Wine is a drink that evokes images of good food and festive occasions. Good wine goes with good company. Perhaps wine brings back memories of student parties with lots of cheap plonk that left you with a nasty hangover. There is a lot more to wine, however, and its uses are numerous. Its used as medicine, as an offering of peace between tribes, in the celebration of Communion in the church and more. You may have heard that a glass of red wine a day is good for preventing cardio-vascular disease but thats not all its good for. The health benefits of wine have been known since ancient times.

Archaeological evidence shows wine has been a part of culture for thousands of years. Civilisations in the Middle East started to cultivate Vitis vinifera around 5000BC. The Vitis plant family has about 40 members, all of them vigorous climbers. These (initially) wild plants thrive in a temperate climate. The fruits have a fresh-tasting acidity in combination with high levels of sugar. Species from around the Mediterranean are the ancestors of the varieties we see today. Many white grapes originate from Vitis vinifera pontica, a strain originally found in the Caucasus. Vitis vinifera occidentalis, from the Nile Delta, is said to be the forebear of most of our red varieties.

In ancient times, people didnt have the complex equipment we have today. It was purely through trial and error that winemaking came about. The fermentation process was far from perfect and harvests were not consistent. We would have thought the wine of those times undrinkable. Details of ancient winemaking can be found in odd places: the book of Genesis in the Bible mentions that Noah planted a vineyard after the animals disembarked from the Ark. After the harvest, Noah drank his wine and was drunken and uncovered in his tent. This earliest example of public drunkenness is depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo painted nine sections of the Bible, including Noahs drunken episode, between 1505 and 1512 at the request of Pope Julius II. You can still see them there today.

More records of winemaking were found in 1922 when Egyptologist Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutankhamun. He came across murals that depict the art of winemaking in great detail. The child Pharaoh Tutankhamun, who became king at the age of nine in 1334 BC, lived in a period when wine was made in a way not dissimilar to our modern methods. Thirty-six amphorae (wine vats made out of clay) were found in the tomb. The amphorae were marked with labels that told the age of the wine as well as the name of the chief vintner. Information on the taste of the wine was also supplied. The amphorae were dug into the cold clay soil, no doubt to encourage fermentation. Other archaeological finds in the Valley of the Kings proved that certain winemakers were in demand, as their names grace more than one lot of amphorae.