The demise of Roman political and military authority led to a reversal of wine’s fortunes in Europe. This was not because successors, such as the Franks, Vandals, Goths, Visigoths, and Huns, eschewed wine; rather it resulted from the unsettled conditions that plagued the countryside for several centuries. Vineyards were difficult to maintain in the face of repeated raiding and pillaging, and markets all but disappeared as cities went into decline with the disruption of trade. Wine growing persevered, if on a much reduced scale, and it managed to do so largely because of its role in the Christian liturgy. Wine was needed in order to celebrate the mass, and thus the numerous bishoprics established following Rome’s conversion managed to keep small vineyards in production during the difficult times of the middle of the first millennium A. D.
Of longer-term significance, however, were the monasteries, which provided bastions of security amid general insecurity. In terms of wine, the most significant monastic orders were the Benedictines and their offshoot the Cistercians, followed by the Carthusians. Experiments by the monks led to new cultivars and to improvements in numerous aspects of viticulture, especially with regard to site selection. Many of today’s most celebrated vineyards in such places as Burgundy, the Reingau, and the Mosel were laid out by monks nearly a thousand years ago.
By contrast, from Persia through western Asia across northern Africa and into Iberia, viticulture was confronted by the advance of Islam and the Koranic injunction against drinking alcohol in any form. Although the spread of Islam was very swift, the elimination of wine growing proceeded much more slowly. Minority Christian and Jewish communities often were allowed to continue to use the beverage largely for the tax revenues wine provided. Thus during the early centuries of Islamic rule, the ban on alcohol varied in terms of how rigorously it was enforced. It never seems to have taken a strong hold in Iberia, and consequently wine growing continued there without serious interruption during the period of Moorish rule. But wine in western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean was under greater pressure, and with the rise to power of the Ottomans, it virtually disappeared over much of the area.
Although Norse raids had slowed the pace of vineyard developments in Europe, expansion was once more under way by the beginning of the twelfth century, even in such northerly locales as the Low Countries and England. The monasteries continued with their plantings and were joined in this endeavor by noble estates, many of which employed wine-growing specialists. Local demand was expanding as wine, at least in Western Christendom, became a more common drink among the populace at large. It was a substitute for unsafe drinking water and widely prescribed as a medication for a variety of ailments. In addition, profits could be gained from exports, particularly to the trading states of the Baltic and North Seas. Much of the wine headed in this direction seems to have come from the Rhineland, including Franconia and Alsace.
World History
