Wine, Vatican City, and the Papacy: A History

No institution has shaped the story of wine more profoundly than the Catholic Church. It needed wine for its central sacrament, it preserved and improved viticulture through the long centuries after Rome fell, it lent its name to one of France’s greatest wines — and, to this day, the tiny Vatican City drinks more wine per person than any nation on Earth¹.

The bond between the papacy and the vine runs from the altar to the vineyard to the dinner table, and it is older than almost any wine region now alive⁴.

Wine at the heart of the Mass

At the centre of Catholic worship stands the Eucharist, in which wine is consecrated and, in Catholic doctrine, becomes the blood of Christ⁴. That single article of faith turned a reliable supply of genuine grape wine from a luxury into a religious necessity: no wine, no Mass. When the Roman Empire collapsed and secular viticulture withered across much of Europe, it was the monasteries — tending their vines for the altar and the refectory table — that kept winemaking alive and, in places like Burgundy, pushed it to new heights¹. (See also: wine and the emergence of Christianity.)

For a thousand years, in other words, the map of European wine and the map of the Church were very nearly the same map. Monks cleared the slopes, recorded which parcels ripened best, and refined the craft generation by patient generation — a debt every modern wine drinker unknowingly owes to the cloister¹.

The Avignon popes and the pope’s own wine

For much of the fourteenth century the popes did not live in Rome at all. From 1309 to 1376 the papacy sat at Avignon in southern France, where seven successive popes built a court so opulent that the poet Petrarch damned it as a second Babylon³. Wine was central to that court’s life — and one pope in particular left his mark on the map.

Pope John XXII took a keen personal interest in the vineyards just north of Avignon, improving their cultivation and drinking their wine, which came to be known simply as Vin du Pape⁵. He even built a castle among the vines as a papal summer residence. In time the village and its wine took the name they still carry: Châteauneuf-du-Pape — literally “the pope’s new castle” — a great wine born directly of the papal court²⁸.

Mustum: a loophole for priests who cannot drink

Because valid sacramental wine must be true, naturally fermented grape wine, the Church long faced a genuine pastoral problem: what about a priest who is a recovering alcoholic, or who physically cannot tolerate alcohol? Its answer is mustum — grape juice in which fermentation has only barely begun, containing the merest trace of alcohol⁷. It is a careful piece of theology, bending to human frailty without abandoning the requirement that the matter of the sacrament be real wine. The very existence of the mustum rule shows how seriously the Church takes the difference between wine and mere juice⁷.

The world’s thirstiest state

All of this helps explain a genuinely startling statistic. Vatican City — a walled enclave of a few hundred residents — has the highest per-capita wine consumption of any state on Earth, on the order of 74 litres a year for every man, woman and child, comfortably ahead of famously wine-loving France and Italy⁶:

The reasons are peculiar to the place. The Vatican’s population is overwhelmingly adult — clergy and staff, with essentially no children to lower the average — and wine plays both a sacramental and a daily mealtime role there. Add communal dining, a culture that treats wine as food rather than indulgence, and a duty-free supply within the city walls, and the world record starts to look almost inevitable⁶.

Patron and preserver

From the wine of the Mass to the monks who saved viticulture, from a pope’s vineyard at Châteauneuf to a careful modern ruling on grape juice, the Catholic Church has been wine’s greatest patron and preserver for the better part of two thousand years¹. Few institutions have left so deep a mark on what the Western world drinks — or on why, in one tiny city-state, they still drink quite so much of it.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Châteauneuf-du-Pape: the legendary wine
• Mustum: the Vatican’s half-fermented loophole
• The origins of wine and viticulture

References

1. The Daily Compass — The popes’ penchant for wine (especially the Avignon popes). newdailycompass.com ↩
2. AOC Châteauneuf-du-Pape — History of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. en.chateauneuf.com ↩
3. Encyclopædia Britannica — Avignon papacy. www.britannica.com ↩
4. Encyclopædia Britannica — Eucharist. www.britannica.com ↩
5. Encyclopædia Britannica — John XXII (pope). www.britannica.com ↩
6. VinePair — The Vatican drinks more wine per capita than anywhere on Earth. vinepair.com ↩
7. Catholic News Agency — on mustum and low-alcohol sacramental wine. www.catholicnewsagency.com ↩
8. Wine-Searcher — Châteauneuf-du-Pape wine region. www.wine-searcher.com ↩

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
A sweeping, readable history that traces wine’s path through the monasteries, the medieval Church and beyond.

A Short History of Wine
Rod Phillips
A crisp global history of wine, strong on the Church’s central role in preserving and spreading viticulture.

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