It was in the midst of the hangover resulting from the 2008 Greek debt crisis, and I was packing up a case of wine for a customer when I noticed I had stowed an Assyrtiko from the Greek island of Santorini adjacent to a Riesling from Germany’s Mosel region. I quickly thought better of it and moved them further apart. These days, I mused, better not to put the Germans too close to the Greeks . . .
These were the days when a series of rather brutal belt-tightening policies were forced on the Greek government by northern banks, determined to recoup their losses. Greeks who were seeing their pensions evaporate and savings accounts wiped out rioted. To be fair, it wasn’t just Germany and Greece who were at daggers drawn. The entirety of the prosperous states of the European north were putting the squeeze on their poorer relations in the south, with the predictable result that the Putters Upon were heartily resented by the Put Upon. The northerners referred to these policies rather tamely as “austerity measures.” But I can think of at least one instance – admittedly in the rather distant past – when northern Europe offered an austerity package the south was happy to take.
By the middle of the first century BCE, Romans had conquered all Gaul and Britain and in doing so pushed the boundaries of their nascent empire to the banks of the Rhine. By this time, the Romans had already been addicted to wine for three hundred years, at least since they turned a dietary corner by abandoning wheaten porridge to become a race of bread-eaters.
As part of a vigorous program of cultural imperialism, Rome introduced the wine vine into the northern reaches of Europe where it had never gone before. As wine began to flow from these high-latitude vineyards south to urban centers of the Mediterranean it was clear that here was something almost altogether new: wine that was more delicate and transparent than anything ever made in the south. When Roman physicians first encountered it, they used the word austeritas – harshness or severity – to describe its unfamiliar, somewhat aloof character.
Wine was a subject of particular interest to doctors in the classical world both as an important element of diet and a therapeutic in its own right. Physicians scrambled to work this new kind of wine into their classifications, and touted its health benefits.
With surprising speed these nimbler, more digestible, and less-alcoholic wines were the height of fashion among the Empire’s food snobs, eclipsing both the ponderously ripe crus of Campania and the sumptuous luxury cuvées of the eastern Mediterranean. in step with a shift in viticulture’s center of gravity, wine underwent a dramatic makeover.
It’s curious that even today individual experience seems to follow this historic arc. Those airy, savory, elegant wines from vineyards at viticulture’s latitudinal limits are often the last to appeal to wine drinkers whose appreciation of them comes only after initial flings with richer, fruitier California or Mediterranean versions. Our feeling is that some of the most exciting wines in the world – both white and red – derive from vineyards that push the limits of horticultural possibility, and that a certain cool reserve and modest scale are responsible for some of the most exciting food matches we know.
Climate change is already provoking the wine world to rethink just about everything it knows about how to go about its business. Another great northern migration may well in the cards.
-Stephen Meuse