The World Flows with Mediterranean Wine: On the Roles of Mare Nostrum in Global Wine Dynamics

Abstract

Although in ancient times wine was presented to buyers as being the expression of the particular place where the grapes were grown, a form of marketing that is even more pronounced today, when considered historically, a preeminent fact about wine is that it moves. This chapter provides a broadly historical-sociological account of that point, showing how it applies not just to the finished product, but to the whole gamut of persons (often colonizers), non-humans (ranging from grape vines to the tools of the vineyard and winery and the vessels wine is transported in), and ideas (both technical and ideological) which have moved across lands and seas over millennia. Both driven by and contributing to the creation of wider socio-cultural currents, wine-related phenomena travelled from an originating core in Eurasia – the Caucasus region – into the Mediterranean area, and there they were then “Mediterraneanized” in various ways, then subsequently “Europeanized”, and then, over the most recent 500 years, spread across much of the world, in a series of processes that are conventionally called the “globalization” of wine. Within that long history, the movement of wine-related phenomena has gone along with, and been in large part driven by, imperial expansion and colonial projects. It is Greco-Roman wine culture, shaped particularly by the complex and wide-ranging dynamics of the Roman empire and its control over the Mediterranean, that is the most influential imperial constellation in the long-term in this regard. And it is the flowing of wine-related products, persons, technologies, and ideas into, around, and out of the Mediterranean geographical area and cultural worlds, which lies at the root of subsequent “globalizations” of wine, including those happening today. The chapter concludes with a consideration of how the millennia-long dominance of Mediterranean and European claims to have invented wine is today being challenged by those in the Caucasian region, who claim a more ancient inheritance as regards wine-making tradition.