Never forget the reason for the season, mortals.
Showing posts with label mythology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mythology. Show all posts
Saturday, December 16, 2017
Sunday, December 25, 2016
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...
Sunday, December 11, 2016
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 |
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!
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!
Sunday, December 4, 2016
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 |
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.
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.
Sunday, May 8, 2016
Tarhun Returns: The Resurgence of Turkish Wine
The Middle East was the origin of civilization, science and viticulture. The people here were once the leaders in human advancement and technology.
But as monotheism took control of the Middle East and Europe, many of these achievements stood still or regressed in the name of religion. Although one thing that improved through Christianity was wine, alcohol was prohibited in Islam. Places that had been making wine longer than anywhere else didn't have the chance to become the famous wine regions they deserved to be.
 |
| IMAGE SOURCE: winesofturkey.org |
Once controlled by the wine-guzzling Romans and Byzantines before the alcohol abstinent Ottomans, Turkey held on to its relationship with the vine through table grapes and raisins. It's a transcontinental country with its Thrace portion in Europe and Anatolia in Asia. Even though Turkey is often called the most liberal Muslim state, it's hasn't officially been a Muslim state in a very long time and it's really not liberal at all in comparison to the west. But Turkish wine is making a comeback on the actual market for you to buy, and it's making some noise.
It's safe to say that Turkey is the origin of wine itself, and not because the Genesis story has Noah planting a vineyard near Mount Ararat. We're talking about evidence going as far back as eight thousand years ago. In a more modern sense of winemaking and viticulture, there's plenty of archaeological finds from the Hittites four thousand years later, four thousand years ago today, on the Anatolia portion of Turkey. Wine cups and art that features wine made by the Hittites can be seen in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, in the capital city of Ankara.
The Hittites also had a god of wine that puts all the other gods of wine to shame.
