Ancient Rome: A legacy in wine

What did the Romans ever do for us? Plenty, of course, and in her new book Nina Caplan recounts her journey across Europe in search of traces of the conquering culture's influence on our contemporary world of wine...

Ancient Rome: a legacy in wine

Very amusing – but Latin isn’t as dead as all that. Around 30% of our words have Latin origins, including ‘civilisation’, ‘culture’ and ‘wine’, and those of us more likely to expire from a lack of these things than any excess of Latin have cause to be grateful to the Romans, who can take credit, etymologically and otherwise, for all three.

The Romans didn’t invent wine – the Greeks brought it to the Italian peninsula – but their thirst for conquest sent it travelling, and their belief in its civilising properties changed much more than the landscape. Roman soldiers travelled with amphorae, shapely clay vessels filled with wine, as fuel for their fighting and comfort for their homesickness; food for the army was foraged as they went, so this really would have been their only taste of home. Then when the fighting was done, the grateful generals apportioned the hard-won land – and many of these new farmers planted vines.There are traces of Ancient Rome all over their erstwhile Empire – every time a Romance language is spoken, as well as more tangible evidence. Stone arches and walls rise upwards like the standards of a long-dead army; in Champagne, millions of bottles now age in chalk caves carved out to build Durocortorum, which we know as Reims. Still, it is the vines whose fruit makes the contents of those bottles that are the Romans’ living legacy.

Veni, vidi, vini

Spain’s vineyards predated Rome’s invasion, but the conquerors radically expanded them and sent the wine back to ever-expanding, eternally thirsty Rome. The fact that most of it was plonk – perfect for getting the porter of your mistress drunk on, as the poet Ovid sniffed – was far less important than its cheapness and abundance, particularly after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD destroyed many of southern Italy’s own vineyards. It is a lasting irony that the same liquid that fired up soldiers for conquest was used to pacify the victims of that success. When Juvenal sneered at the Roman populace for caring only about bread and circuses, he forgot to mention wine.

If the modern wine lover hears, practically everywhere as she travels through Europe, that vines were first planted here by the Romans, that’s because it’s often true. We have Ausonius writing about his Bordeaux vineyards in the third century and, two millennia later, the remains of Roman vineyards uncovered on the Côte d’Or (actually, under Bouchard’s car park in Savigny-lès-Beaune). In Italy, the depression like a giant thumbprint near the coast in Campania – where the soil is so fertile that roots must be uncovered each year and supplementary subterranean shoots snipped off to preserve the vigour of the main trunk – is where the vines for legendary Falernian once grew. This was the Romans’ top cuvée, so marvellous that its best year, 121BC, was apparently still good 200 years later – and if that induces a frown of incredulity then you’ve arrived at the central problem in discussing Roman wine, which is: how little we know.

Is the grape variety Biturica, mentioned in ancient texts, a precursor of Carmenère, or of another Bordeaux variety? Were the wines of the Rhône, so admired by Pliny for their ‘pitchy’ taste, any relation to those we find today? The winemakers who make Les Vins de Vienne think so, and have created wines called Taburnum, Sotanum and Heluicum in support of that belief. (None, I’m glad to say, tastes of pitch.) The Gauls had the example of the 600-year-old Greek colony around Marseille and were enthusiastic drinkers before Caesar conquered them, making enterprising Italian merchants rich: one Roman historian reported that the Gauls would give a slave – an astronomical price – as payment for an amphora, thus ‘exchanging the cupbearer for the cup’. Wouldn’t they have ended up making wine without Roman help?

Nunc est Bibendum

These speculations are delightful, as frothy and inconsequential as Champagne bubbles. The fact is, the Romans did plant vines, and perhaps they would not have been Romans, in their eyes or ours, if they hadn’t. They did expand Spain’s reach until amphorae of Spanish wine showed up all over the empire. Amphorae were such useful vessels and so cheap to make that they were tossed away rather than reused, and the Romans’ littering is the modern historian’s bounty, because we can learn all sorts of things from these ancient shards. They were used for wine, oil and other liquids. An equivalent was even used as a burial vessel for children.

In Rome, I climbed a hill which is not one of the famous seven, and looked out over the centre of the ancient world. My feet slipped on slivers of pottery, the creator’s grooves still visible beneath 2,000 years of dirt. This is Monte Testaccio, made entirely of amphorae that were jettisoned, then covered in lime to neutralise the smell. Rain liquefied then solidified this dumping ground and the result is a 30m hill made, in more tangible fashion than most, of fragments of the past .

Monte Testaccio is solid; come back north, cross the Channel to England and you will find nothing but spume and speculation. English winemakers believe that vines grew on their hillsides in Roman times, and perhaps they are right. But I can find no evidence that those fruits were made into wine. Perhaps they were; it is even harder to find evidence that something didn’t happen, and the Romans made wine practically everywhere, but they were sour on the English climate – Tacitus claimed that it rained all the time – and may have feared that the wines made from English grapes would be sour, too. What is interesting, to me, is the longing to believe that we can trace our vinous history back to the people we still consider, along with the Greeks, to be the progenitors of civilisation. And of course, our belief, inherited from them, that only those who cultivate the vine are ever truly civilised.

In vino veritas

But civilisation is all very well: at the end of the day, or the bottom of the bottle, we are all barbarians, enslaved to our senses, which is why any discussion of wine and Ancient Rome comes back to the question of what it actually tasted like. How we long to touch the past. Wine, that strange and intoxicating afterlife of grape juice, is already a triumph over mortality; surely it should also be able to transport us back in time?

At Mas des Tourelles near Beaucaire in France, the owners, entranced by the many amphorae shards they found in their vineyards, have built a Roman wine press: a whole tree-trunk, weighing 2,500kg, presses the grapes for cuvées which also have Roman names and are aged in dolia (giant amphorae) and enhanced, or adulterated, with fenugreek, thyme or cinnamon, just as they might have been in Roman times. The results are surprisingly drinkable, as are the wines of Baetica (the Roman name for southern Spain), which are perfumed with rose, violet and cinnamon in what Manuel León Béjar assures me is the authentic Roman style – never mind that his base wine is Cabernet Sauvignon.

Nobody suggests diluting these wines with water, even though no Roman would have dreamed of drinking wine straight; nor are the world’s great winemakers about to start infusing their first growths and grands crus with herbs and spices. Every wine we taste owes the Romans a debt, but it isn’t one we can touch, or quantify, however much we wish it were. We are left to inhale and imagine – both enjoyable pastimes, after all. And speculate, another word from those Latin roots that seem to be – sorry, schoolchildren – as ever-fertile as any Campanian vine.

The Wandering Vine: Wine, The Romans and Me, by Nina Caplan, is published by Bloomsbury (March 2018, £15.29)