This Day in Wine History is a website for history and wine lovers alike. If you enjoy pairing world-class wine with award-winning documentaries, then this site is for you! Our articles are broken into DAYS (this day in wine history for all 365 days!), ARTICLES and IN-DEPTH, which focuses on deeper research, academic citations, and longer essays for the true history lover. Enjoy the latest articles from our talented writers from all over the world.
Paris Burned Its Wine-Tax Gates Days Before the Bastille Fell
The Storming of the Bastille, watercolour by Jean-Pierre Houel, 1789 | Public domain (Wikimedia Commons) By the This Day in Wine History Editorial Team · […]
How a Colonial Wage Practice Left the Cape With the World’s Highest Fetal-Alcohol Rates
The Boschendal wine estate in the Cape winelands | Vincent Steenberg, CC BY-SA 2.5 (Wikimedia Commons) By the This Day in Wine History Editorial Team […]
For 1,051 Days, Reims Lived Underground in the Champagne Cellars
Reims Cathedral after the German bombardment. Above ground the city was rubble; below it, in the champagne cellars, a whole life carried on. Photograph: U.S. […]
The Body That Defines “Champagne” Was Born Under Nazi Occupation
The Champagne cellars (crayeres) of Ruinart, print by Louis Tauzin | Public domain (Wikimedia Commons) By Ken Wytsma · Researched, fact-checked & verified by the […]
Napoleon Drank It on His Deathbed. Enslaved People Made It: The Real Makers of Constantia Wine
The Groot Constantia estate in the Cape | JessyAM, CC BY-SA 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons) By the This Day in Wine History Editorial Team · Researched, […]
Three Men Proved Yeast Was Alive in 1837. Europe’s Great Chemists Mocked Them.
Budding yeast under the microscope. In 1837 three researchers, looking at almost exactly this, concluded the specks were alive — and were mocked for it. […]
“Contains Sulfites” Has a 1487 Ancestor: When Sulfur in Wine First Needed a Law
Barrels ageing in a wine cellar, Vila Nova de Gaia | Ray in Manila, CC BY 2.0 (Wikimedia Commons) By Ken Wytsma · Researched, fact-checked […]
The Cape’s Wine Boom Ran on Enslaved Labour — and Abolition Made It Harder, Not Freer
The Stellenbosch winelands beneath the Drakenstein Mountains | SkyPixels, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons) By the This Day in Wine History Editorial Team · Researched, […]
How a Coal Fire Gave Wine Its First Strong Bottle — and Why Kenelm Digby Got the Credit
Thick, dark, and heavy: the English “verre anglais” bottle was strong enough to hold wine for years, and even to hold it under pressure. Photograph: […]
How a Ban on Wood-Fired Furnaces Set the Strong Wine Bottle in Motion
In 1615, England banned wood-fired glass furnaces to save oak for warships. The switch to coal made the tough dark glass that became the strong English wine bottle.
The Test That Reads Whether Wine’s Sugar Came from Grapes or a Sack
A taster can be fooled; a molecule can't. Since 1981, SNIF-NMR reads a deuterium signature in wine's alcohol to tell whether the sugar started as grapes or came out of a sack.
Pass the Port to the Left — and “Do You Know the Bishop of Norwich?”
The port comes out after dinner — and with it, one of the most precise pieces of unwritten etiquette in the English-speaking world. Photograph by […]
The First Modern Wine Guide Was Written by a Journalist, Not a Merchant
The template for every world-of-wine survey was set in 1833 by Cyrus Redding — a working newspaper editor who had lived in Paris, not a wine merchant.
Champagne Cellars Were So Lethal That Workers Wore Iron Masks Against Exploding Bottles
Champagne aging in the cellars. Each bottle holds about six atmospheres of pressure — and for much of the nineteenth century, a great many of […]
A Tang Poem Froze the Moment Grape Wine Was a Glamorous Import
In a single Tang-dynasty quatrain, Wang Han captured grape wine as a glamorous foreign import in a land of rice wine — drunk from a 'luminous cup' on the Silk Road frontier.
Atmospheric Nuclear Tests Gave Every Post-1952 Vintage a Radioactive Fingerprint
An atmospheric nuclear test. The fallout from tests like these left a faint radioactive marker in every wine made since the early 1950s — and […]
Pombal Uprooted the Douro’s Elderberry Trees to Stop Faked Port
To defend Port's honesty, the Marquis of Pombal drew the world's first demarcated wine region — and ordered the Douro's elderberry trees uprooted to stop the faking of Port's color.
How a Forbidden Drink Became Both a Poetic Genre and a Metaphor for God
In Arabic literature, wine — forbidden in Islam — became both a formal poetic genre (khamriyya) and, in Sufi verse, the central symbol of union with God.
Drinking Wine Neat Marked You as a Barbarian — and Drove a Spartan King Insane
A Greek krater, the great bowl in which wine was mixed with water before it was served. To drink wine unmixed was, to the Greeks, […]
The Waiter Who Smashed a $500,000 Jefferson Margaux — Except There Was No Waiter
The legend says a clumsy waiter destroyed a half-million-dollar bottle once owned by Thomas Jefferson. The truth is stranger — and the bottle may have been a fake.
The Greek Anthology Quietly Preserved a Whole Genre of Wine Poems
A whole genre of ancient Greek wine poems survives for one reason: Byzantine schoolteachers kept copying it. The strange, thousand-year rescue of the Greek Anthology.
Fasting Half the Year: The Ethiopian Church’s Wine Problem
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church keeps one of Christianity’s strictest fasting calendars — and still requires grape wine for the Eucharist, in a land that […]
Finger Lakes: History of New York’s Great Riesling Region
An Atwater Estate vineyard in the Finger Lakes, New York By the This Day in Wine History Editorial Board • ✓ Researched, fact-checked, and cross-referenced […]
Washington Wine: History of America’s Desert Wine Powerhouse
A vineyard in the Yakima Valley, Washington By the This Day in Wine History Editorial Board • ✓ Researched, fact-checked, and cross-referenced against primary and […]
Sonoma: History of Where California Wine Began
Photo: Jim G from Silicon Valley, CA, USA / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY 2.0 By the This Day in Wine History Editorial Board • […]
