Wine and its extraordinary properties have always been associated with spirituality and religion. While most of the religions practiced in the eastern Mediterranean incorporated wine in their rituals, it was the spread of Christianity in the fourth century that ensured the survival of viticulture and winemaking after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Because wine was such an integral part in the celebration of the Eucharist, the monasteries and cathedrals that sprang up across Europe took up winemaking and amassed substantial vineyard holdings. The monks — who had the education, the financial resources of the Catholic Church, and the requisite time for cultivating land and trying new techniques — became some of the most important winemakers of the Middle Ages.

Monastic wineries established extensive vineyards across Europe — and especially in Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne, the Loire Valley, and the Rhone Valley. During this time France emerged as the preeminent winemaking region in the world.

Wine and War Don't Mix

In 1152 Henry II of England married France's Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose dowry included the vineyard areas of Bordeaux and neighboring Gascony. The light red wine produced there gained favor in England and came to be called claret.

By 1350, the port city of Bordeaux was shipping a million cases of claret a year, but the sporadic fighting between the kings of England and France — known as the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) — put an end to England's access to her much-loved wine. Any ship transporting the wine faced piracy, and protecting the ships became prohibitively expensive. England had to look beyond western France for wine imports.

A trading friendship with Portugal began that led, ultimately, to the creation of port wine. The journey by sea from Portugal to England was hard on wine. The shippers in Oporto, the port city, began adding buckets of brandy to the wine to stabilize it so it would arrive in good condition. They started adding the brandy earlier and earlier until they were adding it during fermentation. This wine became known as, quite appropriately, porto — or port.

Inventions Spur Change

Even though the Romans may have used blown-glass containers to serve wine, pottery and stoneware jugs were the norm — that is, until the seventeenth century and the advent of commercial glass making. The first glass bottles were onion-shaped but eventually evolved into cylindrical bottles that could be stacked on their sides. Needless to say, there could be no sideways stacking without an effective bottle stopper. Enter the cork.

Originally corks were tapered so they could fit a bottle with any size neck and could be manually removed. But with the production of mold-made bottles and horizontal stacking, a standard cylindrical cork was developed that could be driven into the bottle for maximum wine containment. Now a special tool was required to remove the cork. Corkscrews of all kinds were introduced, and continue to be introduced to this day.

Reaching Out to the New World

With the discovery and colonization of new lands, emigrating Europeans took their vines and their winemaking knowledge elsewhere. Exploration and settlement brought wine to the Americas and South Africa in the 1500s and 1600s and to Australia in the 1700s. The wine history of Europe thus became intertwined — for better and for worse — with that of the New World.