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By Root 503 0

and he often pronounces. “But where,” he asks, “can we better make a beginning than with the vine?” He describes the various ways of cultivating the vine, and follows this with a discussion, which is pages long, of the many varieties of grapes and their uses. He talks about famous wines of former times, the oldest of which was the wine of Maronea grown in the seaboard parts of Thrace, as described by Homer. He also celebrates a more recent vintage, the vintage of Opimius, called such because it was the year of the consulship of Lucius Opimius; this was 121 BC, and it was probably as memorable because it was also the year of the assassination of Gaius Gracchus “for stirring up the common people with seditions” or proposals for reforms. That year the weather was so fine and bright (“they call it the ‘boiling’ of the grape”) that wines from that vintage, according to Pliny, still survived nearly two hundred years later. He did add, however, that they had “now been reduced to the consistency of honey with a rough flavor, for such in fact is the nature of wines in their old age.” Nevertheless, if an amphora of this wine cost a hundred sesterces the year it was made, 160 years later a hundred sesterces would buy only one-twelfth of an amphora of the wine—“so large,” he exclaims, “are the sums of money that are kept stored in our wine cellars! Indeed there is nothing else which experiences a greater increase of value up to the twentieth year—or a greater fall in value afterwards, supposing that there is not a rise of price.” The Opimian vintage was an exception, because it continued to improve beyond twenty years—although clearly not for two hundred.

Pliny predated the 1855 classification technique by nearly two thousand years when he listed Italian wines in order of merit, for, he says, “who can doubt … that some kinds of wine are more agreeable than others, or who does not know that one of two wines from the same vat can be superior to the other, surpassing its relation either owing to its cask or from some accidental circumstance?” He then classifies Italian wines into first-, second-, third-, and fourth-class wines, other wines, and foreign wines. He does not, however, follow fashion blindly. Many commentators have exalted Falernian wine, and indeed, he remarks that “no other wine has a higher rank at the present day.” Pliny, however, puts it into the second class, although he does praise the estate of Faustus because of “the care taken in its cultivation;” but, he adds, “the reputation of this district also is passing out of vogue through the fault of paying more attention to quantity than to quality.” Modern parallels leap to mind.

Finally, he is firm on the vexed question of terroir. In his discussion of the areas in Italy where good wines were made, he gives Campania as an example of a region that, “whether by means of careful cultivation or by accident,” good wines had recently been produced from new areas of cultivation. On the other hand, there were areas where decent wine would never be made, no matter what efforts were taken: “as for the wines of Pompei [sic], their topmost improvement is a matter of ten years, and they gain nothing from age; also, they are detected as unwholesome because of a headache which lasts till noon on the following day.” Therefore, “these instances, if I am not mistaken, go to show that it is the country and the soil that matters, not the grape, and that it is superfluous to go on with a long enumeration of kinds, since the same vine has a different value in different places.” In any case, “everyone has his own favorites,” and “I would not deny that other wines also deserve a high reputation, but the ones that I have enumerated are those on which the general agreement of the ages will be found to have pronounced judgment.”

So what can we say about Pliny as wine judge and wine writer? First of all, he was almost unbelievably hardworking; he also tended to castigate those whom he thought were not working as hard. His curiosity was capacious and his command of detail admirable. Although he