Wine and the Papacy: How the Church Shaped European Wine

For most of a thousand years, the Catholic Church was the most important winemaker in Europe. The reason is simple: the Mass cannot be said without wine.

Faith created a permanent demand for wine, and the institutions of the Church, above all its monasteries, met it. In doing so they preserved winemaking through Europe’s darkest centuries and laid the groundwork for the great regions we know today.¹

Wine at the altar

The Christian Mass centers on the Eucharist, in which wine stands for the blood of Christ.¹ Every church needed a steady supply, and as Christianity spread across Europe, viticulture spread with it. Where the faith went, vines followed, because the altar required them.

The monks who saved the vine

After Rome fell, it was the monasteries that kept winemaking knowledge alive. Through the early Middle Ages the Benedictines and Cistercians became the custodians of Roman-era viticulture, guided by the Benedictine rule that monks should live by the work of their hands.² The Cistercians of Burgundy went further than anyone. Studying how soil and climate changed the wine from one plot to the next, they helped pioneer the idea of terroir that still defines fine wine. They created the walled Clos de Vougeot, assembled from the 12th century and enclosed by the 14th, and at Pontigny they are traditionally credited with first planting Chardonnay in Chablis.²

The popes at Avignon

The link between wine and the papacy became literal in the 14th century. From 1309 to 1377 the popes ruled not from Rome but from Avignon, in the south of France, and their court became famous for its wines.³ The clearest legacy sits a few miles north of the city: Châteauneuf-du-Pape, “the Pope’s new castle,” where Pope John XXII built a summer residence and encouraged the vines that still carry his title. The ruined castle above the vineyards is what remains of that papal court.

Read more

• The Benedictines and medieval wine
• Châteauneuf-du-Pape: the Pope’s wine
• The castle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape

References

1. Wine’s centrality to the Eucharist and the Church as a driver of medieval winemaking: The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed., “Church, the” and “monks and monasteries”; Decanter, “monastic wine.” ↩
2. Benedictines and Cistercians as custodians of viticulture, the Cistercians’ work on terroir and the Clos de Vougeot (walls completed in the 14th century), and the Chablis Chardonnay tradition: The Oxford Companion to Wine, “Cistercians,” “Clos de Vougeot,” “Burgundy”; Hugh Johnson, The Story of Wine. ↩
3. The Avignon papacy (1309–1377), the renown of the “Popes’ wines,” and Châteauneuf-du-Pape under Pope John XXII: Encyclopædia Britannica, “Avignon papacy”; The Oxford Companion to Wine, “Châteauneuf-du-Pape.” ↩

Want to read more? Try these books

The Oxford Companion to Wine Jancis Robinson (ed.)

The Story of Wine Hugh Johnson

Ancient Wine Patrick E. McGovern

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