Ancient Roman Wine America

Wine was a popular drink back in ancient Rome. Many people desired the consumption of wine as it grew to be an important factor in Rome’s trade. Wine allowed Rome to control more territory. Also many new people started writing books on how wine was produced like Cato the Censor, Varro, and Columella. These works provided insight on how wine played a part in Roman culture. Consumption of wine started bringing taxes on the quantity people drank. However, wine was an essential need in everyday life. The trading of wine helped Rome many beneficial ways because it allowed the Romans to get different goods from many places and it also allowed their empire to expand in territory and influence.

It was exotic and expensive. The author says “So fine was the calibration of wine with status that drinkers at a Roman banquet, or convivium, would be served different wines depending on their positions in society.” The richest drank the finest wines while poorer citizens drank lesser vintages and so on the social ladder. Wine was also religious. Wine influence on the history of the society started in ancient Greece, wine became the main export of a vast seaborne trade, helping to spread Greek culture abroad. It was a form of currency. I agree with the author’s assessment on the impact of wine. I agree because without wine it probably wouldn’t been involved with religious activities unless it was discovered later down the

From the first living creatures to modern-day homo sapiens, we all have at least one thing in common: the way that drinks affect survival, culture, and day-to-day life. Water is not the only drink that humans have become, in a sense, reliant on over time, as shown in Tom Standage’s novel “A History of the World in 6 Glasses”. Standage states, other than water, that beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola greatly shape the events of our world’s history.

The Romans viewed wine as a mark of sophistication and pleasure in contrast to the Greeks view of it was intelligence.

The author’s main thesis in setting up his book “A History of the world in 6 Glasses” is to depict how six drinks: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and Coca-Cola forged our world. These six different drinks each exist in six distant time periods. Drinks have been used for casual desires such celebrating births, as well as vital objectives such as making life-saving medicines. Furthermore, these beverages have greatly expanded cultures and shaped civilizations since the beginning of time. For instance, beer was used as a currency to the first inhabitants of the first cities. Wages and rations were paid in bread and beer. This became the basis of the economy. A more modern drink also provided everlasting affects in the late 18th century. Coca-Cola

God gives us the right to drink alcohol moderately but not waste ourselves with it. Also, we should not stumble our brothers and sisters if we do choose to drink. I will prove this by researching the uses and ingredients of biblical wine, by researching present day wine along with one other present day alcoholic drink, and by comparing and contrasting my research on present day and biblical wine.

Imagine… you are a working citizen in Rome, neither wealthy nor poor… you make just enough money to get by, you are an average citizen in a vast land of honor. In Rome, they had simular food to present day, traded for commodities, and even were almost as advanced as we are in the medical region today.

Standage began the chapter by explaining how the Romans converted to Greek culture by sacking the famed Greek city of Syracuse, and how the wine craze moved to Rome and throughout the empire. Standage transitioned to how wine came from the vineyard to the table and described the different classes of wine from Falernian to lora. While explaining this, Standage also described how your socioeconomic status affected which class of wine one would drink. This makes sense, but it was fairly strict especially in public settings (e.g. the convivium). Shifting to a lighter topic, the author presented the importance of wine in the beginnings of western medicine and indicated that the wine culture couldn’t have survived if it wasn’t for the Christian Church

In A History of the World in Six Glasses, Standage discusses how beer and wine are made in terms of the ingredients and how each beverage is related to each social class. The ingredients are what differentiate one beverage from another beverage. An Ingredient is the main component that makes the beverage unique and gives it an identity. An ingredient is what makes people to choose a beverage from wide range of options. An ingredient gives the color, the texture and the taste to a beverage which makes it unique from other beverages. When it comes to the social classes, beer and wine played a huge role to set up the structure of the social classes. Both beer and wine made each stage of social class devote to a certain beverage that would represent their social class. This essay, I will describe how Tom Standage’s text, A History of the World in Six Glasses, discusses the relationship and the differences between ingredients of the beer and wine and the social classes with regard to beer and wine. This synthesis will explain how the beer and wine were viewed in the in terms of ingredients and how each social class was devoted to a certain beverage.

The divergence between the rich class and the lower class was reflected by the wine contents in their goblets. Case in point, the more wealth a Roman was, the greater their ability to recognize and name the finest wines were. In addition, both civilizations used wine as a mark of social sophistication. For the Greeks, wine drinking correlated closely to refinement and civilization. The type of wine chosen

Then eventually people cared for the age of the wine , it had seemed the older the wine, the better (Standage 55). This ideas and morals placed by the Greeks from wine spread wherever the wine went to. The book says “with its carefully calibrated social divisions, it’s reputation for unparalleled cultural sophistication, and its encouragement of both hedonism and philosophical inquiry, wine embodied Greek culture” (Standage 66,67). Wine from Greece spread all around, as did its influence on Greek culture. Wine became so distinguished that is became a symbol of the one who drank it, “a mark of wealth and social status of the drinker” (Standage 75). In Rome, different herbs and spices were added to wines, especially to the cheaper wines to hide the bad taste or imperfections. Mulsum, a drink drank by the higher class. While the Roman soldiers drank posca, it turned into a vinegar like substance, they drank when wine was unavailable. Lora, considered the worst wine of all, was drank by the slaves, it was a thin, bitter drink. “From the legendary Falernian down to the lowly lora, there was a wine for every rung on the social ladder.” (Standage

Absinthe is a highly alcoholic distilled spirit, reputed to have psychotropic qualities. In the history of liquors it holds a special place for being one of the most controversial drinks of French history. Yet it wasn’t always that way, for a period in the late 1800’s absinthe was one of the most popular liquors in the western world. Some companies at the height of its popularity produced over 30,000 liters of it a day. American Chemist T. A. Breaux has spent years researching the drink; through his research he has found that the drink originated as a medicine developed as a digestive aide in the late 1700’s (pg.2-3). The drink then rose in popularity after the 1840’s when the French government would dispense rations of the drink to its soldiers fighting in foreign campaigns as a means of purifying unclean water. These soldiers developed a taste for the drink claiming it to be the drink of a true man, due to its strong bitter taste (pg. 4-5). By the late 1870’s it became the most coveted drink, especially among artist and intellectuals who would feature the iconic drink in their works.

The largest exporter of California wines and an international winery as well as distributor headquartered in Modesto, California. It was founded in 1933 by Ernest Gallo and Julio Gallo, with a 25% share of the American wine market. Barefoot Wine is a brand of wine produced by Barefoot Cellars which is based in Modesto, California. E & J Gallo Winery bought it in 2005. Barefoot Wine was introduced in 1986 by Michael Houlihan & Bonnie

This thesis explores old ideas regarding the valuable properties of intoxicating drinks, as presented in Greco-Roman sources from the first to third centuries AD. In doing so, it responds to Mary Douglas' Constructive Drinking (1987), which emphasized that contrary to anthropological findings, many societies' authorities tend to focus upon, and overemphasize, the negative aspects of alcohol consumption. This pattern is particularly prevalent in modern Western scholarship. The same trend can detect within both Greco-Roman society and classical learning. Although many Greeks and Romans are undoubtedly consumed quantities of wine, on a regular basis, in a manner which was widely considered 'moderate,' the literary evidence from this period tends

By fermenting the juice of pressed grapes, came the production of wine! According to Greek culture, wine was mainly used for religious purposes. Due to it’s scarce nature and high price, wine was suitable for the consumption of the gods. The wine dynasty followed the succession of beer. Although the two were used in religious ceremonies beer was also used for taxes and a form of payment while wine wasn’t. Wine was also developed into a symbol of social hierarchy. The cost of transporting wine through the mountains made wine ten times more expensive than beer, thus leading to only the elite could afford to drink. In Greek culture wine was mixed with water. They did this to ensure you were balanced between the scale of sobriety and drunkenness.