Wine and the Birth of Civilisation

In 1976, a Parisian wine competition staged by an English merchant shocked the world: a Californian Cabernet Sauvignon from a vineyard planted only six years earlier beat the great Chateau Mouton Rothschild in a blind tasting. The French judges were humiliated, and the "Judgment of Paris" became a landmark in the history of wine. But as this episode of The Rest Is History makes clear, that moment was just the latest twist in a story that stretches back 8,000 years—a story in which wine has been a driver of civilization, a tool of empire, a religious flashpoint, and a mirror of global power.

The Deep Roots: From the Caucasus to the Canaanites

The history of wine begins not in France or Italy, but in the mountains south of the Black Sea. The hosts trace the earliest evidence to pottery shards found near Tbilisi, Georgia, dating to 6000 BC, and to a large wine press discovered in a cave at Areni, Armenia, from around 4000 BC. This was no small-scale hobby: the press was big enough to produce wine for distribution, pointing to the early emergence of a trade. The key biological breakthrough was the domestication of the Vitis vinifera grape, which required a shift from wild male-and-female vines to a hermaphroditic vine that could self-pollinate. The region around Mount Ararat—where the Bible places Noah’s first vineyard—is the likely cradle.