Greek And Roman Wine Analysis

Wine in Greece and Rome
In the chapters “The Delight of Wine” and “The Imperial Vine,” Standage talks about how wine is important in Greece and Rome. It is said that wine was first discovered in mountains where grape juice was fermented. The fact that wine was created from the breakdown of chemicals by bacteria or yeasts is something that is thought to be bizarre today considering that many do not question where wine came from. They tend to just drink it without giving it too much thought into how it was made. After wine was discovered, it spread around to neighboring societies. This fancy drink called wine was then passed from one person to the next in the higher social classes. The wine essentially became a trading good considering …show more content…
Therefore, drinking wine was something that caused Greeks to feel as if they were on top of the social hierarchy. It also revealed some of the 19th century anthropological issues of defining a society. Those issues consisted of the good-better-best process or even the standardized rate of progress with a societies development. The idea of savages being the worst, barbarians being the middle section, and civilized societies being at the top of all others. This shows in Standage’s text, “the formal, intellectual atmosphere of the symposium also reminded the Greeks how civilized they were, in contrast to the barbarians, who either drank lowly, unsophisticated beer or—even worse—drank wine but failed to do so in a manner that met with Greek approval.” Therefore, Greeks believed that by drinking wine, it made them more civilized than barbarians who drank beer or drank in a non-Greek way. This idea of being better than others made the wine become a more widespread product considering everyone would like to be better than someone else. By drinking wine, it was also stated to be a way of telling societal truths. It could also reveal a person’s flaws and character. Considering how important wine was in the Greek culture, the Greeks shared