Lets Talk About Ancient Wine

As I mentioned in class the other day, I am fascinated by ancient wine. Why? Because it can tell us so much about how ancient civilizations and - for me at least - it is a great reminder of the social, political, and economic power that this beverage still holds today.

Since I'm an Egyptologist by training, for this blog post I wanted to talk about one of my favorite drinking cultures - the Celts.

Bear with me on some history for a second. Today, Celtic culture is mostly associated with Northern Europe (e.g. Ireland); however, in their heyday, the Celts occupied an area north of the Mediterranean that stretched from Turkey to Portugal. The first traces of this culture come from the 13th century BCE. The area that I would like to focus on for this blog post is the Early Iron Age in southern France.

The Celtic reputation for excessive drinking is long standing. References to the Celt's barbaric drinking practices (drinking until they could no longer stand, etc.) litter contemporary Greek and Roman accounts.

And, let's get one thing out of the way early. The Celts did, in fact, drink a LOT of wine. Over 50 shipwrecks have been found off the coast of Southern France filled with Roman wine. Combined with evidence from settlements, it has been estimated that in just a single century as many as 40 million amphora may have been imported by Celts. For context, that means the Celts drank ~2.65 million gallons of wine annually (1).

The general assumption is that the Celts drank so much because as a "barbaric" culture they wished to imitate the more refined social norms of the Greeks and Romans. But, not truly understanding how wine was to be consumed, they drank their wine without water (which a good Roman would never do) and, therefore, became drunk and unruly. However, is this really true? The Celt's just didn't understand the purpose of wine?

The Early Iron Age Celts of Southern France lived in, "small, open, relatively undifferentiated village[s] and hamlet[s]" (1). The society ran on "work-feasting."

A "work-feast" is a pretty simple concept. Say you had to build a barn, but couldn't do it alone. Since you're in a pre-monetary society, you also don't have the ability to pay anyone to help you. So what do you do?

Well, if you're a Celtic head of household, you throw a party. You ask as many people as you can feed to help you raise your barn and, at the project's completion, you throw a giant party filling your workers with food and getting them very, very drunk. The bigger the party you can throw, the more workers you can "hire," the greater amount of work you can get done, the more socially, politically, and economically powerful you become within society based on your new assets.

Prior to the importation of Roman wine, the limiting factors for throwing these parties were grain and wives. Grain because the society ran on beer. Wives because beer was incredibly intensive to make - beer was brewed in the open air and, as such, lasted only about 3 days (so you couldn't stockpile it). Food could be made ahead of time, but beer needed to be made on the spot before it soured.

With the introduction of wine, however, all bets were off. Now, young men - men who should have spent years or decades building up their political, social, and economic prestige through successively larger parties and who may have only had one wife and few dependents - could throw a blow-out work feast to rival that of their elders. All they had to do was stockpile wine, which didn't go bad, and BOOM they were able to throw giant parties with half the wife labor.

There is a strong argument to be made that more than anything else, the introduction of wine is what led to the social, political, and economic chaos that marks the end of the Early Iron Age for the Celts of Southern France. All of a sudden, the political, social, and economic structures that had governed life for years were overturned. One product - wine - is introduced and an entire civilization is brought to its knees. How many products (other than iron) can be said to have accomplished the same?

In the end, I would argue that far from attempting to be like the Greek and Romans, the Celts consumed wine for distinctly Celtic reasons. While at the end of the day it was the same product, the connotations and place of that product within society meant vastly different things between the cultures.

But who cares, right? That was millennia ago. Well, I would argue that we can see some of this battle being played out right now on the global stage.

Consider some of what we learned about the increase in wine consumption in China. Here, again, we see wine that we are used to interpreting through the lens of one culture (mostly European) being interpreted through another lens (chugging). My observation is that this leads to a sense that the wine is being "misused" but is it really? Is there one may to consume a product?

I understand the branding challenges associated with having a wine that in the USA/Europe has one identity and use, and in China another (a good parallel to this might be Budweiser's inconsistent brand). The ancient world didn't really have had to worry about managing a brand in a global context. But in class we've spoken extensively about how education is important aspect of having your wine "make it" in the Chinese market. Why? Isn't there an argument to be made that to be successful in China importers should play into cultural norms rather than fight or change them?

Another parallel to the Celtic case can be seen right here in the USA. Wine consumption is growing and beer sales are falling. Wine used to be a product restricted to the wealthy, with significant social implications. What will happen if this beverage becomes more ubiquitous? While I don't foresee a situation in which wine brings modern civilization to its knees (after all, our beer now lasts much longer), the decline of beer and the increase in wine will have significant social (the role of the dinner party in modern society should be it's own blog post), economic (in 2014 the beer industry contributed some $252.6 billion to the economy), and even political (I won't even go into regulations in this post) implications (2).

Some day, when the archaeologists of the future study us, I wonder what they will say about wine.





Sources:

Personal Class Notes
http://www.ancient.eu/celt/
(1) http://media.wix.com/ugd/46245e_21201ad25a6943b69c06b7cba3819c91.pdf
(2) http://fortune.com/2015/08/05/beer-industry-craft-beer/