Rome and Wine

Filed in archive Italian Wines on March 19, 2007

We have been watching the HBO series, Rome, and loving it. I can't wait for another episode. We ended up missing the first few episodes, so we had to use the HBO on demand feature to catch up. Along with being able to see shows we missed, there are some short available about the show and the history of Rome in general, for example their huge consumption of wine.

If you haven't seen this series, I recommend it. While it is gritty, for the most part, they seem to try to stay true to history. In the mean time, I managed to dig up some information on Rome and wine on the Internet. This is from "Wine and Rome:"

The earliest work on wine and agriculture was written in Punic. After the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC, the Senate decreed that this treatise be translated into Latin, and it subsequently became the source for all Roman writing on viticulture. Ironically, it was Cato who had insisted on the destruction of Carthage in the Punic wars and who, about 160 BC, wrote De Agri Cultura, the first survey of Roman viticulture, which, significantly, also is the earliest surviving prose work in Latin. In it, he discusses the production of wine on large slave-based villa estates, which suggests how important vine cultivation had become in an agrarian economy that traditionally was subsistence farming.

Indeed, by 154 BC, says Pliny, wine production in Italy was unsurpassed. That same year, the cultivation of vines was prohibited beyond the Alps, and, for the first two centuries BC, wine was exported to the provinces, especially to Gaul, in exchange for the slaves whose labor was needed to cultivate the large estate vineyards. (In part, the wine trade with Gaul was so extensive because its inhabitants, writes Pliny, were besotted by wine, which was drunk unmixed and without moderation). But, as more land was expropriated by the villa estates, the displaced rural population was forced to emigrate to Rome until, by the first century BC, the city had approximately one million inhabitants.