A HISTORY OF WINE
By the Civic Museums of Pitigliano with the cooperation of EURO INNOVANET srl

Examining what in the today's western society the consumption of the wine represents, it is interesting to notice that its function in the upper social classes is not quite different from that wine assumed in the antiquity, starting from a certain historical moment. The wine and its consumption are, today, prerogative of an elevated and refined social class; some productions reach high prices, that do not appear justifiable from cultivations and traditional methods of cultivating the grapes, but that are only to be attributed to drinking a determined bottle represents for a society: the wealth.
And this constituted also, in ancient times, the interest for the consumption of the wine: the aristocratic society, and before it the Gods, were the only ones that could afford to hold and to drink the wine; who drank it recognized him/herself as participating to a shared concept of aristocracy and heroic ideals.

But the history of the grapevine cultivation has ancient roots, and in the most ancient periods the situation was certainly different.
It is believed that the first grapevine domestication was in the Caucasian area, where the environment was particularly favorable, beginning from the Neolithic Age and that, with the time, the technique has reached before the Near East to reach, subsequently, Greece, during the Mycenaean Age.
In Italy the grapevine made its appearance in the Neolithic Age, but this still was wild grapevine. It is possible to find testimonies of it in the site of Poggio Olivastro, located in the lower part of the Fiora river valley, not far away from Vulci, where some vines have been recovered in the levels referable to the last phase of the period, facies of Diana- around 4000 years B.C.
In a period in which agriculture was not yet so well developed, the diet of people was integrated with all the edible plants and the grapevine surely was among these: for its nutritive power it could almost be defined as a sort of  ''drink-food''. As the modern research has confirmed, in fact, both the wine and the grapes, naturally, contain numerous nourishing and protective substances for the Human Body.
The wine and the cultivation of the grapevine was kept in great consideration by the ancient people, especially among the population culturally more developed, which had found in the consumption of the wine, assumed in specific occasions, one of the ways to celebrate the aristocratic class.

With regard to this it is possible to quote the Greek historian Tucidid can be quoted (second half of the 5th Cent. B.C.), according to which the Mediterranean people began to emerge from barbarity when started to cultivate the grapevine.

The cultivation of the grapevine as the cultivation of the olive, have deeply changed the agrarian landscape of Italy and, in particular way, redrawn the one of the Italian central tyrrenic area located at the middle of Tuscany, Umbria and Lazio.

It could be possible to start from here, from the research of the origins of the land as we know it today, and that we exploit in such an intensive way, to try getting awareness about our identity so to safeguard our more ancient and valid agricultural traditions that, fortunately, excel still today in all the world.

With regard to Italy, if it is possible to believe that an autonomous cultural technique of the grapevine and the wine was developed, nevertheless it is only through the contacts with the Mycenaean civilization, particularly intense in the late Bronze Age, that the grapevine cultivation becomes one of the characteristic element of the agricultural system in the Protohistoric Age together with the olive cultivation. This is directly testified by the tools specialized for the pruning, the pruning hooks, that were recovered in Etruria in different samples, datable in the first Iron Age (9th Cent. B.C.), that introduce a pen on the back, similar to that of the "pen pruning hooks" of the modern times.

In Etruria, on the base of the evidences, the most ancient phase of the grapevine cultivation is that performed with the technique of the living tree stake. The wine's production, still limited, occupied the marginal areas of the fields (lambruscaie), where the wooded areas at the borders (labra) of the ploughed earths begin (ad Verg. Georg. V 6).

In the second half of the 8th century B.C. it started to consolidate a selection and an improvement of the spontaneous grapevine, also thanks to the vivacious movement of people determined by the Greek colonization, that invested the middle and southern Italy and Sicily along this period: all these people bring with themselves, besides objects, vases, etc., also wine and scions from Greece to the western Mediterranean.

To the same chronological horizon can be referred the first "banquet sets", already attested in Greece and mentioned several times in the Homeric poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey. As already happened for the beer during the final phase of the Chalcolithic, facies of the Belle Beaker (around the half of the I3rd Millennium), the beverage that exalts, the nectar of the Gods, must be served and tasted with plates specifically devoted to this aim and in appropriate assemblies.

In Etruria, from the end of the 8th century, real dinnerware sets are produced, whose typology traces out the Greek plates. It deals with pitchers to pour, of cups and wine glasses to drink, of great vases as the hydriae (vases to contain and to transport water), stàmnoi vases (vases to contain wine) and craters, to mix, according to the Greek use, a third of wine with two thirds of water, before serving it to the table companions.

Wine jar, The Civic Museums of Pitigliano

Anphora, The Civic Museums of Pitigliano

Etruscan anphora of the Painter from Micali. Last quarter of the 6th cent. B.C.. The National Archaeological Museum of Florenc

Pelike, late Iron Age, Regional Museum of History Veliko Tarnovo

Clay amphora for wine, II-III cent. B.C., The Brukenthal National Museum

The plates can be made of ceramics or metal: bronze, but also silver and gold. The ostentation of the plates and the utensils in the graves constitute one of the characteristics of the aristocracies of the Mediterranean area during the orientalizing period. The characteristics of this production, the elevated artistic level that certain ceramicist and potters reach as well as the wide diffusion of the manufactured articles are, for the archaeologists, the basis of most studies aon the Mediterranean Civilizations.

Of this plates we have a vast documentation in the exposition of the Civic Museum of Pitigliano. Of excellence is the production in black heavy-style bucchero (heavy Bucchero) of the first half of the 6th Century. In this production remarkable are  the great craters, the amphoras and the hydries with embossed elements. Numerous are also the amphoras for transporting wine from the areas of production to those of consumption, more distant.

In the Etruscan Age, and after during the first Imperial phase, Italian wine was largely exported in Gallia, Spain and also in the Western Greece. But, from the beginnings of the First century, also southern Gallia and Spain become strong exporters of wine. With regard to this, it is possible to observe that the transport of wine on long distances had to greatly harm to the preservation of wine and that, the any case, to maintain unchanged the taste of this drink was a particularly complicated matter, for those times.

Greeks, Etruscans and Romans tried to remediate to this problem by adding substances of very strong taste: famous, because produced in Greece is still today, is the retsina wine, which was obtained by adding to the must some pine resins. Tied to the heroic cults, but also due to an analogous function, this had to be the preparation of a special drink of the Homeric heroes: the kykeión.

It consists of a drink base on wine not diluted with water, but to which were added some barley, honey and grated cheese. Testimonies of the use of adding  grated cheese to the wine are furnished by Homerus, in the Iliad, but evidences can be found also in archaeology. Exemplars of bronze-leaf graters are documented, as offered, in the sanctuaries of Greece; in Italy such items are found in some princely funeral equipments of the orientalizing period, in the regions of Campania and Lazio, both bronze-leafe and silver objects.

In the Greek archaic world the consumption of wine mainly took place  in the symposium, an occupation exclusively reserved to the men of the aristocracy, originally only to the warriors. In Etruria, indeed, the wine's consumption in public occasions was also prerogative of women. The Romans, with the convivium, created a situation partly different.

Women were allowed to participate to this; the equal dignity of the aristocratic participants was replaced by a hierarchy among the guests: the convivium was promoted, in fact, by a rich person for his sodales and clientes. Finally, as it regards the most specific aspect of the assembly, the attention was moved on the food, the caena, rather than on drinking.

Other aspects to be taken into consideration with regard to wine are those related to its curative power, often praised by the ancient writers. It is, in particular,  the famous Greek physician Hippocrates of Coo that, at the beginnings of the 4th  cent. B.C., while elaborating the theory of the humors and the correct diet to prevent the illnesses of the human body, pointed out that a moderate assumption of wine a good could be a component to maintain in form the body and to prevent it from several disturbs.
These theories, through the Roman world, remained unchanged and continued to be applied for the whole Middle Ages. For what concerns, finally, the effects derived by the abuse of wine, they were well known and were very popular themes on ceramics.

The deep sleep, that favored the blinding of the Cyclops Polyphemus by Ulisses, to which the king of Itaca has offered black wine not diluted with water;  the vomit of the young symposium participant to which a young girl supports the head, realistically painted by the Painter of Brygos in the second twenties of the 5th Cent.  B.C.; the whole drunkenness and the excitement that wine can arouse are also reproduced on the black figures B amphora side by Antimenes Painter, recovered in the necropolis of Pitigliano, at St. Giovanni. Here, Dionysus and the Menadis are represented while dancing among the Satyrs. Dionysus, with the head encircled by a crown of ivy, holds in the stretched out left hand a horn and in the right hand shoots of grapevines entwining in the field; in front of him, a Menade brings the hands to her breast and lifts the left foot in a footstep of dance, turning herself toward a satyr represented, to the left, in profile, with the right arm brought ahead with the palm of the hand opened and the left one bended on the back, with closed fist. On the apposite, another satyr in profile to the right makes a step dance specular to the one of the Menade.

About the theme ''Wine'' it is available a DVD just realized by the Historia Foundation under the patronage of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities as well as, among the others, by the Municipality of Pitigliano.

Here is available a preview of the DVD