Worldbuilding Beverages: Wine
This is part two of my "Worldbuilding Beverages" series. Click here to see the whole series!
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This week, we're continuing our exploration of how you can use Tom Standage's History of the World in Six Glasses to inform your worldbuilding. Standage's book, for those of you just joining, takes on a broad overview of the arc of human history from Ancient Mesopotamia to the modern, globalized world, through the lens of six important drinks that impacted human civilization over time. The book is great and very informative, and I strongly recommend that you pick up the book for all the juicy history tidbits that we don't have time for on the blog. The links to the book in this article are affiliate looks for Bookshop.org – every purchase will give me a small cut (at no extra cost to anyone) AND will help support independent bookstores. You can also pick up the book at Amazon or Barnes & Noble or wherever else you get your books.
This week's article will focus on the second section of Standage's book, focusing on wine and viticulture. We'll talk about what Standage defines as the drink and its associated historical connection, and then we'll delve into how to use wine as a part of your worldbuilding. I'll also give some examples from my homebrew world as to how I'm using what I've learned from the book.
History: the Development of "Western Civilization"
The wine section of Standage's is focused on ancient Greece and Rome. Wine began before recorded history, just like beer, but records indicate that it happened between 9000 and 4000 BC in the region roughly of modern Armenia. Wild grapes, cereal grain crops to provide surplus food for those engaged in winemaking (like with beer), and the development of clay pottery for fermentation are all necessary prerequisites. Similar to beer, wine was likely an accidental invention, as storing grapes in pottery would have led to wild yeasts converting the sugar of the grapes into alcohol.
A few things differentiated wine from beer in a historical sense. While, as we discussed last week, beer marked the development of a complex society capable of agricultural surplus, wine marks that there is some sort of regional trade. Unlike beer, which can be produced locally wherever grain can be produced--which is a wide variety of places, given the importance of having some sort of cereal grain staple option for humans to be able to have agriculture--wine grapes can only grow in a more limited range of climates and soils. This meant that there would be wine-producing regions in a way that was not true for beer. For wine to spread beyond those small local regions, you needed trade routes. For wine to be available to anyone beyond the richest kings and priests, you need large states and empires in order to reduce the number of border crossings and therefore the number of tariffs paid.
Standage chronicles this development in the ancient Mesopotamian empires (such as Assyria), but the bulk of his section is devoted to Greece and Rome. The book section is chock-full of really interesting information about how Greeks and Romans drank their wine, and what that implied about their societies. Greeks drank out of large communal jars, a hallmark of the relatively egalitarian ideal of Athens and the Greek city-states (with "how you drank" marking civilized Greeks from their "barbaric" neighbors); while the Romans made strict classifications of wine quality, as a way of perpetuating Roman class distinction. Wine played an important religious role in both Greek and Roman pagan religions as well as Christianity.
In this way, Standage's argument in this section is how the growth of wine is linked to the development of classical Western civilization. Wine is a marker of the large-scale trade networks that developed in the ancient Mediterranean, and as Greek and Roman colonization and empire-building spread, wine came with them. Wine is introduced to Britain, for example, by Roman conquest. Wine's regional growth (which he will use next chapter to distinguish regional wine from global liquor) means trade, but it also allows for social distinction in a way that the more easy-to-access beer does not.
Non-Western Wine
But here, putting my historian hat on, is where I think the broadness of Standage's argument (trying to cover "the history of the world") is his own worst enemy. Wine may have been important to ancient Greece and Rome--and again, the book had a bunch more detail on the culture surrounding wine drinking that was really fascinating, but beyond the scope of the blog--but unlike with beer, Standage's focus for wine is very tightly limited to Europe.
In his section on beer, Standage discusses the Americas and Asia and their cultural equivalents to beer, which demonstrate the agricultural transition. Are we to believe that wine did not exist outside of Europe? My first reaction when reading it was for that to be true, it would mean that wild grapes had to be a purely European fruit, since that was in our necessary prerequisites for wine development. However, recent scholarship (and by that, I mean developments in 2020, after Standage's book was published) has suggested that pre-Columbian Native Americans might have produced wine, particularly in a smaller region.
Collin Dreizen
If that's true--which, from what I could dig up, it seems like is still up for academic discussion--then what does wine mean outside of the European context? If it is just produced in small local regions and does not have a broad trade network, then why? The Americas did have large empires like the Aztecs and Incas that facilitated trade networks; why did those not develop robust wine cultures like Greece and Rome?
In short, my argument is not that Standage is wrong, but his analysis of wine's historical importance is rooted in the role that it played to Europeans, not to the world, and I was disappointed by that--particularly when I thought his chapter on beer, while Eurocentric in its focus, still did touch on why his argument held merit outside of just European culture. For our worldbuilding, therefore, I don't want to be heavily rooted in wine, specifically; instead, I want to focus on the role of larger trade routes, and how beverages and empires are linked. It just doesn't have to be wine.
Worldbuilding
As we discussed, one of the gaps in Standage's work is that he does not examine the non-European history of wine. However, I want to focus on what Standage attributes to be the niche that wine fills in the world's anthropological development: what locally cultivatable drink becomes widespread as a result of the development of large trade networks? How does the consumption of this drink reflect your civilization's attitude towards social class and exclusion?
From that perspective, I think we can also integrate a non-European perspective. Large empires would presumably have something filling this niche; it just might not be wine, and wine might take on a different, less significant role.
There are two elements here for our worldbuilding prompts: 1) the beverage needs to be not completely rare (as you need to be able to spread cultivation), but it does need to not be universally producible, so that it becomes a trade commodity; and 2) its consumption needs to reflect a part of the social attitudes of the dominant culture (Greek "equality" and notions of outsider barbarism, Roman social distinctions based on the quality of wine).
Lastly, remember this that is built on top of the foundation of the qualities necessary for beer. Hunter-gatherers would not have wine because they do not have the agricultural prerequisites for it.
My World: Mead, the imperial drink
In my world, we can think about this topic for at least one region. My humans have an ancient, slowly crumbling empire like Rome/Byzantium that once ruled most of their continent. This empire was built on a religion that was based on one's duty to their community–this meant shared resources, helping one another, and focusing on collective prosperity rather than individual superiority, but it also meant stagnation, complacency, and social inequality as you were expected to fill your community role (even if that meant being deeply poor and working mostly for the benefit of others). The empire viewed bees as sacred animals for their collective efforts in producing honey, which meant that their go-to "ritual drink" was mead. They had beer because they are growing grains and making bread, but mead would be considered the finer beverage that had spiritual significance (as wine did for the pagan Greeks and Romans).
The issue with this is that mead--fermented honey--would not have quite the same implications around trade. Mead can be produced anywhere that there are honeybees, and there are honeybees where there is stuff to pollinate. It is why mead flourished in real Norse culture, where neither grapes nor even most cereal grains would grow with enough ease, but was less popular when beer or wine was abundant. It is not quite as restrictive as wine should be, and is more "beer"-like in terms of having a broad cultivation range.
According to an article about the medieval honey industry by Dr. Alexandra Sapoznik, honey was "a highly complex product of the natural world, whose taste reflected the ecology and seasons of the regions in which it was produced." Varieties of honey and different qualities were well-established, much like wine in the Roman world--which could have entrenched social divisions more easily (though that possibly opposed to the community orientation of the religion? Unless I frame it as everyone drinks mead, but different social classes are "expected" to drink a particular caliber of mead).
So I do think that my human empire could have widely accessible mead, but also have higher-quality mead that is reflective of how the empire was integrated. Sapoznik notes that this is reflective of reality: "although [honey] was produced throughout Europe, only the honey of certain zones was sought after enough to merit long-distance trade, carrying cultural and economic values which could withstand the high cost of transport."
1) Mead becomes widespread as the old human empire grows. It is widely cultivatable, but as the empire builds trade routes, certain regions of mead production are deemed better tasting or more prestigious, and are therefore determined to be worth trading. These more elite meads become widely spread along imperial trade routes.
2) The stratification of mead quality reflects the growing entrenchment of social hierarchy in the empire. Local production of mead was for common folk, shared across the religious community. More imported and prestigious mead would be consumed by elites, like priests and nobles, who are more "imperial" and outside the true local community. These distinctions are reinforced by the drinking of mead, but to reject your local low-quality swill as a commoner would be seen as breaking a valuable community bond.
My World: Elvish Wine, the direct parallel
The elvish kingdom of my world is the home of some of the highest-prestige wine. This essentially mirrors Standage's Roman wine, so I'm not going to go into much detail: it is a marker of hierarchy, not cultural unity. It shares all the Standage traits of wine--it is regionally produced, and it is the expansion and growth of trade networks throughout the elvish lands that makes wine widespread.
Some of these people were under occupation by the empire in antiquity, where they would have certainly been introduced to mead. High-caliber mead certainly would have taken a strong foothold, in many ways supplanting wine's popularity as the "elite drink" in the ways that Germanic peoples put wine in high esteem as symbolic of their elite overlords in Rome.
The elvish court of my world is all subtle barbs and suggestions, inspired vaguely by Orlais from Dragon Age and by the reputation of the medieval French court. As a result, I think this competing tension between wine and mead could very well have persisted through the centuries, down to the present day. Drinking fine mead is a sign of support for closer ties with the old empire, or at the very least, peace; it is a sign of support for autocracy and for imperial absolutism. Drinking fine wine is a sign of support for nationalism and opposition to the human empire. Meanwhile, servants and commoners drink far poorer wines, while a commoner drinking mead would be seen as a major faux pas--it would be seen as overly aspirational, as desiring to social climb into elitehood in a society still rooted in noble privilege that frowns on that. Readers who participated in my elf-kingdom campaign, does this sound right to you?
Outside of the elvish kingdom, however, wine in my world should not carry the reputation for "prestige" that Standage gives it. Instead, mead would be deemed the drink of nobility across the continent, as they look back to the days of a broad empire in the way that much of European history is built in the shadow of Rome.
Orcish "Wine"
I do want to take a stab at connecting Standage's claims and framework with a non-Europe influence. The article on the discovery of potential wine residue in ancient North America really intrigued me. Still, in my world, I want to think critically about different continents having different native plants and animals (especially as I don't think my world had a Pangea stage, which means a lot of plants would have struggled to spread across continents).
Researching other fruits that could be used to make wine, I saw that loquats are fairly popular among home winemakers in the present day. They're native to Asia, but they're well-suited to places like California and Louisiana. They are native to "cool hills", but can grow in warmer and wetter conditions (like Louisana), which makes them perfect in my mind for my orcs, who range from mountains to plains to river valleys in a warm region that is not quite tropical. I imagine they began in the mountains and then spread into the lower valleys nearby, which is actually pretty reminiscent of old Mesopotamian/Armenian early viticulture as Standage describes it.
My orcish culture is far more communal than rigidly hierarchical, which means that I want to model their loquat viticulture after that of Greece rather than Rome. That means that loquat "wine"--I'll think of a better name for it later--is largely going to be drunk communally. It would be served before gatherings where philosophy and politics might be debated, and it would usually be served watered down, with the aim of straddling the line where alcohol would loosen tongues without turning rowdy. My orcish governments tend to focus on community town meetings on the local level, and so opening each of those assemblies with everyone drinking from a communal vat of loquat wine--symbolically placing them on the same level, tying them together with the bonds of hospitality--sounds totally in line with what I had in mind and with ancient Greece.
The other part of my worldbuilding prompts was how this beverage serves to exclude or differentiate, and my orcs have a perfect neighbor for it: my hunter-gatherer goblins, who I discussed last week. As hunter-gatherers, the goblins have no alcohol of their own. However, I do think that they'd likely have access to orcish loquat wine through the trade networks that wine symbolizes. However, like the Germans to the Greeks, goblins drink the wine without watering it, just a demonstration of their "barbarism" to the orcs.
I also have several orcish subcultures, and I think their consumption patterns of loquat-wine also probably inform their relative "civilization vs barbarism" metrics when one group thinks about the others. But I'm pushing 3000 words, so I should wrap this up instead of delving too deep into orcish internal distinctions.
Conclusion
I hope everyone enjoyed this section on wine and trade networks. Please share YOUR wine-equivalent beverage worldbuilding in the comments of the post, answering the two questions I raised.
Remember that you can follow along with the series by subscribing to get the blog delivered weekly to your inbox (or get a roundup at the end of the month), and you can follow along with the actual book that I'm drawing this from by picking up Tom Standage's History of the World in Six Glasses on Bookshop.org (all while supporting independent bookstores and the blog!)
Next week, we get into the topic of colonialism--something that may not be present in your world but is in mine–with the birth of liquor and spirits and rum.