing nothing. But before long, the must began to change all by itself.
Foam appeared on the surface, bubbles rose through the liquid, and its smell and taste began to change. Today we know that yeasts were converting the sugar in the grapes into alcohol and carbon dioxide. A Greek winemaker of the fifth century BC knew nothing of microorganisms, but generations of observation had taught him to recognise the course of fermentation and to tell when everything was proceeding normally—and when something was going wrong.
The boy put his ear to the vessel.
— It’s making a noise.
— It is.
— But we only poured grape juice in there. I saw it!
The boy thought for a moment.
— Then something must be living in there.
His father laughed.
— If you ever find out what it is, be sure to tell me and my friends.
Ancient Greece, 5th century BC. In the pithos, the must began to ferment naturally. The winegrower knew nothing yet about yeast, but centuries of experience had already taught him to understand the behavior of wine and patiently wait for the result
The answer was only about two and a half thousand years away, with the work of Louis Pasteur linking alcoholic fermentation to the activity of living microorganisms.
Once fermentation was complete, a new problem arose: how to preserve the wine. The ceramic vessels were sealed, the wine was separated from the sediment, and every effort was made to limit its contact with air. Resin could be used to treat the porous inner surface of the vessels, at the same time affecting the flavour of their contents.
👉 An echo of this ancient tradition survives in modern Greek retsina, whose distinctive aroma comes from pine resin.
Other techniques were used as well, some of which would seem unusual to a modern wine lover. Ancient sources mention herbs and aromatic substances, salt and even seawater. The island of Kos was particularly well known for winemaking traditions involving seawater.
There was, however, no single recipe for “ancient Greek wine.” The vast Greek world had many local traditions, and the wines of different islands could vary considerably from one another.
What may strike a modern drinker as a strange additive could, for an ancient winemaker, have been part of a familiar flavour or a way of helping wine survive time and travel. Because making the wine was not enough.
They still had to keep it from spoiling
⏳ When Time Helped the Wine
Most wines were not intended for long-term storage. The Greeks did, however, distinguish between young and old wine, and the ability of the finest wines to withstand the passage of time could increase their value.
Ancient “old wine”, of course, cannot be directly compared with a bottle of great Bordeaux resting for decades in a modern cellar. The vessels were different, the storage conditions were different, knowledge of ageing was different, and so were the wines themselves. But an idea that would become important throughout the later history of winemaking already existed:
sometimes wine became more valuable simply because no one was in a hurry to drink it
For most foods, age meant deterioration and danger: grain spoiled, oil turned rancid, and meat had to be preserved quickly.
Good wine was gradually becoming an exception. But sooner or later, there came a point when waiting no longer made sense. The wine had to be sold.
— We’ll never see it again? — the boy asked.
— Probably not.
— Who will drink it?
His father shrugged.
— Whoever pays for it.
For the winegrower, the story of the wine was almost over. For the wine, it was only beginning.
⛵ When Wine Acquired an Address
A huge pithos was of little use for long-distance transport. The wine was transferred into transport amphorae—ceramic vessels with two handles and often an elongated body tapering to a point at the bottom. This shape allowed the cargo to be packed closely and securely in a ship’s hold.
Wine left the vineyard and set out across the sea. Transport amphorae carried it far from its place of origin, turning a local drink into a commodity traded across the ancient Mediterranean
A new life was beginning for the wine. Until now, almost everything had happened close to the vineyard. From this point on, a vast sea might separate the person who had made the wine from the person who would eventually drink it.
But an amphora was more than just a container. Its shape, the way it was made and, in some centres, the stamps it bore could help associate it with a particular place of origin. Thasos is especially famous for its numerous amphora stamps, followed later by Rhodes and other centres of trade.
This was not yet a wine label in the modern sense. No amphora announced:
“Château Dionysos, vintage 450 BC, aged in pithos, 13.5% ABV.”
A stamp might identify the maker of the vessel, an official, or some element of a system of control, and it certainly did not provide the buyer with the kind of information about the wine that we expect today.
But gradually, a principle was emerging that would survive for thousands of years:
origin matters
Chios, Thasos and other wine-producing centres developed reputations of their own. The buyer no longer wanted simply wine. He wanted wine from a particular place.
And once the name of a place increased the value of a product, that value needed protection. Surviving laws from Thasos show just how seriously the island took the regulation of the wine trade and the protection of its local economic interests.
The appellation systems of future Europe were still thousands of years away. But the problem itself already existed:
if a place creates value, someone will inevitably try to profit from that value
🌊 Across the Sea
Some of the amphorae were taken down to the shore and loaded into the holds of merchant ships. Some vessels reached their destinations safely. Others sank in storms together with their cargo—which is why, thousands of years later, archaeologists can still find amphorae on the seabed and use them to reconstruct trade routes that vanished long ago.
Not every ship reached its port. Thousands of years later, sunken amphorae help archaeologists reconstruct the trade routes and wine geography of the ancient world
Our imaginary ship was one of the lucky ones. Ahead appeared Piraeus—the port of Athens, where goods arrived from across the Mediterranean.
One such amphora came ashore. We do not know who grew the grapes for the wine inside it. We do not know who trod them underfoot or who watched over the fermenting juice.
But none of that mattered to the buyer now. He had very different questions:
Where is the wine from? Is it good? And how much does it cost?
🪙 When Origin Became Part of the Price
In Piraeus, amphorae made their way into warehouses, shops and private homes. Simple local wine was meant for everyday drinking, while wines from famous islands could command considerably higher prices.
Chios enjoyed an especially distinguished reputation. Ancient authors repeatedly mentioned its wines among the expensive and prestigious. The island’s name itself was already becoming part of the value of what was inside the amphora.
A customer approached one of the merchants.
— I need some wine.
— I have plenty.
— I’m looking for something good.
The merchant looked at him more carefully.
— I have plenty of that too.
— I’m having guests tomorrow.
— Then you need something very good.
The customer frowned.
— No. The guests aren’t that good.
The merchant pointed to one of the amphorae.
— Chios.
— How much?
On hearing the price, the customer looked at the amphora again — this time with considerably less respect.
— Do you have anything good that isn’t from Chios?
The same conversation could easily have taken place two and a half thousand years later.
Piraeus, 5th century BC. Wine was already more than a drink—it was also a commodity. Origin, reputation, and the name of an island could influence its price: the buyer was paying not simply for wine, but for wine “from somewhere”
The customer was no longer paying only for wine. He was paying for origin, reputation and prestige.
And yet, just before leaving, he glanced once more at the Chian amphora.
— All right. I’ll take one.
— For your better guests?
— No. So my guests will think they are.
🏛️ From Commodity to Social Gesture
Wine was acquiring yet another meaning. In the vineyard, it had been the product of labour. In the pithos, a drink that had to be preserved. On the ship, cargo that had to be delivered. In the merchant’s shop, a commodity to be sold. But in the home of a wealthy Athenian, it also became a way of saying something about the host himself.
What wine would he serve his guests? Would they recognise where it came from? What would his choice say about the wealth and status of the man giving the feast?
Our amphora entered an Athenian home. But no one was going to simply pour its contents into cups.
First, the krater had to be prepared.
For the Greeks, it mattered not only what wine they drank, but also how they drank it
🍷 When Wine Became Conversation
By evening, the guests began to arrive. After the meal came a special part of the gathering—the symposium, when the guests drank wine together. In a wealthy household, a separate room known as the andron might be reserved for it, with the participants reclining on couches arranged along the walls.
But no one intended to pour the wine they had brought directly into their cups. A large vessel—the krater—was placed in the centre. Wine was mixed with water in it. The Greeks regarded drinking wine undiluted as a sign of lacking moderation and associated the practice with barbarians.
An Athenian symposium, 5th century BC. Wine was mixed with water in a krater and then poured into drinking cups. For the Greeks, what mattered was not only what wine they drank, but how they drank it—moderation was part of their wine culture
Our modern visitor would probably try to intervene immediately:
— What are you doing to that good wine?
The Greeks would be equally surprised.
— Drinking it.
— But you’ve poured water into it!
— Of course. How do you drink yours?
The answer—”undiluted”—would make the Greek look at his twenty-first-century guest with some concern. Had the customs of the barbarians returned after all?
The proportions of wine and water could vary; there was no single “Greek recipe.” At a symposium, a master of ceremonies known as the symposiarch might be chosen to set the rules for the evening, including how the wine was mixed and the pace at which it was drunk.
The cups began to make their way around the room. There was music. People told stories, argued, joked and recited poetry. Wine helped create a sense of fellowship and gradually loosened the restraints of everyday conversation.
But with it came a question the Greeks were asking themselves long before the emergence of modern alcohol science, with all its guidelines and warnings:
Where is the line between a person controlling the wine — and the wine beginning to control the person?
The Greek philosopher continued his speech in the arena of the Colosseum:
— I would like to ask you a couple of simple questions. What matters more—the land that produced a famous wine, or the culture that made that wine part of human thought? Does a vineyard become great when its wine changes the person who drinks it?
At this point, the comic playwright Eubulus stepped forward from the Greek delegation and reminded the gathering of the ancient Greek rule of the three kraters.
The first was for health, the second for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the third, he reminded them, wise men should leave the feast.
— And the fourth krater? — someone among the Romans asked.
Eubulus shrugged.
— The fourth and those that follow have nothing more to do with a great vineyard. That is where noise, quarrels, fights and madness begin.
The Roman senators in the stands greeted this with loud laughter. They reminded the Greek speaker of his countryman Alexander the Great, who, according to numerous stories, did not always observe the rules of moderation himself. After particularly heavy drinking parties, the great conqueror was said to have been prone to outbursts of rage and anger, while some ancient accounts even connected the circumstances of his final illness with heavy drinking. Even centuries later, tales of Alexander’s banquets remained part of his legend.
The Greek received these accusations with philosophical calm.
— That is precisely why, — he observed, — we speak of moderation. Even the greatest of men, after winning so many battles, can still lose an argument with Dionysus. That is why Eubulus stopped at the third krater!
At that moment, a servant approached the large krater. In full view of the other delegations, he poured wine into it and then added water.
— And one more thing, — the Greek continued. — We almost never drank wine undiluted. Mixing it with water was considered the mark of a civilised person. To drink it neat meant being unable to control either the wine or oneself.
He pointed to the krater.
— That is why our philosophers argued not only about where great wine was born. They also asked what happened to a person after that wine reached his cup.
Then he continued:
— Does the price of a wine make a vineyard great?
That was Greece’s central argument: a great vineyard must produce more than extraordinary wine. It must become part of a culture capable of outliving both the wine itself and the people who drank it.
The greatness of a Greek vineyard was measured not only by the wine it produced, but also by the thoughts born beside the cup
Meanwhile, an entirely different idea of greatness was already preparing to take the rostrum…
To be continued…
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