Drink wine day
<p>In 2007, archaeologists working in the Areni-1 cave in the Vayots Dzor province of Armenia uncovered something that pushed the story of wine deeper into prehistory than most people imagine: a clay fermentation vat, a shallow basin that had served as a grape press, storage jars, and even a drinking cup, all of it dating to roughly 4100 BC. It is the oldest known winery on Earth, a complete production setup left behind by people who lived more than six thousand years ago. Drink Wine Day, marked each year on 18 February, is the modern and far more relaxed end of that astonishingly long line, an invitation to raise a glass and appreciate a beverage whose history predates writing itself.</p>
<h2 id="where-the-day-comes-from">Where the day comes from</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The observance itself is a recent and lightly documented invention. It is generally credited to Todd McCalla, who is said to have established it around 2007 in the United States as a way of encouraging people to enjoy wine and to reflect on the moderate pleasures it offers. Unlike the ancient craft it celebrates, the day carries no deep tradition or institutional backing; it sits among the many modern food and drink observances that have proliferated in recent decades, kept alive largely by enthusiasts, bars and merchants happy to mark the date.</p>
<p>What gives the day its substance is not its own thin pedigree but the subject it points at. A glass of wine is a thread running back through Roman banquets, Greek symposia and Egyptian tombs to Neolithic villages in the South Caucasus. The date may be arbitrary, but the thing it honours is anything but, and that contrast, a young holiday celebrating an ancient drink, is part of what makes it worth keeping.</p>
<h2 id="the-deep-history-of-the-vine">The deep history of the vine</h2>
<p>The chemical evidence for winemaking reaches back even further than the Armenian winery. Analyses of residue from pottery found at Neolithic sites in Georgia, in the South Caucasus, have identified tartaric acid and other compounds characteristic of grape wine, dating the practice there to around 6000 BC. That makes Georgia the strongest current candidate for the birthplace of viniculture, and Georgians have long taken fierce pride in the claim, with their qvevri, large earthenware vessels buried in the ground for fermentation, still in use today as a living link to that origin.</p>
<p>From these Caucasian beginnings the vine spread outward along the trade and migration routes of the ancient world. The Egyptians cultivated grapes in the Nile delta and recorded winemaking in tomb paintings, treating wine as a drink of the elite and of the gods, and they even labelled their jars with the vintage, the vineyard and the winemaker, an early ancestor of the modern wine label. The Greeks elevated it into a centrepiece of social and religious life, honouring Dionysus and structuring the symposium, a formal drinking gathering, around shared cups and ordered conversation; they also habitually diluted their wine with water, regarding the drinking of it neat as the mark of a barbarian. The Romans, in turn, industrialised the business, planting vineyards across their empire from Iberia to Gaul and laying the foundations of regions that remain celebrated for wine two thousand years later. The map of European wine, in other words, is in large part a Roman inheritance, and the vineyards of Bordeaux, the Rhône and the Mosel all trace their beginnings to Roman expansion rather than to anything more recent.</p>
<h2 id="terroir-and-the-idea-of-place">Terroir and the idea of place</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>One concept does more than any other to explain why wine fascinates the people who fall for it: terroir. The French word gathers up everything about a place that shapes the wine made there, the soil and its drainage, the slope and aspect of the vineyard, the climate and weather of a given year, and the local practices of cultivation. The same grape variety, the argument goes, will produce noticeably different wines depending on where it is grown, so that a bottle becomes a kind of report on a specific patch of ground in a specific season.</p>
<p>This is why a single grape such as Pinot Noir can taste so unlike itself when grown in Burgundy, in Oregon and in New Zealand, and why enthusiasts speak of wines in terms of geography as much as flavour. Terroir turns the drink into something more interesting than alcohol with fruit notes; it makes each bottle a small piece of a particular landscape, which is precisely the appeal that keeps people learning, comparing and arguing about wine across a lifetime.</p>
<h2 id="how-the-day-is-marked">How the day is marked</h2>
<p>Drink Wine Day is observed in unhurried, sociable ways rather than through any fixed ritual. Some people use it as a prompt to visit a local winery, vineyard or wine bar; others host a tasting at home, lining up bottles from different regions or grape varieties to compare side by side. Restaurants and merchants frequently lean into the date with featured pairings, recommendations or themed menus, and the more curious treat it as an excuse to read about a region they do not know or to attend a guided tasting.</p>
<p>The pleasures it celebrates are as much social as sensory. Wine has been bound up with shared meals and hospitality since those Greek symposia, and the toast, that small gesture of raising a glass together, remains its most universal ritual. It also pairs naturally with other gatherings of the table; a bottle opened for Drink Wine Day might just as easily anchor a <a href="/specialdate/national-wine-and-cheese-day/">National Wine and Cheese Day</a> spread, since the two have been partnered for as long as anyone has bothered to write the pairings down. The unspoken condition, on this date as on any other, is moderation, and the day is best honoured by appreciation rather than excess.</p>
<h2 id="a-world-of-variety">A world of variety</h2>
<p>Part of wine’s lasting hold lies simply in how much of it there is to explore. Several thousand grape varieties are cultivated commercially around the world, from the famous handful, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Merlot, Syrah, that dominate supermarket shelves to obscure indigenous grapes grown in a single valley and almost nowhere else. The study of it all, oenology, draws together microbiology, chemistry, agriculture and a good deal of accumulated craft, and the vocabulary that has grown up to describe wine, all aroma and body and finish, testifies to how much pleasure people have found in pinning down its sensations.</p>
<p>That same spirit of curiosity links wine to the wider culture of food and drink celebration, the eager exploration of varieties that animates an occasion like <a href="/specialdate/us-national-wine-day/">National Wine Day</a> as readily as this one. Whether someone is chasing the differences between two neighbouring vineyards or simply discovering a new favourite, the breadth of the field means there is always somewhere further to go.</p>
<h2 id="red-white-and-the-colour-of-the-cup">Red, white and the colour of the cup</h2>
<p>For all this variety, almost every wine begins as the juice of grapes whose flesh is pale, which leads to one of winemaking’s more counter-intuitive facts: the colour of a wine comes mainly from contact with the grape skins, not from the colour of the juice. A red wine is made by fermenting the juice together with the dark skins of red or black grapes, drawing out pigment and tannin; a white wine is made by pressing the juice away from the skins, whatever the grape’s colour, and fermenting it on its own. The same black grape can therefore yield a red or, with care, a white, which is exactly how some sparkling wines are produced.</p>
<p>Those broad styles, still red, still white, rosé and sparkling, are joined by the fortified wines such as port and sherry, in which extra spirit is added to raise the alcohol and, in some cases, halt fermentation while sugar remains. Each style carries its own history and its own ideal occasions, and part of the gentle education a day like this encourages is learning where the lines fall and why. None of it requires expertise to enjoy, but a little knowledge about how the colour and style of the wine in the glass came to be there tends to deepen the pleasure rather than complicate it.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The world’s oldest known winery, complete with a press, fermentation vat and storage jars, was discovered in 2007 in the Areni-1 cave in Armenia and dates to around 4100 BC.</li>
<li>Chemical traces of grape wine in Neolithic Georgian pottery push the practice of winemaking back to roughly 6000 BC, making it older than the wheel in much of the world.</li>
<li>Georgia’s traditional qvevri, large clay vessels buried in the earth for fermentation, are still used today and represent a winemaking method thousands of years old.</li>
<li>Several thousand distinct grape varieties are grown commercially, yet a small handful account for the overwhelming majority of the wine most people ever drink.</li>
<li>Much of Europe’s modern wine geography, from France to Spain, traces directly to Roman vineyard planting carried out across the empire two millennia ago.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>There is a pleasing humility in drinking something this old. Almost nothing else on a modern table connects so directly to the Neolithic; the bread is industrial, the cutlery mass-produced, but the wine is made by essentially the same act of crushing grapes and letting them ferment that someone performed in an Armenian cave six thousand years ago. A manufactured holiday on an arbitrary February date cannot add much to a tradition that deep, and it does not try to. What it offers instead is a small annual nudge to notice the thread, to taste a glass as the latest installment in an extraordinarily long story, and then, sensibly, to stop at one or two.</p>
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