April 2

April 2, 1767: The expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain’s massive territories across the Americas began. This was undertaken on the orders of King Charles III of Spain and followed similar efforts by the Papacy, France and others to suppress the Society of Jesus back in Europe. The resulting crackdown saw the wine industry across the lands of the Spanish Empire, which had been extensively developed by the Jesuits in countries like Argentina, Chile and Peru since the late sixteenth century, highly damaged. For two centuries most of the viticulture which had been practised from Mexico south to Argentina and Chile had been driven by the Jesuits who needed sacramental wine to carry out their missionary work and to celebrate the mass. As a result, the suppression of the Jesuits across Spain’s vast American empire completely changed the viticultural landscape of the Americas for decades to come. For more information, see Christine Vogel’s The Suppression of the Society of Jesus, 1758–1773 (Mainz, 2011).

April 2, 2014: HISTORY reported on the theory that the Holy Grail — the cup from which Jesus drank wine at the Last Supper — is the jewel-encrusted Chalice of Infanta Doña Urraca in León, Spain.

For more dates in wine  history, click here.

Header image: Tokyo Tanenhaus — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).