Timeline of Famous Winemakers

A Brief Timeline of a Few of the World’s Most Famous Winemakers

The basics of winemaking is actually very simple. Take grapes, crush them, and let the grape juice ferment with yeast to become alcohol, and voila wine is made. But if you use the most basic process, the resulting wine probably won’t taste very good. In order to make a good tasting wine, the winemaking needs to get much more complicated. And through the thousands and thousands of years humans have been making wine, multitudes of technologies and techniques have been invented by winemakers in an effort to make a better tasting drink.

The First Winemakers

Historians are unsure when humans first discovered how to make wine, but the earliest evidence of wine production has been dated to at least 8,000 years ago. These first wines were certainly nothing like what we drink today. They were probably thick, bacterial, and certainly disgusting by modern standards, although little is known about these first wines. 

Wine quickly began spreading in the ancient period thanks to the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Both spread vines and wine culture around the Mediterranean and beyond. As wine spread and more and more people began making and consuming it, winemaking technology began advancing. This is especially true under the Ancient Romans. The Ancient Romans took wine very seriously; at this time it was considered a dietary staple for even the lowest social classes. So they obviously produced lots of wine and transported it throughout their empire. With such an emphasis on wine they developed many new winemaking techniques to help improve their wine. 

Although the Romans certainly enjoyed their wine, modern wine drinkers would certainly not enjoy a glass of their wine today. Even though the Greeks and Romans introduced many new winemaking techniques that improved their wine, they were still very far behind today’s winemaking technologies. One of the greatest problems with wine in this time period was trying to keep it from going bad. Many winemakers tried adding different ingredients to help preserve the wine with varying success. Some of these ingredients included resin, lead, ash, salt, and herbs. And when that failed, ingredients were added to cover up the bad taste of the off wine.

Eventually after the end of the ancient period, it was the Catholic Church that was the next group to put in a lot of effort to increase the quality of wine and develop new technologies and techniques. In Western Europe it was the Catholic Church that was responsible for producing most of the wine in the Middle Ages. Making the majority of the winemakers at the time, Catholic monks. Many of these monks came up with new ideas to improve the quality of wine in both the vineyards and wine cellars. 

In more recent times the discovery of yeast has finally explained how wine is actually made. Additionally, the discovery of bacteria and the importance of cleanliness in winemaking has made a massive impact on the taste of modern wine. The last 300 years has seen an enormous growth in winemaking techniques that have greatly improved the taste and quality of wine worldwide. 

The quality of the wine we drink today is due to the effort of thousands, and maybe even millions of different winemakers throughout history, who each contributed their knowledge to the wine world. Below is a timeline of some of history’s most famous winemakers through the ages, and how they contributed to help create the modern wine of today. 

References:

“What Did Wine Taste like Thousands of Years Ago?” n.d. Serious Eats. https://www.seriouseats.com/wine-history-paul-lukacs-inventing-wine-how-wine-was-modernized-ancient-wine-tasted-terrible.

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