Almost every wine-drinking visitor to Armenia will at some point taste a bottle or two of the deep-ruby Areni wine; and if that visitor is fortunate enough to get a really good one, its light fragrance, backed up by a firm texture, lingering ripe plum and dark cherry flavors, and, in the best of them, a hint of black pepper in the finish, will not soon be forgotten. Even an ordinary Areni is typically delicious on a hot day, poured straight from a jug kept in the refrigerator and preferably enjoyed while relaxing in the shade of one of the overflowing grape arbors with which Armenia is so generously endowed. But the people of Areni village know their wine, and they know their grape, and they probably correctly doubt that it can be grown to the same advantage anywhere else. After all, they will tell you, they have been growing these vines for centuries—for so long, indeed, that the memory of winemaking in these parts fades back into the mists of time.

The earliest cuneiform inscriptions referring to wine production in Greater Armenia date to the days of Urartu, a proto-Armenian kingdom centered in eastern Anatolia that flourished in the seventh and eighth centuries b.c.e. Urartu was a major exporter of wine to neighboring Assyria, and most Urartian cities had important wine-storage facilities, some holding many thousands of liters, which testify to the beverage’s economic importance. The first literary records of wine in the region come from the beginning of the fourth century b.c.e., when the soldier Xenophon, in his epic work Anabasis, described the retreat of a Greek mercenary army from Babylonia. Xenophon records that, as they fought their way across southern Armenia on their way to the Black Sea, the Hellenic forces “took up their quarters . . . in numerous beautiful buildings, with an ample store of provisions, for there was wine so plentiful that they had it in cemented cisterns.” As ancient as Xenophon’s account and the wine jars of Urartu may be, though, at Areni the story of wine began immensely earlier yet. For in a cave just outside the village, archaeologists have found traces of winemaking that probably date from a full six thousand years ago.

Past the bucolic Areni settlement, the scenery changes dramatically. As you leave the fertile valley behind you’ll enter a narrow chasm carved by the river Arpa through a massive outcropping of limestone. And low on the sheer cliff to your right, just before the river is joined by a tributary running

down an equally precipitous gorge, there opens the entrance to the cave that is now famous to archaeologists as Areni-1. First mapped in the 1960s by Soviet Cold War planners improbably on the lookout for places to shelter the sparse local population from nuclear attack, Areni-1 has since proven a bonanza for prehistorians, its extraordinary archaeological richness stemming from the many advantages it has offered people throughout history. Not only is the cave roomy and strategically located above the valley, but its arching portal made it a comfortable place for early humans seeking shelter from the elements. What’s more, in later times the cave’s interior provided ideal conditions for the preservation both of the dead and of the artifacts they used in life.

You can park your car in the shade of a sprawling grape arbor beside the bickering Arpa and scramble up a steep talus slope toward the cave entrance: a high, wide gash across the side of the cliff. As the narrow path flattens out onto the platform of sediment at the cave’s mouth, you’ll glimpse a partially excavated area in which archaeologists have already found hints of almost unimaginably long-term use of the cave by humans. At the bottom of the pile of occupation deposits, test pits have produced crude stone tools indicating that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were camping at Areni some hundreds of thousands of years ago, long before our species Homo sapiens came into existence. Doubtless these early humans were exploiting the rich bounty of a local environment that would have included fish teeming in the river as well as the herds of migrating mammals that converged down the neighboring valleys. It is not hard to imagine those early human relatives perched outside the cave, scanning the river valley for approaching prey.

For now, though, the imagination must serve. Sadly for those interested in Ice Age lifeways, it will be a good while before we are able to say much more about the earliest inhabitants of Areni-1— though for the best of reasons. Because this place was always attractive to humans, the oldest layers at Areni are covered over by the remains of more recent occupations that will have to be painstakingly documented and removed before the Ice Age layers are reached.

Still, the archaeologists are in no hurry, for in the more recent layers they have been finding an unparalleled record of life in the crucial interval, some six thousand years ago, between the New Stone Age and the Bronze Age. This was a time when complex settled lifeways were just becoming established in the Near East, and when Areni-1’s Chalcolithic (Copper Age) inhabitants were, among other things, burying their dead in the cave’s gloomy interior.

As you leave the light and airy platform at the front of the cave and proceed deeper into the rock, the natural illumination is gradually replaced by a string of feeble lightbulbs that reveal a tall, winding passageway bounded by a deep pit on the left. A sharp right turn, through what is in effect a natural airlock, brings you to a wider section of the cave, in which shallow excavations into the floor have revealed evidence of several extensive Chalcolithic occupations.

What makes the findings at Areni-1 special is that the cool, dry conditions beyond the airlock proved ideal for the preservation of light organic materials of the kind that usually rot away rapidly and disappear. Rarities of preservation include pieces of rope, textiles, and wooden implements—

even a complete shoe, made from a single piece of leather. This remarkable artifact caused quite a stir when it was first reported, not only because of its excellent preservation but also because of its age: in the entire archaeological record of the Old World, only the damaged shoes worn by Ötzi the Ice Man, the natural mummy of a Chalcolithic hunter discovered in 1991 after an Alpine glacier melted, come anywhere close to its antiquity. And Ötzi’s grass-stuffed shoes are several hundred years younger than the Areni moccasin.

Equally remarkable at Areni-1, though, is the extent of the evidence about their everyday existence that the ancient people left behind. Within the shelter they built dwellings with durable walls and smooth, plastered floors; they cooked food over hearths; they made tools of obsidian and chert; they ground grains on flat stones—and they made wine. Indeed, the Chalcolithic people of Areni-1 have bequeathed to us the remains of the world’s earliest winery: the first tangible physical evidence we have, from anywhere, of a society’s devotion to the fermented juice of the grape.

In 2007, archaeologists were carefully removing the superficial occupation debris that had accumulated in the cave when they found their way down to a layer that revealed a shallow, flat-bottomed basin with raised edges, scraped into the hard-packed clay of the ancient cave floor. The bottom of this basin sloped slightly, toward the mouth of a large (60 liter) pottery jar that was sunk into the cave floor beside it. The scientists at once recognized the flat platform as a surface on which ancient grapes had been trodden (presumably by unshod feet). The juice had drained naturally into the jar, which had clearly served as a fermentation vat. The cool, dry conditions of the cave would have provided a perfect environment for the fermentation process, as well as for the wine’s later storage in the many other pottery jars lying in the immediate vicinity. The purpose of this unusual archaeological feature was apparent from the start, not only because of its resemblance to wineries known from later times but because the treading area was littered with grape seeds and stems from a strain of today’s favored winemaking vine species, Vitis vinifera.

This staggeringly old winery was an exciting find, especially given the sophisticated arrangement of the pressing floor and the large size of the fermentation vat. Usually scientists who try to find traces of the very early production and consumption of wine have to make do with more indirect evidence, most notably the chemical residues that form on the insides of containers used to store the wine. The study of such residues has an intriguing history in archaeology (colleagues recently found traces of marijuana

inside Elizabethan clay pipe stems dug up in William Shakespeare’s garden in Stratford-upon-

Avon), but the evidence is sometimes not easy to interpret. A handful of potsherds found on the grape-pressing floor at Areni-1, for example, radiocarbon-dated to between 6,100 and 6,000 years ago, proved to carry residues of malvidin, a major pigment in grape skins that is responsible for the color of red wine. A wonderful discovery, but a bit equivocal nonetheless: malvidin is also present in fruits other than grapes, such as pomegranates, which still grow around Areni today.

Because the source of the malvidin might not have been grapes, Patrick McGovern, the leading expert on analyses of this kind, observed that he would have been more comfortable if traces of tartaric acid had also been found on the pottery fragments. For unlike malvidin, in the Near Eastern environment tartaric acid is a compound pretty much confined to grapes. Still, given all the supporting evidence that the structure at Areni-1 was a winery, it seems reasonable to conclude that the malvidin came from wine. And though the discovery itself was serendipitous, finding a winery this old was not hugely surprising since several years before the Areni discovery was made, McGovern himself had reported tartaric acid residues from the remains of a pottery jar found at an even earlier site, Hajji Firuz Tepe in the Zagros Mountains of Iran.

The jar in question was manufactured at some time between about 7,400 and 7,000 years ago, and additionally bore traces of resin from the terebinth tree. It is plausible to conjecture that this resin was added to preserve the wine in the container, and it would probably have made the resulting drink taste rather like Greek retsina. The practice of preserving wine with resin is documented well back into classical times, and most authorities reckon the tradition started a lot earlier than that. And while it remains possible that the resins might have been used simply to seal the unglazed pottery, the traces of resin at Hajji Firuz Tepe suggest that the wine stored in the jar was deliberately made, rather than produced by the accidental fermentation of grape juice.

Perhaps a little historical perspective will be useful at this point. At about seven thousand years old, the mud-brick settlement at Hajji Firuz

Tepe dates from late in the Neolithic (New Stone Age) period. The Neolithic was the time, following the final retreat of the northern glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age, when the Near East was the site of the first human experiments in settled life based on the domestication of plants and animals. By the beginning of the Neolithic human beings who looked anatomically just like us had already been on earth for well over 150,000 years, and the modern human creative spirit had been burgeoning for at least half that time. In Africa, early stirrings of the modern mind have been detected back to around one hundred thousand years ago, and the earliest of the fabulous cave paintings of France are well over thirty thousand years old. But even the geniuses who decorated caves such as Lascaux and Chauvet were still practitioners of an ancient hunting and gathering lifeway that had its roots in a still more distant past and ensured that human beings remained relatively thin on the landscape. As a result, in economic and social terms the Neolithic represented by far the most fateful innovation in all of human prehistory. Settled life in villages—and soon in towns and cities—represented a complete break with the past: the greatest revolution ever in the relationship between human beings and the world around them.

Until the end of the Ice Ages, human beings had lived off nature’s bounty and by its rhythms. But as the northern ice caps started to retreat in earnest around eleven thousand years ago, people in several centers around the world began to experiment with permanent settlement based on agriculture. The Syrian site of Abu Hureya is particularly instructive: it records a transition that ran from hunting and gathering between 11,500 and 11,000 years ago, through hunting and gathering supplemented by cereal cultivation about 10,400 years ago, to both plant and animal domestication— still augmented by hunting and gathering—by around 9,000 years ago. A fully settled way of life was the apparently inevitable outcome of such developments, and once this had been achieved the tempos of both social and technological change began to accelerate. Towns protected by walls began to appear in the Near East by about 8,500 years ago, and it then took a mere 3,000 years for complex stratified urban societies to become well established in the region.

One reason for this uncertainty is that among the first plants to be domesticated in the Old World were the cereals: wheat and barley in western Asia and rice in China. The deliberate production of fermented beverages clearly followed closely on cereal domestication; in China there is trace evidence in the eastern province of Henan for the production of “beer” (fermented from rice, honey, and fruit including grapes) by about nine thousand years ago. Probably the early Neolithic of the Near East was a time of similar experimentation based on local cereals—certainly after pottery had become available. Indeed, occasional argument still erupts among scientists over whether the first cereal product in the region was beer or bread.

Yet it may be significant that gathering grapes (or any other fruit) and fermenting their juice is a less complex process than doing the same thing with cereals, in which laborious intervention is needed to convert the starches into sugars before fermentation can proceed. Quite simply, it’s easier to make wine than beer—after all, nature does it unaided. And grape seeds found at Abu Hureya show that very early on, even before pottery containers were available to potential winemakers, people in the Near East were taking an interest in the fruit of the vine. At the same time, though, it may be significant that whereas beer was being made in China very early indeed, the first evidence for Chinese viticulture goes back only about 2,300 years. Significantly, evidence for this comes from far-flung Xinjiang, where influences from western Asia would have penetrated first along the precursor to the Silk Road trading network. Possibly the rice-centered culture of Han China, with its range of cereal-based alcohols, was already set in its habits and resisted competition from the grape.

Whatever may have been going on in eastern Asia, investigations into the origins of grape growing and winemaking have repeatedly converged on the western fringes of the continent. Recent DNA studies produced results compatible with the notion that vines were first domesticated in the southern Caucasus, and although this origin is not conclusively proven, wine and its associated rituals seem even more deeply ingrained in western Caucasian society than in other famously oenophilic countries such as France. Certainly, no visitor to Georgia and the vine-friendly parts of Armenia can fail to be impressed by the importance of wine in hospitality rituals, and by how thoroughly vine-festooned the houses are in every country village.

There is plenty of archaeological evidence that viticulture had spread widely to Mesopotamia, the Jordan valley, and Egypt by about five thousand years ago. Even if the geographical dispersal of grape growing out of the Caucasus was relatively rapid, it would have taken some time for it to cover such a wide swath of territory, making it easy to imagine that the initial domestication occurred in the Caucasus early in the Neolithic, perhaps a couple of thousand years before the winery was constructed at Areni-1, or conceivably earlier yet. Whether vines were initially domesticated— at a time when plant domestication was all the rage—in order to provide a supply of fleshy table grapes rather than juice for fermentation is something that can be endlessly debated. But what is clear is that one use of the vine would inevitably have followed closely upon the other.

One intriguing aspect of the winery at Areni-1 is its location within a “cemetery” of wine jars that had also served as urns. These burial jars contained the remains of several individuals of various ages, and although the remains of the men had been cremated, those belonging to women and juveniles had been dismembered. Drinking cups made of animal horn were also found in and around the interments. Boris Gasparyan, the lead excavator at Areni-1, believes that there was a close relationship between the winemaking and the activities associated with the cremations, dismemberments, and burials. If so, the extraordinary site of Areni-1 inaugu rated a tradition of using fermented beverages in funerary and other rites that is abundantly documented in later phases of antiquity.

Such codification of alcohol use speaks directly to the inherent human tendency to give symbolic meaning to experience and ritualize behaviors of all kinds—perhaps especially those involving altered physiological states. From the earliest times, wine certainly had the supremely practical utility of easing social tensions in addition to the more symbolic but equally functional purposes of cementing reciprocal relationships and lubricating social rituals. And almost equally certainly, wine sometimes also had its place in shamanistic and other rites. It’s easy to imagine that early hominids also occasionally got drunk on naturally fermenting fruit, and it is even possible that early modern hunters and gatherers devised ways of fermenting honey or fruit juices before—perhaps long before— pottery containers were invented. But adapting such practices to a ritualistic context is unique to modern humans, as we still see today in the consumption of sacramental wine or even in such unfortunate ritualistic expressions as the Saturday-night binge drinking of soccer hooligans.

In the Republic of Georgia, where some country winemakers still ferment their grape juice in qvevri, large buried clay pots that are direct descendants of their smaller counterparts at Areni, wine is as deeply embedded in the human spirit as might be expected of one of the regions where the beverage may have originated. Tradition there still dictates that the host or guests at a feast choose a toastmaster (the tamada) to preside over the wine drinking. Well-developed social skills and cleverness with words are the keys to this role. The feast unfolds as the proposal and answering of a succession of elaborate and often witty toasts, honoring everything from the nation’s glory to present and absent friends and relatives. After each toast, all present drain their glasses, and although theoretically no one drinks between toasts, the revelers can become pleasantly tipsy over the numerous courses of the meal. But just spare a thought for the poor tamada, who will have emptied many a glass before the feast is finished, but is expected to show no symptoms of inebriation. Modern Georgian rituals happily demonstrate that tradition and enjoyment need not conflict in the consumption of wine. But they remind us also that in the ancient world, as in ours, wine drinking was often bound up with rules, rituals, and cosmic beliefs, perhaps most especially in places where it was an expensive import.

Wine was prized from ancient times as a beverage of status and ostentation. At about 3150 b.c.e. Scorpion I, a predynastic king of Upper Egypt, was laid to rest in a many-chambered tomb, three entire rooms of which were filled from floor to ceiling with jars that now contain grape seeds, the chemical residues of wine, and the terebinth resin sealant with which we are already familiar from Hajji Firuz Tepe. Figs had apparently been added to some jars to improve the wine’s flavor, or perhaps to provide yeast or sugars to aid in fermentation. All together there were about seven hundred jars in the three rooms, together containing close to four thousand liters of wine—more than enough to give Scorpion a splendid start in the afterlife. The wine itself turned out to have been shipped from the southern Levant, on the western coast of the Mediterranean many hundreds of kilometers away, although the jars may have been locally resealed as part of Scorpion’s funeral rites.

The evidently oenophilic Scorpion was far from the only Egyptian with a pronounced taste for wine. At Saqqara, site of the great Step Pyramid of Djoser, an inscription dated to about 2550 b.c.e. records that Metjen, an official of the pharaonic court, made a “great quantity of wine” in a walled vineyard, probably located in the Nile Delta, where temperatures were moderated by the proximity of the Mediterranean. And as remote in time as they are from us, the Egyptians developed many conventions that we think of as modern. Once wine production in the delta had become established, they rapidly devised what amounted to a classification system, analogous to the rankings and appellations developed in France thousands of years later. Individual wine containers were labeled with the name of the region, the year of production, and even the name of the winemaker. The most fortunate producers were identified as makers of wine for the pharaoh. Wines might be unclassified or ranked as “genuine,” “good,” or “very good.”

It became rapidly de rigueur for wealthy Egyptians not only to be washed with wine before being mummified but also to be buried with a selection of the finest wines. Soon this custom became rigorously codified, and by around 2200 b.c.e. it had become unthinkable among Egypt’s elite not to be buried with wines from the five most prestigious regions of the Nile Delta. Just as today, when wine has become a fashion accessory and an investment vehicle, in ancient times it seems that some of the best wine never got drunk! Still, the Egyptians were as pragmatic in this regard as in others; if the wines themselves were not available, or were unaffordable, it eventually became enough to illustrate, or even merely to list, them on the tomb walls.

One specific use for wine in ancient Egypt was in curing diseases. The alcohol in wine makes it an excellent vehicle for dissolving ingredients such as resins and the compounds present in medicinal herbs. Wine is hence an ideal medium for delivering medications to the sick, and written records show that as long ago as 1850 b.c.e. herbal wine infusions were prescribed in Egypt for afflictions as diverse as stomach problems, respiratory conditions, constipation, and herpes. What is more, molecular archaeology reveals that the qualities of wine as a healing medium were almost certainly recognized by the Egyptians much earlier than this. Chemical analysis has demonstrated that one of the jars placed in Scorpion’s tomb almost 5,200 years ago contained a cocktail of herbs that included balm, coriander, senna, mint, and sage. It is a good bet that the purpose of this complex mixture was medicinal—which makes us wonder about the kind of afterlife Scorpion expected to have!

Still, elaborate as his funerary ceremonies doubtless were, Scorpion does not hold the record for early ostentation. In 870 b.c.e., Assurnasirpal II of Assyria held what was probably the most epic bash ever at his new capital of Nimrud, in the northern Tigris valley. In ten days of feasting, about seventy thousand guests consumed ten thousand skins of wine, in addition to two thousand cows and calves, twenty-five thousand sheep and lambs, several thousand birds, gazelles, fish, and eggs, and more. Other beverages included ten thousand jars of beer, each containing several liters, roughly as much as a wineskin. Significantly, when the king is depicted feasting in the commemorative bas-reliefs at Nimrud, he is not shown drinking the beer that was almost emblematic of Assyrian society (and was, indeed, the medium in which Mesopotamian workers had typically been paid since at least 3400 b.c.e.). Instead, Assurnasirpal is shown brandishing a wine bowl.

The Greeks seem to have benefited early on both from Egyptian winemaking proficiency and from the transportation advances of the Levantine Canaanites, whose cedar of Lebanon ships pioneered the long-distance transport of wine around the Mediterranean. They built on this maritime expertise to become the first to produce wine on a truly commercial scale and to turn the beverage into a commodity available to virtually all. From one single Greek merchantman, wrecked off the Mediterranean coast of France in the fifth century b.c.e., underwater archaeologists in the twentieth century recovered a full ten thousand amphorae that had contained the equivalent of more than three hundred thousand modern bottles of wine. From a variety of literary sources, we know that the Greeks learned how to concentrate the sweetness of grapes by drying them on mats before crushing them, and to harvest them early to preserve their acidity. In addition, they developed their own wine-drinking decorum: in contrast to the barbaroi, who drank their wine straight, the Greeks watered their wine, often in the formal setting of the symposion. But water was not the only adulterant used in wine: laws governing the labeling of wines are evidence of rampant fakery, as a preference for older wines developed and different regions strove to distinguish themselves by packaging their product in amphorae of distinctive shapes. The modern world was emerging: blame it all on wine.

The Romans owed a huge cultural debt to the ancient Greeks, one that included their devotion to wine. By the time Rome had achieved hegemony around the Mediterranean after the Punic Wars in the third and second centuries b.c.e., the Romans found themselves at the center of the extensive wine trade that had originated in Canaan and Phoenicia and had subsequently been developed by the Greeks and Carthaginians. Indeed, the oldest Latin text that has come down to us, a detailed manual of farming practices written in about 160 b.c.e. by Cato the Elder, apparently leaned heavily on the work of the third-century b.c.e. Carthaginian Mago. This early agriculturist had also provided advice on every phase of winemaking from propagating, planting, fertilizing, irrigating, and pruning the vines, to grape pressing and fermentation. Mago’s original Punic text has vanished; but Cato’s instructions illustrate how sophisticated winemaking had become by his day, and how closely wine itself was integrated into the rapidly growing economies of Mediterranean countries.

Eventually, wine estates expanded so greatly that cereal production practically ceased on the Italian peninsula, making Rome dependent on its North African colonies for its grain supplies even as it exported increasing quantities of wine to the periphery of its empire, squeezing beer production in the process. As colonial peoples began to acquire a taste for wine, they began producing it locally. Although vine growing was prohibited beyond the Alps in 154 b.c.e. (to encourage exports), local viticulture (until the third century c.e. restricted to Roman citizens) gradually became established in what are now the classical northern European viticultural areas, especially France and Germany. Indeed, by the end of the first century b.c.e. French wines had gained a considerable reputation among Roman oenophiles. Thanks to the Carthaginians, Spain had by then long possessed a thriving vine-growing industry; Iberia helped make up the shortfall when Italian production mysteriously dipped in the second century c.e.

Especially after the Romans had discovered that burning sulfur candles inside empty wine jars would keep them free of vinegary smells, and so began adding sulfur dioxide as a preservative, wine became a durable product that could be taxed according to its quality. Much of the payment of such taxes was in kind, and this practice gave the Roman authorities reserves of wine to distribute, both to cement existing alliances and to buy off “barbarians” who might have threatened the imperial fringes. Over the centuries, for example, Rome sent large quantities of wine to Gaul, where humbler wines had been produced on a small scale ever since the Etruscans introduced wine to the region around 500 b.c.e. Imported Roman wine was shipped to ports on the Rhône estuary, where the local Celtic traders developed the habit of transferring it from amphorae into oak barrels before sending it on upriver to be traded for honey and timber. Thus was born one of the most hallowed regional winemaking traditions, as the new wine-storage technology underwrote the inexorable advancement of viticulture up the Rhône valley and into the French interior, even in the face of resistance from winemakers closer to Rome.

The best wines of the empire inevitably found their way to Rome, where they were prized as symbols of prestige and wealth. Everyone seems to have agreed on which these were, and at the pinnacle of repute were wines that came from the slopes of Mount Falernus, to the north of Naples. Made from the Aminean grape, these golden or amber-colored wines were probably high in alcoholic content, since Pliny the Elder recorded that they might “take light” when a flame was applied to them. The most fabled Falernian vintage was harvested in 121 b.c.e. Not only was it widely praised at the time, it was served to Julius Caesar a hundred years later, presumably to his entire satisfaction because someone was apparently brave enough to offer it again to Caligula in 39 c.e., when it was 160 years old.

In the Greek and Roman traditions the consumption of liberal quantities of wine had been associated with the cults of Dionysus and Bacchus, gods of a pretty generalized hedonism. Still, while in both cases the value of wine lay in its practical role in the shedding of inhibitions, rather than with hierarchy and spiritual symbolism as in Egyptian tradition, it had great symbolic significance in the Hellenic and Roman worlds as a badge of civilization. But although the importance of wine to Rome itself was overwhelmingly social and economic, one side effect of Roman colonial activities was to diffuse the drinking of wine into peripheral regions where its consumption could be adapted to new contexts. And, as it happened, one of the unintended consequences of the road and sea transport systems established by the Romans to unite their empire was that not only was the transport of wine and other goods facilitated. So also was the spread of an obscure religion that had its origins in the Levant, an ancient winemaking region, at the beginning of the first century c.e.

The founder of that religion, Jesus Christ, grew up in a tradition that was steeped in wine, which his Jewish community considered a God-given blessing when consumed in moderation. Excessive inebriation was strongly disapproved of, and was condemned by biblical tradition to such an extent that some sects banned the consumption of wine. But the beverage was for the most part favorably viewed by Christ’s community; after all, Noah’s first act when he disembarked from the ark was to plant a vineyard. In Christ’s time the average privileged citizen of his Judean homeland drank about a liter of wine a day; and, as recounted in John’s Gospel, Jesus’s first miracle involved saving an unfortunate situation at a wedding by turning six pots of water into reportedly excellent wine. Throughout the accounts of Christ’s career, wine and vines crop up as recurrent themes: he likened himself to the vine and his apostles to its branches, and most significantly, during the Last Supper Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record that Christ gave his disciples wine, declaring, “This is my blood of the new testament.” The offering of wine at a Passover Seder was hardly unusual: the ceremonial drinking of wine was entrenched in Jewish tradition. But in light of Christ’s remark wine took on a special significance for his followers, and thenceforward Christians imputed to it a specific symbolic role as the embodiment of the blood of Christ.

From its earliest days, the church celebrated the Eucharist with wine, and those in the mainstream disapproved of the Gnostics, who celebrated it with water. The practice meshed nicely with established habits that proved durable even as economic and political changes roiled the Levantine region. When, in the early fourth century, Constantine adopted Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, his motivations were largely political (you will look in vain for any mention of Christ’s teachings in the fourth-century Nicene Creed); but although its political aspect ultimately led to the church’s bureaucratization, sacramental practices continued unaffected—as indeed they did following the division of the Roman Empire into eastern and western empires in 395. It is thus possible to discern a distinct continuity between Roman and Christian beliefs and imagery. Both Christ and Bacchus were thought to have been born of a god via a mortal woman, and both were associated with life after death. Bacchus had even previously used Christ’s trick of turning wine into water, and scholars have found various other Bacchic symbols embedded in early Christian mythology. In symbolic as well as gustatory ways, wine formed a bridge between the ancient and the nascent modern world.

The five centuries after the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 and by the Vandals in 455 are often known as the Dark Ages. But although the city of Rome almost disappeared, and chaos ruled in some parts of its lost empire, many formerly colonial economies continued to flourish, or at least to muddle along. Most important, the vine-growing tradition persisted almost everywhere it had been established. Indeed, a taste for wine turned out to be one of the most durable aspects of Roman influence, waning only where climatic conditions were unsuitable for growing grapes.

Oenophilia was also a hallmark of many pagan tribes, but the symbolic role of wine as the blood of Christ accounted most strongly for its spread in Europe, a rapidly Christianizing region. There, in the face of a general decline in literacy, monasteries and other religious settlements often came to assume the role of guardians of historical, cultural, and agricultural knowledge. Initially most ecclesiastical establishments lacked the resources for more than limited wine production, restricting themselves to what was necessary for sacramental requirements and to maintain the quality of monastic life. But over time, some became famous for their wines and acquired increasing expanses of vineyard that were leased to local viticulturists, thereby helping revive the wine trade.

This persistence of the vinous tradition held true initially for all parts of the former Roman Empire. As in Europe, vines continued to be cultivated in such places as Mediterranean North Africa, the Levant, Persia, and even the Central Asian oases that dotted the fabled Silk Road, a web of trading routes extending toward China. But in the seventh century, with the rise of Islam, this long-established pattern was widely disrupted. From their Arabian place of origin, Islamic armies had by the middle of the eighth century conquered most of the Middle East and Mediterranean North Africa, as well as the Iberian Peninsula in Europe. And where Islam went, viticulture, or at least the making of wine, stopped.

The story goes that the young Prophet Muhammad had one day happened on a wedding at which wine was being consumed, and all the guests were happy and convivial. He left the feast murmuring blessings upon wine. But when he returned the next day, he found the place a wreck, the revelers bloody and battered from all-night drunken brawling, and revised his blessing into a curse. Thenceforward he forbade his followers to drink wine. In his view of paradise rivers flowed with this delectable liquid, but humans on earth could not be trusted to drink it without abuse.

There has been a lot of scriptural exegesis aimed at understanding precisely what Muhammad prohibited, and interpretations vary. One way in which wine production was stopped was the banning of the clay receptacles in which it was made. But skins were still permitted, and it is believed that Muhammad’s own wives used wineskins to make him a potion prepared by soaking dates or raisins in water and allowing them to ferment slightly. The Arabic name for this concoction is nabidh, usually rendered in English as “date wine.” But the accuracy of the translation is subjective and contentious, and in the Islamic world interpretation has increasingly tended toward a blanket ban on alcohol. From time to time, and place to place, a more relaxed take on the Qur’anic injunction has been adopted, and at the end of the eleventh century the Persian poet Omar Khayyam was still able to muse: “I often wonder what the vintner buys / Half as precious as the thing he sells.” But in general, in most places where Islam imposed itself—and stayed—wine production and consumption ceased.

Still, it would be inaccurate to characterize the Islamic and Christian worlds as abstemious and bibulous, respectively . Even today, some Islamic countries take a softer stance on the matter of wine and other alcoholic beverages, while in the Christian world attitudes vary hugely, and the coexistence of the pleasures and pitfalls of wine have led to severe cognitive dissonance at both the individual and social levels. Perhaps the best example of this is provided by Prohibition in the United States of America.

In the early days of the nation, Thomas Jefferson and some of his patrician colleagues were noted wine connoisseurs, reveling particularly in the wines of France. On a more populist level Benjamin Franklin wrote that “wine [is] a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.” But by the early nineteenth century, particularly owing to rapid urbanization, alcohol consumption and abuse had skyrocketed in the United States, leading to the development by around 1840 of a vociferous temperance movement. After the abolition of slavery many churches and secular associations also began to turn their abolitionist energies toward demon drink, first trying to persuade imbibers on an individual level to moderate their habits, and ultimately badgering state legislators to prohibit alcohol altogether.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the women’s temperance movement in particular (women and their children tended to be the ultimate victims of men’s excessive alcohol consumption) had achieved notable successes at local levels, not least as a result of the intensive media coverage of exploits like Carrie Nation’s campaign of smashing up bars with an ax. On such victories was built the Anti-Saloon League, perhaps the best organized of all early lobbying organizations, which took aim directly, and effectively, at legislators’ voting records. With its roots in conservative Protestantism and the explicit goal of countrywide prohibition of alcohol, the League rapidly managed to build a powerful coalition out of such unlikely bedfellows as the suffragists, the Ku Klux Klan, the Industrial Workers of the World, and John D. Rockefeller. A number of unlikely events then concatenated to move the League’s agenda forward as the early years of the twentieth century progressed. An important element in its success was the domination of brewing in the United States by German immigrants, against whom anger could easily be whipped up as America entered World War I; indeed, drinking beer became downright unpatriotic. Also significant was the introduction, just before the war, of a federal income tax, which reduced the government’s dependence on alcohol taxes. Importantly also, the argument for prohibition was couched mainly in moral terms, something that has always appealed to Americans. As a result, with their attention on other pressing issues, politicians were vulnerable to pressure by special interests to get prohibition legislation passed. By the end of 1917 the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, banning the manufacture and sale of alcohol, had breezed through both houses of Congress, and, after rapid ratification by the states, it went into effect in early 1920.

Apparently, few of those who had supported the change had given much thought to its practical effects. Perhaps the only ironclad rule of human experience is the law of unintended consequences, and in the case of Prohibition this unwritten rule went into operation with a vengeance. Outlawing alcohol proved to have little if any effect on the demand for alcoholic drinks; the main result of prohibiting them was to increase prices and, as with today’s war on drugs, to turn gangsters into millionaires. Other unanticipated economic effects included a general depression of economic activity and the impoverishment of local governments owing to the loss of liquor taxes. Ironically for a measure that was based to a great extent on moral outrage, the forbidding of alcohol to a population that still wanted to consume it had the paradoxical effect of causing widespread immorality in the form of flouting of the law. Almost everyone became a lawbreaker, and corruption was rife as many enforcement agents joined with the gangsters to profit from the booze business. Such anarchy could not last: the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed at the end of 1933, largely on the compelling grounds that it had led to a severe loss of respect for the rule of law.

Prohibition and its enabling laws present us with a prime example of well-meaning anti-alcohol legislation gone astray, but not with a unique one. Within the twentieth century alone, the sale of alcoholic beverages was banned for various periods in majority Christian countries as diverse as Russia, the Faroe Islands, parts of Scandinavia, and Hungary—always for the same stated reasons. For, while it is an unquestionable augmenter of the pleasures of life, this gift of the gods is also liable to hideous abuse, and has been responsible for the infliction of enormous misery. Viewed in this context, alcohol appears as a mirror for humanity itself. It is emblematic simultaneously of civilization and savagery, and it reveals the worst as well as the best in human nature. As a result, as long as alcohol produces its contradictory effects (which is to say, as long as our difficult and complex species remains in existence), human beings will continue to have a conflicted, contradictory, and complicated relationship with wine and other alcoholic drinks.