Most likely, wine accompanies a person from the moment one of our prehistoric ancestors ate some rotten fruit and felt a short-term euphoria after that. Having shared his happiness with his fellow tribesmen, this unknown hero became the ancestor of winemaking.
People began to consume fermented (fermented) grape juice much later. But still not too late to determine where the name of the drink comes from. Both Armenians, Georgians and Romans claim the championship. In the Russian language, the word "wine", most likely, came from Latin. Obvious borrowing in Russian has acquired an expansive, as far as possible, interpretation: wine began to be called everything alcohol stronger than beer. The hero of the story “The Golden Calf” called a bottle of vodka “a quarter of bread wine”. And yet, let's remember the fats about wine in its classical interpretation as a drink made from fermented grapes.
1. The life of the vine is constant overcoming. The hotter the climate, the deeper its roots go (sometimes tens of meters). The deeper the roots, the more species they grow, the more varied the mineralization of future fruits. Large temperature swings and soil poverty are also considered beneficial. These are also the ingredients of a good wine.
2. In the tomb of Tutankhamun, they found sealed amphorae with wine with inscriptions about the time of production of the drink, the winemaker and an assessment of the quality of the product. And for counterfeiting wine in Ancient Egypt, the perpetrators were drowned in the Nile.
3. The collection of the "Massandra" association in the Crimea contains 5 bottles of wine of the 1775 harvest. This wine is Jerez de la Frontera and is officially recognized as the oldest in the world.
4. At the end of the 19th century, European winemaking took a hard hit. Seedlings infected with grape phylloxera, an insect that eats the roots of grapes, were brought from America. Phyloxera spread throughout Europe up to the Crimea and caused colossal damage to winegrowers, many of whom even moved to Africa. It was possible to cope with phylloxera only by crossing European grape varieties with American ones, which were immune to this insect. But it was not possible to win a complete victory - winegrowers are still either growing hybrids or using herbicides.
5. White wine has a strong antibacterial effect, the mechanism of which is still unknown. It is impossible to explain this property by the alcohol content in wine - its concentration is too low. Most likely, the matter is in the presence of tannins or dyes in the white wine.
6. A sediment in a vintage port is not a sign that you have been shod with rubbish. In a good port, he must appear in the fourth year of aging. The main thing is not to pour this wine from the bottle. It must be poured into a decanter (the procedure is called “decantation”), and only then pour into glasses. In other wines, sediment appears later and also indicates the quality of the product.
7. Very few wines improve with age. In general, ready-to-drink wines do not improve with aging.
8. The reasons why the volume of a standard wine bottle is exactly 0.75 liters has not been precisely established. One of the most popular versions says that when exporting wine from England to France, barrels with a capacity of 900 liters were first used. When switching to bottles, it turned out to be 100 boxes of 12 bottles each. According to the second version, the French "Bordeaux" and the Spanish "Rioja" were poured into barrels of 225 liters. This is exactly 300 bottles of 0.75 each.
9. A great reason to show yourself as a connoisseur is to use the words “bouquet” and “aroma” correctly. To put it simply, “aroma” is the smell of grapes and young wines; in more serious and mature products, the smell is called “bouquet”.
10. It is well known that regular consumption of red wine reduces the risk of heart disease. Already in the 21st century, it was found that red wines contain resveratol - a substance that plants secrete in order to fight fungi and other parasites. Animal experiments have shown that resveratol lowers blood sugar levels, strengthens the heart, and generally prolongs life. The effects of resveratol in humans have not yet been studied.
11. Inhabitants of the Caucasus, Spain, Italy and France traditionally eat food with exorbitant amounts of cholesterol. Moreover, they almost do not suffer from diseases of the cardiovascular system caused by cholesterol. The reason is that red wine completely removes cholesterol from the body.
12. Due to the poor climate, wine production in the world in 2017 fell by 8% and amounted to 250 million hectoliters (100 liters in 1 hectoliter). This is the lowest rate since 1957. We drank 242 hectoliters all over the world for a year. The leaders in production are Italy, France, Spain and the United States.
13. In Russia, wine production has also dropped significantly. The last time Russian winemakers produced less than 3.2 hectoliters was in 2007. The recession is also blamed on poor weather conditions.
14. One standard (0.75 liter) bottle of wine takes on average about 1.2 kg of grapes.
15. Every wine tasted has a “nose” (smell), “disc” (the upper plane of the drink in the glass), “tears” or “legs” (droplets flowing down the walls of the glass more slowly than the bulk of the drink) and “fringe” (outer edge of the disc). They say that even by analyzing these components, the taster can say a lot about wine without trying it.
16. Grape plantations in Australia appeared only in the middle of the 19th century, but business went so well that now growers with plantations of 40 hectares or less are considered by law to be small entrepreneurs.
17. Champagne wine is named after the French province of Champagne, where it is produced. But the port is not named after the country of origin. In contrast, Portugal arose around the city of Portus Gale (present-day Porto), which had a mountain with large caves for wine storage. This mountain was called "Port Wine". And the actual wine was christened by an English merchant, who realized that fortified wine can be delivered to his homeland easier than fine French wines.
18. The sailors of Christopher Columbus, who missed the wine, saw the Sargasso Sea and shouted joyfully: “Sarga! Sarga! ”. So in Spain they called the drink for the poor - slightly fermented grape juice. It had the same green-gray color, and was just as bubbling as the water surface lying in front of the sailors. Later it turned out that this was not the sea at all, and the algae floating in it had nothing to do with the grapes, but the name remained.
19. The English sailors were indeed given out on the voyage wine, which was included in the diet. However, this diet was rather meager: by order of the Admiralty, the sailor was given 1 pint (about 0.6 liters) of wine, diluted in a ratio of 1: 7, for a week. That is, the wine was banally poured into the water in order to protect it from damage. This was not some special atrocity of the British - about the same "treated" wine to sailors in all fleets. The ships needed healthy crews. Sir Francis Drake himself died of banal dysentery caused by rancid water.
20. The diet of Soviet submariners during the Great Patriotic War included 250 grams of red wine per day without fail. This portion was necessary due to the fact that the submarines of those times were very cramped, and the sailors had nowhere to move. This made it difficult for the gastrointestinal tract to work. To normalize this work, the submariners received wine. The reality of the existence of such a norm is confirmed by memoirs in which veterans of another complain that they were given alcohol instead of wine, or received “sour dry” instead of red.
