Book Review: "A History of the World in 6 Glasses" by Tom Standage (2005)

 

"Drinks have a closer connection to the flow of history than is generally acknowledged, and a greater influence on its course."

This really isn't a "review" I guess, but just a little "hey, this book exists, check it out!" It was published all the way back in 2005 and I recently picked it up at my local library.

The book is hella fun. It's called "A History of the World in 6 Glasses" and goes through the history of mankind broken down into the beverages at the time they ruled the world above all else. From beer in the stone age, to wine, to distilled spirits, to coffee, to tea, to the soda of today.

It goes over how and why the beverage rose to be so popular, the culture and consumption habits of those who drank them, and how they changed the course of history. There are so many cool things in here that I never knew, such as coffee houses creating the stock exchange and tea being the drink that fueled the Industrial Revolution. As a history nerd in the beverage industry, I loved it. 

"Baths, wine and sex ruin our bodies. But what makes life worth living except baths, wine and sex?" - Corpus Inscriptionis VI, 15258

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Book Review: "Ancient Wine: the Search for the Origins of Viniculture" by Patrick E. McGovern

I hope you like pottery! Like, really really like pottery! A lot! Because that's what Ancient Wine by Patrick E. McGovern is pretty much all about. This is because when you go back thousands and thousands of years, before writing, all we can hope to know about ancient wine is through the pottery that survived and the residue that remains within.

Patrick E. McGovern is the scientific director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. According to this book, he and his laboratory have made some pretty incredible discoveries on the ancient history of wine, including the discovery that wine has been around for thousands of years before we thought.

Ancient Wine doesn't read like a story about wine, starting from the beginning and moving forward. Ancient Wine reads like the story of McGovern's career, going in the order of as things were revealed to him through his work. Although McGovern TRIES to keep it by place and time, it very much does bounce around all over the place a lot, so going into this it helps to know your ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamian civilizations and their timelines.

Not only does Ancient Wine go into the history of wine (and beer, as well) in ancient times, but also the science behind the knowledge and technology that we use today to find what kind of beverage was in that pottery and how we know how old it is. Very, very cool book that will teach you a lot of very, very cool things you didn't know you wanted know.

(Originally published in 2003, this reprint from 2019 includes an Afterword by the author to catch you up on all of the updates in what we have learned and what is new in archaeological technology since the original printing.)

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Book Review: "All Our Broken Idols" by Paul Cooper

This book has nothing to do with wine (I believe alcohol is only mentioned maybe twice), but it was so good that I just had to share. As a huge fan of history, I was listening to the Fall of Civilizations Podcast's episode about Assyria when at the end the host, Paul Cooper, mentioned he wrote a novel that takes place during the reign of Ashurbanipal. So of course, I had to get it.

All Our Broken Idols actually takes place in the same place but in two different times. Yes, one story takes place in ancient Ninevah in the 640's BCE, but the other takes place in modern Mosul in 2014 CE.

In the ancient story, Aurya is the main character. She's a teenager living in an Assyrian village. It appears to me that her older brother has some form of autism; he literally remembers everything, every little detail about every moment, goes into sensory overload quite often, and is a gifted artist. When their father suddenly dies (I won't tell you how) just before he was to sell a huge rock to King Ashurbanipal, they travel with the King and his men to the city of Ninevah to start anew.

In the modern day story, Katya is the main character. She's a 26 year old archeobiologist, meaning she's an archeologist who specializes in plants (very important in archeology). Her father was from Iraq and moved to England where he met her mother. But he was a reporter and about 10 years earlier he went back to Iraq to report on the conflicts there, and he never came back. Rather than going to Greece for a site to work at, she chose the ruins of Ninevah to search for her roots and possibly her father. And if you were paying attention to world events back then, you know what happened to Mosul back in 2014.

The writing and storytelling is wonderful, and the two stories intertwine beautifully, culminating together perfectly. I ripped through this book so quick it's not even funny because I couldn't put it down. Highly HIGHLY recommended.

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Book Review: "Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization" by Edward Slingerland

Just by going back into the articles on this blog, it should be no secret to you that I'm a huge science and history geek. But I'm especially geeky about evolution and the cosmos. I've delved into so much Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Richard Dawkins that it's ridiculous. Clearly, I'm also a wine geek, so when you combine those things together I'M IN!!!

I saw Drunk while browsing Barnes & Noble one day, trying not to lose my six year old and making sure the books my thirteen year old wanted were appropriate. I was like "Cool! A history of our drunk asses! SOLD!" but it was not like what I was expecting. Rather than accounts throughout history on our said drunken asses, this book asks the question:

How has evolution not eliminated our enjoyment of getting drunk? It's clearly harmful to your organs, leaves you with awful hangovers, and is a very common cause of death around the world, so you'd think those who refrained from booze for whatever reason would produce more offspring, and through evolution we'd have some reaction that would stop us from consuming ethanol. 

But this book goes through it all from the very beginning, and it goes deep into who we truly are as a species. How our primate lineage and instincts mixed with our worker-ant mentality and societies butt heads within our heads often, and because of this we need to shut down our prefrontal cortex to open up our creativity and inspirations.

Drinking and dancing together at the ancient ceremony or local pub builds trust and creates friendships. This has made the act of community drinking an important part of the human experience, and lead to the great ideas and progress we have made throughout history.

But the book also goes into a relatively new threat: the rise of ABV in wine (from 5% average to 12% average) and beer (we're seeing it get even bigger now with craft beer), the creation of distilled spirits (allowing you to get sloshed very quickly), and the ability to completely isolate ones self (drinking alone). Is this why evolution hasn't done anything about alcoholism yet? Is this drastic change to the alcohol we consume, the advancement of our technology, and social changes too new? And if we keep going in the direction we are, will evolution react?

At one point he wonders if there should be a different legal age for buying and consuming distilled spirits than wine and beer, and to me that completely makes sense. An earlier age for the lower ABV products of beer and wine would create a greater appreciation and respect for drinking, and there would be less abuse when the brain is developed enough for distilled spirits. For defending this, he uses the drinking cultures of southern Europe vs northern Europe.

Slingerland sticks up for the community pub and believes it's worth a hit to the liver to enjoy yourself, because if you can't enjoy yourself and your friends and be merry, then what do you have? But he takes a step back... well, many steps back and then moves closer and closer to a step back, to really analyze what's going on with us and our love of intoxication. He sees it through the eyes of both Spock and Kirk, and he's great at it.

I recommend this book to all the science, history, and wine geeks out there. It will reel you in and not let go until you're done.

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Audio Article - The Adventures of Aglianico

Get the complete history of one of the most ancient wine grapes still around: Aglianico. From the Ancient Greeks, to the Romans, to the Normans, to Mussolini, to today. Campania, Italy's Aglianico has seen it all. Read The Adventures of Aglianico - A Complete History of an Ancient Wine article originally published on June 4th, 2014

Listen on Anchor / Apple / Google / Spotify

Breaker / Overcast / Pocket Casts / Radio Public / RSS

*** Help Support the Podcast ***

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Wine Bloggers Off-Topic #3: Most inspirational historical figures

And we're back with another installment of Wine Bloggers Off-Topic! It became apparent that this would be better served as a bi-monthly thing rather than monthly because, ya know, life is busy and even monthly comes up real quick on us all. ALTHOUGH! Recently I was inspired by seeing my favorite quote of all time pop up when a friend shared it on Facebook, so maybe we could do one next month with just our favorite quote? No need for a write-up or explanation or anything, just the quote. What do you guys think?

The point of this series is for all of us to learn more about those in our online wine community beyond their taste in wine, and today it's all about the historical figure that inspires us the most. As always, they are in order of submission.

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Just Brew It, Part Two: Making Sake

If you haven't read Part One: A brief history of Sake then go ahead and check it out. Or not. It's not required reading for this article, but Sake's history is a fascinating one.

In the next two parts of this trilogy I'm going to give you a run-down on the things that you NEED to know if you want to start getting into Sake while I consciously leave out the things you don't (unless you want to become an expert), and here's why:

Sake is actually not a hard thing to understand, and learning about it has felt the least like work than anything else in my alcohol related education. What makes it hard is the words and terminology. Myself as an English-only speaking person, at least with wine I'm mostly dealing with languages that are also based on Latin like French and Italian, so learning things like Methode Champenoise is not a big deal. However, Japanese is a whole other thing and the terminology can be pretty hard to grasp. For example: Seimaibuai. See what I mean?

I have thoroughly enjoyed this Sake adventure that I've been on and I want you to get as interested in this category as I am, so I'm going to do my best to provide some Sake education without scaring you away with an overload of information. But that also doesn't mean we're not gonna get nerdy. So let's begin! Welcome to the world of Sake!

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All Hail Riesling, The Ruler of the Rhine and Our Hearts!

May is Riesling Month on TheWineStalker.net!

German wine is a wonder and dangerously close to not being possible. The position it holds on the planet and its altitude makes it cold for most of the year, so the plant growing season is longer and more drawn out than most wine varieties can handle, and they won't ripen in time before winter. But thanks to the long days, the vines see plenty of sun. The best wine growing regions in the country have slate soil and steep slopes along the Rhine River and its tributaries like Ahr, Nahe, and especially Mosel. The slate soil absorbs both direct sunlight and the reflected sunlight off of the rivers to warm the grapes above, and those rivers also help to moderate temperatures. But even still, it takes some special grapes and vines to handle the German climate.

So the entire world is lucky that Germany spawned one of the noblest of grapes: Riesling. Physically the vines's tough wood can handle the climate like a champion, and its fruit has the right amount of sugar and acidity to make world class wine in it as well. This is the varietal that makes me smile more than any other. Let's take a bow for Riesling, the ruler of the Rhine and our hearts!

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Just Brew It, Part One: A Brief History of Sake

Sake brings me right back to 2004 when I was 24 years old and played my most memorable EA Sports NHL franchise season ever. I took the Columbus Blue Jackets, made them even worse, played on the hardest setting, sucked hard for a big chunk of the season, barely made it into the playoffs, and won the Cup in seven games in each playoff series... all while drinking Gekkeikan Sake in a mug on the rocks.

That's not how you think a history of Sake article would start, right? Hey. That's how I learned to appreciate Sake, and now I love it. Recently I had one that goes for $450 retail and it was INCREDIBLE. I just got a package from Tippsy, which is basically like a wine club dedicated to premium Sake, containing three Sakes that I'll be reviewing this coming Thursday. (This was Tippsy Sake Box #1, and there's since been a follow up with Tippsy Sake Box #2)

Even though Sake has the "rice wine" nickname due to its final product similarities with wine such as profile and alcohol percentages, technically it's a beer because it's brewed and made from grain, and in this case the grain is rice. Bud Light, which uses a significant amount of rice in it's production, actually does have a slight Sake flavor.

Sake runs deep in the culture of Japan and Japan runs deep in the culture of Sake. But it actually didn't originate there and it's certainly not staying there. Sake began in China, the indigenous land of rice. And, in today's world, you might be surprised to buy a bottle of Sake that you assumed was Japanese until you flip the bottle over to find that it was actually made in Oregon.

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Heroes of Wine: Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE)

Pliny the Elder has been mentioned more times on this blog than anybody else. I even made a meme about him. So when it was time for me to finally get back to writing monthly articles on the blog, it was a no-brainer that a biography on this guy would be the perfect return into the swing of things.

Pliny's entrance into this world is not well documented. Historians have pieced it together through fragments of secondary sources. He could have born Gaius Plinius Secundus, the son of equestrian Gaius Plinius Celer and his wife Marcella (Equestrians were the middle-ranking nobility in ancient Rome). He could have been born in Verona, Italy. The evidence is much more solid that he was born 140 miles away in Como, however. We can assume his birth year was 23 CE because his nephew, Pliny the Younger, mentioned his age when he died tragically in 79 CE. Do we all know our uncle's exact age? Hell no!

"The only certainty is that nothing is certain." - Pliny the Elder

Although nearly all of his works have been lost, Pliny still made sure that future generations would know about him. Sadly, no contemporary description, sculpture, or image of him survives, so we don't actually know anything about his appearance. He wasn't one of the most prolific of the great Roman authors, but he is a key part of our understanding for life as a Roman of his time. Also, the man loved wine and beer and wrote about the making and consumption of both.

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Bordeauxing Rioja: The Origin Stories of Manuel Quintano & Luciano de Murrieta

December is A Very Rioja Christmas on TheWineStalker.net!

MARQUÉS DE MURRIETA
OAK BARRELS
IMAGE CREDIT: expansion.com

For my article this month I really didn't just want to do a "history of Rioja" or some expansive long read like that. I wanted a story. I wanted to write about a specific person or event with focus. 

I found many interesting stories about Rioja and the people in its history while searching for a subject. But the origin stories of the two guys that brought Bordeaux influence and oak barrel aging to the region caught my eye and sucked me in. One of them had a short success before pricing laws and war eliminated his efforts. Decades later, the other would make it stick.

They've been producing wine in Rioja since the Phoenicians. So about three-thousand years, give or take. The region doesn't have a great geographic position for exporting its wines elsewhere, but it does have a great geographic position to grow vines and make wine. Starting in the the middle ages, Rioja found itself in the path of a popular religious pilgrimage. It's called el Camino de Santiago, known as The Way of Saint James in English, and it takes believers to the city of Santiago de Compostela where, supposedly, the body of Saint James resides. Pilgrims would drink the local wine while passing through Rioja and end up spreading the word of its excellence. Rioja was built on a word-of-mouth reputation instead of export power.

But before Manuel Quintano came along in the 1700's, the wine was still stored underground in clay vessels. Like the vast majority of wine in the entire history of wine, it turned vinegary relatively quick and did not travel well. Much of it spoiled completely and had to be dumped. Rioja needed an upgrade.

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Heroes of Wine: André Tchelistcheff (1901-1994)

They called him "the Maestro". By definition this means "a distinguished musician, especially a conductor of classical music" or "a great or distinguished figure in any sphere". He was great. He was distinguished. He conducted beautiful music in the form of wine. Earlier in his career they called him "the doctor" because of his scientific approach to winemaking and his uncanny ability to cure wine with defects. And then there was that white lab coat he loved to wear.

He was also known as the "the dean of American winemaking" because he really was the head of the university. He was the educator. The absolute most important thing about this man and his legacy was not only his ability to be a highly effective and inspiring mentor, but also his willingness and love of doing so. Combine that with all of his knowledge and talents and you have the most influential winemaker of modern history: André Tchelistcheff (pronounced CHEL-uh-cheff)

André was born in Russia, trained in France, lifted California to greatness, and took off Washington State's training wheels. He was a chain smoker. He was a ladies man. He was... tiny. There are several different accounts on his height; anywhere from 4'11" to 5'3". Regardless, this giant of a man was even shorter than me (and I'm pretty short). But he commanded a room. And his stature was always at attention, or "ramrod straight" as Randal Caparoso put it in "Napa Valley - A legacy of greatness".

Robert Mondavi said that "He is a fascinating man, brilliant, stimulating, creative - a catalyst for the world of wine", while Mike Grgich said that "He had a Slavic heart, which is very soft". Robert and Mike are just two of the many legends that André mentored. And to think that almost didn't happen. André should have died in battle as a young man, and we're all very lucky that he didn't.

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Book Review: Wine & War by Don and Petie Kladstrup

"To be a Frenchman means to fight for your country and its wine." - André Terrail

The problem with an addictive quick read is that you're done with it that much faster because you couldn't put the damn thing down. Then you're sad when you've finished in just a few days. That's exactly what Wine & War will do to you. And because I really want you to read this quick read (248 pages), I'm making this review a quick read as well. I'll tell you some cool things to perk your interest and then dip out! Get the damn book!

Authors Don and Petie Kladstrup talked to survivors of the World War II Nazi occupation of France and put their stories together in this book. They all went through different experiences and hardships, but the one thing all of these people have in common was wine.

The Hugel's of Alsace, the Drouin's of Burgundy, the Taittinger's of Champagne, and many many more.

Despite the Germans believing that the French had the strongest army in the world, the leaders of France and its military were so scarred from the loss of young men that they experienced in the First World War that they decided on a deal to be occupied rather than go through that horror again. When the Germans rolled in, however, the wine people went to work.

They hid their most prized wines immediately, knowing that the Germans would take them and, more importantly, not appreciate them. They built walls in their cellars, closing in the wines behind them, and had their children collect spiders so they'd spin webs to make the wall look older. Dust from old carpets were collected to put on cheap bottles to make them appear rare.

"Generals rarely have the power to build, they more often have the power to destroy." - Pierre Taittinger to General Dietrich von Choltitz

The first thing that Nazi leader Hermann Goering did in Paris, right at the very beginning of occupation, was drive to a famous restaurant to drink a famous vintage, only to be told they were sold out. After checking their cellar, he found that they were telling the truth. Only they weren't telling the truth, and the vintage was hiding behind a wall only feet away.

Once the occupation was better organized, a system was put into place for winemakers to sell their wine to the Germans. The chapter on the Weinfuhrers, who negotiated with the winemakers, is probably my favorite.

And that's not all. Not by a long shot. Vineyards and houses were taken over by the Germans for their own uses. The famous Haut-Brion in Bordeaux was turned into a rifle range. One vineyard owner spread rat droppings all over her house so the Germans wouldn't take it; and it worked. Other families hid their Jewish friends. With copper being taken by the Nazi's, a young man turned his barn into a chemistry lab to try and create copper sulfate to apply to vineyards.

Their lives were rough, although easier in some places. Goering said that the French could live off of 1,200 calories a day. That's half the calories that you need to survive. For the elderly it was only 850 calories. France was literally starving. And those calories included the wine that had always been so important to the French.

"What helped a lot was the wine. As the food grew scarcer, we drank more and more of it. Occasionally on Saturday evenings, we would buy ten or twelve bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Hermitage, Mercurey, Moulin-à-Vent, Julienas, Chambertin, Bonnes Mares or Musigny and have an evening of drinking and singing." - Verian Fry

One of the greatest stories here is about a Prisoner of War concentration camp for French officers that blackmailed their Nazi captors into allowing them to have a wine dinner. The wine dinner turned into a two week celebration of the wines of France, leading up to everybody getting just a few ounces of wine at the main event dinner. That story in itself is worth picking this book up.

I could go on and on about all the great moments in the book but I'm going to stop right there before I even get to the liberation.

The Kladstrup's did an amazing job in telling these people's stories, and organizing them in a way to form one overall successive one. It's simply an amazing read. If you're any fan of wine, or if you're any fan of history, you absolutely must read Wine & War.

BUY WINE & WAR HERE!

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A Brief History of 90+ Cellars - Wine Buyers in Boston

What if I told you to your face that you could purchase a $25 bottle of wine for $9 to $12? How about a $75 bottle of wine for $30? You'd probably call the cops because an uninvited strange man has suddenly appeared in your home, but suppose you got past that and listened to what I was saying. You'd either say I was crazy and to get the eff out, or you would ask me where you could sign up.

Through 90+ Cellars these things are possible. This is what they do. That $25 bottle that you can get for $9 to $12 is their Lot 53 Cabernet Sauvignon from Mendoza, Argentina. This is one of the "lots" that they've been releasing with great success for years. That $75 bottle for $30 was their Lot 95 Super Cuvée 2012 out of Napa, California; a part of their Collection Series that features high end products on crazy deals just like that.

I've been a fan of 90+ since the very first time I tried their wines, which was probably soon after they were established. Hell, their famous orange sunglasses are my preferred facial accessory and optical protection from the solar intensity of the summer. They're so stylish and sturdy.

Because 90+ is so awesome, the entire month of May this year is dedicated to them and I'll be reviewing plenty of their wine. So let's go over how they came to be and how they're able to sell wine at such a great discounted price.

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Heroes of Wine: Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)

There have been so many great minds throughout history that changed the course of mankind with their discoveries and innovations, but none may be as important to the lives of the people in the modern world today than Louis Pasteur, one of the founding fathers of microbiology.

LOUIS PASTEUR
IMAGE CREDIT: clccharter.org

Because of Louis Pasteur, your ancestors were able to receive a rabies vaccination instead of dying horribly from rabies after 1885. His rabies vaccine would lead to other vaccines that save lives, like the 1955 polio vaccine by Jonas Stalk. And most importantly of all, because of Louis Pasteur, you are able to enjoy your favorite wines and beers today.

So let's learn about a legend. And to help me with this article on the life of Louis Pasteur, I've asked Lori Budd of Dracaena Wines to contribute. Lori is a winemaker with a history in biology, and there is nobody else that I would rather see do the honors.

(LORI) As a child, Louis Pasteur asked his father “What makes a wolf or a dog mad, and why do people die when mad dogs bite them?” Obviously, this question was asked because Louis Pasteur had unfortunately seen this occur in his childhood. Now, I am not going to say that these deaths totally traumatized him, but if we take a look at his life’s achievements, these deaths did make a lasting effect on him, whether he consciously recognized it or not. 

As a scientist, I admire the predecessors and applaud how well they achieved their goals in the time that they did. Louis Pasteur ranks as one of my all time favorites. In all honesty, if you are familiar with his life, he was a pompous son of a bitch, but sometimes that’s what you need to be in order to be successful. He started his scientific career looking at crystals under a microscope. He was a chemist not an immunologist- that didn’t come until later. At the age of 26, he discovered there were four distinct kinds of tartaric acid. This discovery gave him a taste of fame, and he not only liked it, he craved it! (/LORI)

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Edmond Halley

This is Edmond Halley. He is among the greatest scientific minds and most influential people in history. As he died at the age of 85, he enjoyed his last glass of wine.

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Jeroboams & Balthazars, Part 3: Wine Bottles of Colossal Proportions

This is the conclusion of a series on the stories behind the names of wine bottle sizes, and we're now left with the biggest of the big. These are the bottles that may require some assistance to physically pick up.

DAVID AND GOLIATH
IMAGE CREDIT: huffingtonpost.com

In Part 1: Wine Bottles of Typical Proportions, everything from the 187.5 milliliter piccolo to the 3 liter double-magum was covered. This included several hypotheses on how the 750 milliliter became the standard bottle today. I also, in the end, gave an explanation on why this was a 3-part series instead of being one, flowing, easily accessible source. Part 1 is a completely different animal and a much lighter read than the following two.

Part 2: Wine Bottles of Biblical Proportions started off with the Christian necessity of wine for worship, leading to better quality wine everywhere it spread. Because of this everything above 3 liters with the exception of one are named after legendary and powerful characters from Abrahamic mythology. Then it was the turn of anything from the 4.5 liter Jeroboam / Rehoboam to the 15 liter Nebuchadnezzar.

If you read Part 1 then you know the backstory on how the idea to do this was planted into my brain. And you know from both parts and some of my other writings that I'm on the Richard Dawkins level of religious belief. So why would I actually spend months with the Bible to write this series? The answer is because I love history and even (or especially) the mythologies that people still cling to today are an important part of our history both culturally and as a species as a whole.

But what good to anybody does it serve to get this in-depth? You could argue that most of the content of Part 2 and Part 3 are just ancient stories organized in a bottle size format and none of this really has to do with wine at all. And you can get plenty of simple lists of the bottle size names in books and on the internet, right?

My answer to that is this: I'm a true believer in understanding things. I just didn't learn how to make French toast, I learned that it was invented by the French living in poverty to rehydrate stale bread. I just didn't accept Christmas lights as a tradition, I learned why it's a tradition and that they're meant to mimic the moonlight reflecting off of icicles. Telling somebody that gravity exists does absolutely nothing. But tell somebody why gravity exists and now you're really providing something useful. By the same token, if you tell somebody that an 18 liter bottle is a Melchior then you've just given out information that only creates more questions. Is that piece of data enough for you? That an 18 liter bottle is a Melchior? Because that isn't enough for me. And speaking of Melchior, that's where we're starting right now...

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Jeroboams & Balthazars, Part 2: Wine Bottles of Biblical Proportions

Throughout the history of wine there have been countless variations of vessels to carry and store it. As we've already seen, there are many different names that have been used to describe specific glass wine bottles (apart from simply calling them by how much volume they carry). The title of this three part series, Jeroboams & Balthazars, are just two of them. The point of this series is to not only show the names of these bottles that are still in production, but also to tell the stories of for whom specific bottles were named after and why that name was chosen.

NEBUCHADNEZZAR
IMAGE CREDIT: bibleencyclopedia.com

In Part 1: Wine Bottles of Typical Proportions everything below 3 liters was covered. And everything below 3 liters are easily summarized as a translation (piccolo means "small", magnum means "great") or just an old unit of measurement (like the chopine). In other words: light reading. When you go above that 3 liter bottle, things change.

Wine is an essential part of Christian worship. And so you have Christians, particularly the Catholics, pretty much making all of the advancements in viticulture and winemaking for the vast majority of the last 2,000 years. Wherever Christianity spread, the wine got better. If they didn't make wine before, then vineyards started popping up. Of course, the monotheist institution caused other advancements to be set back hundreds to thousands of years but c'mon... wine is a necessity of life.

The people that named these impressively large bottles had larger-than-life characters from their religious faiths in mind. Who better to be the namesake of an enormous and heavy bottle of wine than a great king of Israel? Or a giant that tried to kill one of them? They may be characters from an ancient mythology that's still believed by many today, but there is no denying that these characters are legendary and have had influence in the course of world history. And, whether you're a theist or an atheist like myself, you have to admit that they're great stories.

And so we transition away from a double-magnum being twice the size of a magnum, and thus double-great, into something completely different. Now we delve into the world of the Christian Old Testament, AKA the Jewish Tanakh.

But before we begin, this blog comment was made by mgraves in Part 1: "What you should emphasize is how infrequently the the odd sizes are used. Most especially the very large bottles. It has been said that there have been more very large bottles of old Bordeaux sold than were ever known to be produced. Large bottles have played an important role in famous wine frauds." Thanks, mgraves! I was unaware of that fact!

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Jeroboams & Balthazars, Part 1: Wine Bottles of Typical Proportions

On a daily basis, the wine bottle sizes that you'll most likely encounter are the 750 milliliter and the 1.5 liter. They're known as the standard and the magnum, respectfully, and they fill the shelves of wine shops and aisles of liquor stores everywhere. You'll also see "splits" and smaller bottles in four packs regularly, with sparkling wine as the more common purchase in those formats. But did you know there's a 6 liter bottle? A 30 liter bottle?

STANDARD VS JEROBOAM

These smaller or larger bottles also have names that have been applied to them besides just a description of their volume or content. Their namesake, once you get over 3 liters, strictly comes from the kings and characters of ancient mythology. More specifically: the Tanakh of Judaism (the Old Testament of the Christian Bible). And one of those fellas, the biggest one of them all, is from Greek mythology. Hint: he likes gold.

Some of these characters after which these bottle sizes were named were real people implemented into the stories and some of them were completely fabricated or legendary figures embellished through religious text. But also some of these bottle names in the lesser sizes come from something else entirely, like the pleasantly small "piccolo".

A friend of mine, namely my personal history expert and special guest editor Graham Richardson, had come across, IIRC, the "Methuselah" six liter bottle. He messaged me asking if all of the bottle sizes for wine had Biblical names. After we began investigating the topic he stated "I think I smell an article." He was actually smelling nachos but an article was a good idea.

In the two and a half years I've been doing this, you should know that I don't do things simply and easily. So rather than just spit out the names of the bottle sizes with a blurb that says "Biblical King" or whatever, let's get into the stories of their namesakes.

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A Brief History of Market Vineyards

What were you doing in 2008? It's hard to believe it's already been eight years, right? I was 28 years old and on my fourth year of employment with Luke's of Cape Cod, but I finally found my love for wine in February of that year. Better late than never, so they say. From there I proceeded to obsessively educate myself on the beverage.

BOB BERTSCH AND
MATT REISENWEBER

Meanwhile in 2008, on the other side of the world, three guys were dining on the rooftop of the Beijing Hotel doing the normal boring social interaction stuff (ew, gross) until they were served a bad bottle of wine (ew, grosser). This brought up the discussion of how nice it would be to take this problem into their own hands and make great wine themselves. This idea in the brains of these three men is a bit different than most of us who jokingly say this, because they actually followed through with it and made it happen.

Matt Reisenweber, Daniel Schulte, and Steve Anderson went home to the states, brought Bob Bertsch in on it, and got the ball rolling with four owners. Schulte and Anderson were from Kansas City but this new winery would be planting its rootstock in Washington, the home state of Riesenweber and Bertsch.

Their new adventure needed a name and, because of their mutual backgrounds in the financial market, they decided on Market Vineyards. Their new adventure also needed a winemaker. They searched around Washington looking for the winemaker that would best bring their vision into realization, and the man for the job was clearly Charlie Hoppes.

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