If this is the first time you have ever decided to become involved in winemaking, then you should know that winemaking isn’t an art that started some years ago, the art of winemaking has been around for millennia. History has it that the making of wine started in the area formerly known as Mesopotamia which is in present day Iran. Currently the largest and the best winemakers are in France and Italy. It was the Greeks who brought the art of winemaking as well as the recipes for some of the best wine to Italy. These Greeks stayed in Italy to make their wines because the grapes in Italy were much better than the quality of grapes that the Greeks were formerly used to. As time progressed the Romans took over the winemaking process from the Greeks and started making wine that tasted better than ever before.
As time passed, Romans started consuming much more wine than before. Everyone from slaves to noblemen started drinking. As long as there was food to be had, there was also wine to be drunk. However, because the content of alcohol in the wine was quite high, it had to be diluted with water in order to prevent the people from being drunk all the time. In those periods, the popular wine which everybody drank was of the white wine variety.
Wine tastes were experimented with to a great extent; different additions would be made to the wine in order to create different flavors. You had people mixing honey with their wine in order to create what was called mulsum. At other times people added, herb, spices and a number of additives to create different kinds of wine. One idea which wasn’t very smart was the addition of salt to the wine; it created a bitter wine which no one even liked. Some went as far as adding chalk to their wine, thinking that it would help reduce acid levels.
As time progressed, great efforts were made to improve the different methods involved in the winemaking process. Vines were no longer simply allowed to trail the ground and trellises were built for these vines to grow upwards. What this also achieved is that fewer grapes got wasted by getting rotten or mashed up on the wet ground. The Romans also studied about which grapes grew better in what territories and all this helped create a much better yield.
As things improved, the Romans learnt what vintage wines were all about. Wines that were left longer tended to taste a whole lot better. They started making wines that were from a decade old to two to three decades old. These wines were widely sought after. A number of other advances were made in the field of winemaking and they were the ones who introduced storing of wine in barrels and the putting of wine in glass bottles which were tightly corked. Certain people also believe that they were the first to make use of corks in their efforts.
However in the 1800s and 1900s, the quality of Italian wine reduced and a number of occurrences hampered the growth of the industry. It was until the Italian government stepped in and changed the whole face of the wine industry that things turned around for the better.
