Related Links: On the origins of Dionysos On Diwonysos Phanagoria The survival of the Greek language in Italy About Salentino		Ancient Greece The arrival of winemaking in ancient Greece is undocumented. Many believe it was brought to Crete by Phoenician traders. It is also likely that it arrived from the north as well, via the land route from Asia Minor. The earliest evidence of winemaking in Greece is a stone foot press at Vathipetro, a Minoan villa on Crete, dated to 1600 BC. The sophistication of the site suggests that Minoan production of wine had been underway for some time. Decoded Linear B tablets from the Minoan site at Knossos in Crete revealed an advanced economy fueled by trade with Eastern cultures, including Egypt. Archaeological finds on the Greek mainland indicate a close connection with the Mycenaean culture. By the sudden end of the Minoan civilization shortly after 1500 BC, winemaking was probably common throughout mainland Greece and the Aegean. The demise of the Mycenean culture around 1100 BC is believed to have resulted in a brief period of cultural and economic depression on the mainland. The gradual recovery of technical arts and the emergence of ironworking, there and on Crete, characterize a period from around 1050 BC to around 900 BC (Protogeometric or Sub-Mycenean) in which peoples from mainland areas and the Aegean islands also began to colonize parts of Asia Minor and the northern Aegean coast. Trade routes were reestablished, and during the period from 900-700 BC Greece underwent major cultural, political and economic transformations. During this time, urbanization commenced and written language reemerged with the adoption of a Semitic alphabet. It was during this period also that the Homeric poems are thought to have been recorded. More significantly, it marked the beginning of the formal practice of deity worship. The first references to Dionysos appear in Homer, although they do not indicate the existence of cult-worship per se before this time. Some scholars believe that Greek cultism in general had origins in colonized regions of Asia Minor and were imported to Greece during this period of expansion. The first reference to Dionysos is now widely believed to be part of a Linear B inscription found during excavations at the Mycenaean site at Pylos in which appears a deity name approximating 'Diwonysos'. Whether this deity was associated with wine cannot be proven, but there is little doubt that wine, which already had become an integral element of Greek culture, had developed a religious status by the end of this period. This legacy outlived the polytheism of Greece and Rome, surviving today even in the staid rituals of Christianity. The period from 750-550 BC saw the establishment of Greek city states. The needs of a growing Greek population were met by further expansion throughout the Mediterranean coast and along the Black Sea. These colonies were able provide the Greeks with a wide variety of staple goods including meat grain, fish, wool and timber in exchange for olive oil, wine and manufactured commodities. Some of these colonized areas were ideal for the cultivation of the vine. Greek colonists from Phocaia in Asia Minor had themselves founded a colony called Massalia, later Marseilles, on the southern coast of what is now France. This event has become a subtext in Greek cookbooks for thirty years, in which claims are made that the Greeks introduced Bouillabaisse to France. This is unfortunate because these relatively meaningless assertions detract from the likely role the Greeks had in initiating an advanced level of viniculture in the south of France. By the time of the rise to power of Philip of Makedonia in 359 BC, Greek colonies existed not only in what is now France, but also on the Iberian peninsula, southern Italy, north Africa, Asia Minor and what is now Southern Russia and Georgia. Many of these areas still retain vestiges of Greek influence. Krasnodar Krai, on the Black sea, is still an important Russian wine region. This tradition began with the founding of the Greek settlement Phanagoria in the fifth century BC. The influence of Greek colonization is still felt in the wine industries of Georgia and the Crimea, to which, in ancient times, the Greeks brought all their resources to bear. According to Dr. Kalliope Angelakis-Roubelakis, who co-heads the Greek Vitis Database project at the University of Crete, among European cultivars, the Iberian, as a whole, display the strongest likelihood of being Greek offspring. Whether this is a result of ancient or later migrations has yet to be determined. Echoes of Greek culture from the period of the colonization of southern Italy continue to this day. The influence and continued existence of Greek dialects in Italy to modern times, Grecanico in Apulia and Calabria, and the Greek components of Salentino dialect, are reminders of the enduring nature of the ancient Greek linguistic influence. Even the name "Italy" is thought to originate in the Greek language. Undoubtedly Greek cultivars entered Italy at many different times, but perhaps one or more of Italy's Greek varieties (Aglianiko, Greca di Velletri, Grecale, Grecanico Dorato, Grecau Niuru, Grechetto Bianco, Grechetto Nero di Todi, Grechettoe Rosso, Greco Bianco, Greco Bianco di Novara, Greco Bianco di Tuffo, Greco Nero and Greco Nero di Cosenza) hark back to this period. Of ancient Greek wines much has been written, but little is known. The wine vernacular of the Greeks was intimately linked to a cosmology quite foreign to modern sensibilities, and yet, as Lambert-Gocs writes, The ancient notions concerning wine and its characteristics are more germane to us than we might imagine, for they were taken by Greek colonists to the Western Mediterranean and thereby entered all subsequent vernaculars... Were it not for that continuity of our orientational glances back at ancient Greece, the language of wine today might bear less resemblance to its actual content, which conceptually has remained virtually homogenous throughout Western civilization, and is not at all different in its fundamentals from what it was in the time of Athenaeus, Plutarch, Hippocrates or Theophrastus. [p.271] Without an empirical basis for making reliable comparisons between ancient Greek and modern Western wines, descriptions from ancient texts—because of a commonality in both terminology and sensibility—at least provide a clearer concept than we might have of, say, ancient Greek music. Modern Greek grape varieties such as Limnio, Athiri, Aïdani, Muscat, etc., believed to be surviving examples of the ancient oenological palette, may offer some clues to their flavor, yet the local wines of regions where traditions have survived—no matter their varietal complexion—would seem more logical in providing signposts to the distant past. It is known that, at various times, the wines of Hios, Thassos and Lesvos were highly regarded and that the wines of Samos were not. Sweet wines were as highly prized in ancient as in modern Greece, perhaps, in part for their staying power, although aesthetics would more likely have accounted for their popularity. Much has been made of the tendency of the Greeks to mix wine with water, including sea water, and to add other ingredients, such as honey and spices. While practices such as these would elicit horror today, they are indicative of a broadminded, creative and culturally integrated wine tradition as well as a highly-developed Epicurean consciousness that is probably beyond the realm of comprehension of the modern mind. Perhaps if one can accept and enjoy Sangria or vermouth over ice, the notion of even more complex and elemental dilutions of wine can be appreciated, especially in an era before distillation and the more recent development in Europe of cocktails and flavored aperitifs. In a way, the more things change, the more they remain the same. The Greek trade in wine was extensive. An early system of appellation designation was implemented to assure the origins of esteemed products. Wine traveled wherever ships sailed. This, the first golden age of wine, entirely an age of Greek wine, came to a close with the disintegration of Magna Graecia during the Peloponesian Wars. By the time Athens fell to the Romans in 86 BC, however, the groundwork for advanced viticulture had been laid throughout a vast expanse of the Western World. The ancient Greeks can be credited with much: the elevation of wine to a deeply-rooted cultural phenomenon; an apparent technical mastery of wine production; and the development of a sophisticated and archetypal level of commerce, all of which have had a profound effect on Western notions of wine and culture. To get at the truth of this role, one must ask what could be expected to exist now in the absence of an ancient Greek antecedent to the development of our collective wine consciousness? It is not hard to imagine that wine itself is sufficiently powerful a force to drive its expansion to all corners of an appreciative world. Yet, without the engine that drove increasing expertise of its manufacture, a religious reverence for its properties and mysteries, commercial innovations such as appellations of origin and even the export of grape cultivars, the outcome could hardly have been what we know and cherish today. Perhaps there would be no Bordeaux as such or Chianti would be known for white wine, perhaps Russia would have dominated world markets during the Middle Ages. The fate of wine in Western civilization was largely in the hands of the ancient Greeks. That it fares so well today is in great part the result of their spirited and industrious commitment to the vine.