Winemaker’s Bookshelf By Gary Strachan


A hundred bottles of wine on the wall


Historical detail and humour are both plentiful in Oz Clarke’s cultural journey.


here are some books that are so interesting or well written that you enjoy sharing quotations with anyone nearby. I have no problem to say that about Oz Clarke’s The History of Wine in 100 Bottles. (2015, Pavilion Books. ISBN 978-1- 910496-80-0. 782 pp).


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The book is organized into 100 brief chapters which correspond to innovative events or products that changed the history of wine forever. Most chapters revolve around a particular wine, although not necessarily a bottle. The story is selective, because after all, it is only 780 pages, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the book. I like Clarke’s cheeky sense of humour and his iconoclastic description of events as he saw them or experienced them.


Clarke has drawn together an enormous amount of detail and has done a great job of condensing it into a very readable book. There are many other details he could have described but he included enough to spin a good story.


He begins his story in Georgia, because of its continuing record of production dating back almost to the beginning of the ancient wine cultures which preceded the Greeks and Romans — the Transcaucasian region of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Anatolia and Iran. Some regions of Georgia have preserved an 8,000-year-old-culture of making and preserving wine in a clay jar (called a kevri) lined with beeswax. The jars, a few hundred litres in capacity, are buried in the ground, filled with crushed, whole grapes and left undisturbed for six months or more.


Clarke makes no mention of similar Chinese wines that have a


British Columbia FRUIT GROWER • Fall 2015 21


history from approximately the same period.


His stories wander


through wine and religion, the Greeks, the Romans, and


the legends of wine’s origins. I loved the quoted party instruction from the Greek poet Eubulus: “Three bowls do I mix for the temperate: one to health, which they empty first, the second to love and pleasure, the third to sleep. When this bowl is drunk up, wise Guests go home. The fourth bowl is ours no longer, but belongs to violence, the fifth to uproar, the sixth to drunken revel, the seventh to black eyes, the eight is the policeman’s, the ninth belongs to biliousness, and the tenth to madness and hurling the furniture.” Clarke identified this with student parties he had known.


The Greeks and Romans are well known for their distribution of


How to establish a vineyard, from a Roman viticulture manual, first century AD.


viniculture throughout the known world. Clarke summarizes these developments well with country-by- country chapters, written in his usual style with facetious comments and an occasional snide remark. The development of glass has its own history. Glassmaking probably was discovered about 1,500 BC in Egypt or Phoenicia, but glass blowing didn’t develop until about the first century BC, possibly in Syria. The Romans then spread it to Europe. Also about this time the Phoenicians invented the written alphabet, which spread to the Greeks ... and as they say, the rest is history. Today we seldom think of England’s influence on the


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