The Body and Blood: Wine and the Emergence of Christianity

No religion has been more entwined with wine than Christianity. It begins with a wedding where Jesus turns water into wine, reaches its heart at a supper where wine becomes the blood of a new covenant, and runs on through a thousand years in which the Christian Church — needing wine for the altar — kept the vineyards of Europe alive and made some of the greatest wines on earth. To trace the story of wine is, again and again, to trace the story of the Church — right up to the surprising moment when a temperance-minded dentist tried to take the wine back out. For the full story, see the great turning points in wine history.

Wine at the heart of a new faith

Wine appears at the very beginning of Jesus’s ministry. According to the Gospel of John, his first miracle was to turn water into wine at a wedding in Cana, when the feast ran dry¹.

It was no modest gesture. The Gospel says Jesus had six stone jars filled with water, each holding twenty to thirty gallons — so the miracle produced something like 120 to 180 gallons of wine, the equivalent of hundreds of modern bottles, and the master of the feast pronounced it the best wine of the day. From the outset, wine in the Gospels is a sign of joy, abundance and blessing, poured out with startling generosity².

“This is my blood”

At the Last Supper, wine took on its deepest Christian meaning. Jesus took the cup, gave thanks, and identified the wine with his own blood, poured out for the forgiveness of sins. From that act grew the Eucharist — the central rite of Christian worship, in which wine is consecrated and shared — making a cup of wine sacred to millions for two thousand years³.

The true vine: wine in the early Church

The first Christians carried this reverence into their gatherings, sharing bread and wine in communion and in fellowship meals. The vine and the grape became favourite symbols in early Christian art, painted on the walls of the catacombs and drawn from Jesus’s own words: “I am the vine; you are the branches.” Wine was not incidental to the new faith — it was woven into its worship, its art and its imagination⁴.

Keepers of the vine: the monasteries

When the Roman Empire collapsed and much of ancient life unravelled, the Church became the great guardian of the vine. Because every Mass required wine, monasteries kept their vineyards through the turbulent early Middle Ages. The influential Rule of Saint Benedict, written around 530, even set a daily wine allowance for monks — a hemina, roughly a half-pint — and took a famously pragmatic view of the whole question⁵⁶.

We read that monks should not drink wine at all, but since the monks of our day cannot be convinced of this, let us at least agree to drink moderately, and not to the point of excess.— The Rule of Saint Benedict, ch. 40 (c. 530)⁷

The monks who made great wine

The monks did not merely preserve winemaking — they advanced it. The Cistercians of Burgundy, tending their vines and tasting endlessly, are said to have studied the soils so closely that they identified which individual parcels made the finest wine, laying the foundations of the Burgundian idea of the climat and building the great walled vineyard of the Clos de Vougeot⁸.

And it was a monk who helped give the world its most celebrated wine of all. Dom Pierre Pérignon, the cellar-master at the Benedictine abbey of Hautvillers in Champagne, spent decades improving the region’s wines in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries — work that made his abbey’s name a byword for the finest Champagne⁹.

When the church took the wine out

Then, in the nineteenth century, the ancient bond was partly broken. As the temperance movement swept America, some Protestants grew uneasy about pouring alcohol at the Lord’s Table. In 1869 a devout Methodist dentist named Thomas Bramwell Welch pasteurised grape juice to stop it fermenting, and began selling “Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine” to churches that wanted an alcohol-free communion¹⁰.

It was a slow-burning revolution. The idea caught on with the temperance-minded, Welch’s grape juice became a thriving business, and in 1916 the Methodists made grape juice mandatory for communion — with many other Protestant churches following. Two thousand years after Cana, a large part of the Christian world had quietly swapped the wine in the chalice for juice¹¹.

A sacred thread

Even so, the link has never truly broken. Wine remains central to Catholic, Orthodox and many Protestant communions, and the Church’s long custodianship shaped the vineyards we still drink from today — Burgundy, Champagne, the Rhine and countless others. Few threads run so continuously through the history of wine as the one that ties it to the Christian altar.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Charlemagne and the medieval vine
• How grape juice replaced communion wine
• A history of French wine

References

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Jesus. www.britannica.com ↩
2. BibleRef — John 2:6 (the six stone jars at Cana). www.bibleref.com ↩
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Eucharist. www.britannica.com ↩
4. World History Encyclopedia — Christianity. www.worldhistory.org ↩
5. The Rule of Saint Benedict — Chapter 40, The Measure of Drink. pressbooks.palni.org ↩
6. wein.plus Wine Magazine — The Measure of the Drink (Rule of St Benedict). magazine.wein.plus ↩
7. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Benedictine. www.britannica.com ↩
8. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Cistercian. www.britannica.com ↩
9. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Dom Pérignon. www.britannica.com ↩
10. United Methodist Church — Communion and Welch’s Grape Juice. www.umc.org ↩
11. Christianity Today — Raise a Juice Box to the Temperance Movement. www.christianitytoday.com ↩

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
Vivid on the Church, the monasteries and the medieval vine.

A Short History of Wine
Rod Phillips
Clear on wine’s place in religion and ritual through the ages.

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