Origins of Viniculture: Wine culture invades Greece, then Italy, then France

Greece, which became a pre-eminent wine culture, was won over from its native ‘Greek grog’, made from Pramnian wine, honey, and barley, topped with cheese—the so-called kykeon of the Homeric epics. Even after the Greeks had become seafaring merchants in their own right and had begun vying with Phoenicia for control of the Mediterranean, their lasting debt to eastern Mediterranean wine culture was demonstrated by their adoption of the Phoenician alphabet which became the basis of our modern Western and Arabic scripts. The earliest archaic Greek inscription was incised on a wine jug (oinochoe) in the 8th century bc and reads: ‘Whoever of all dancers performs most nimbly will win this oinochoe as prize.’ Later in the same century, a Rhodian wine cup (kotyle) from the tomb of a young boy at Pithekoussai, an early Greek colony established on the island of ischia in the Bay of Naples, states in elegant dactylic hexameter poetry, the language of the Homeric epics, that ‘Nestor’s cup was good to drink from, but anyone who drinks from this cup will soon be struck with desire for fair-crowned Aphrodite.’ The Dionysiac interweaving of wine, women, and dance, inspired by Canaanite and Phoenician wine culture, is striking.