Ancient Wine
Grapes grow abundantly and reliably in the Mediterranean climate, and taste good, and even gatherers ate wild grapes (which are smaller than domesticated grapes). But the best thing about grapes has always been that you can ferment them into wine. This has several advantages. First, it preserves the grapes so that they will last for years without refrigeration. Second, it produces alcohol, which is a good source of carbohydrates for energy. Third, wine helps kill bacteria and prevents sickness and tooth decay.
People found wine to be pleasant to drink; it tasted good. Drinking wine felt good too. In the ancient and medieval world, most adults and kids drank wine nearly every day, though not enough to get drunk. People have probably been making grapes into wine since the Stone Age, even when they were just gathering wild grapes.
People began to grow grapes probably a little after they began growing wheat, maybe about 8,000 BC. Growing grapes is a more serious project, because you have to take good care of the vines for several years before you get any grapes out of them.
To make wine, first press the grapes. You press grapes by putting them in a large vat (a sort of barrel) with a hole at the bottom to let the juice run out, and then getting in the vat and stomping the grapes to squish them and let the juice out, as these satyrs are doing.
Then you put the wine in wooden casks or clay pots and add yeast and let it ferment for several months (or sometimes years).
Red wine was among the things the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamon had in his tomb, about 1300 BC.
These are glasses Roman people drank wine from. See how they have little points on the bottom so they won't stand up? You had to drink all the wine in one drink.
And these are some people drinking wine, in Breughel's picture of a wedding from the 1400's AD. See in the lower left hand corner, the man pouring wine from a big clay jug into smaller ones?
To find out more about ancient and medieval wine, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Wines, by Golden Books (2001). For kids.
Ancient Wine : The Search for the Origins of Viniculture, by Patrick McGovern (2003).
Story of Wine, by Hugh Johnson (1998).
