Think about the first wine you ever tasted. Can you remember the flavors, the label, the people who were with you? Place the bottle, in memory, on the left-hand side of a vastly wide, hypothetical shelf.
Now think of your most recent wine–the one that’s still open in your fridge, or whose empty bottle may presently be sitting in the recycling bin at Olive Garden. Summon it to mind and place it on the shelf’s far right edge.
Now imagine that every bottle of wine you ever drank was resurrected and lined up in chronological order between those two bottles. The college-party swill, the wedding Champagne, the Merlot you enjoyed at home when no one was watching, and every other bottle from every phase of your long experience with wine. Surveying these bottles you can probably make out dimly–or maybe clearly–the story of your entire adult life.
In his new book, Oz Clarke’s Story of Wine: 8000 Years, 100 Bottles, the British wine writer takes this simple exercise and applies it to all of recorded human history. One hundred bottles, 100 short chapters explaining the milestones and missteps that got us to where we are. He begins with the probable origins of winemaking in ancient Georgia around 6000 BCE and traces wine’s story forward right up until…whatever wine news was current when he turned in the book to his editor a year or two ago. (Oh, that’s right–it was orange wine, canned wine, and wildfires.)
The “100 historical objects” idea is a framework that has been often used before, and often with fruitful results. The British Museum’s 2010 project “A History of the World in 100 Objects” spawned a hit radio program and a successful companion book. As a food history geek, I have read and re-read William Sitwell’s A History of Food in 100 Recipes (2013) and Vincent Franklin’s Menus That Made History: 100 Iconic Menus That Capture the History of Food (2019). In focusing exclusively on wine, Oz Clarke interweaves draughts of world history with tastes from bottles from his own personal memory-shelf, to create a book that is both sweeping and individual.
In Story of Wine, the formula feels fresh enough due to Oz’s breezy writing style and the strength of the subject matter. The text mostly stands on its own two legs, occasionally supported by illustrative material including portraits, advertisements, and photos (all captioned in Oz’s snarky style). It’s a lot of fun. If you cannot find at least five cocktail parties’ worth of wine conversation starters here, there is something wrong with you.
A few of my favorite wine stories from the book:
1323 BCE: Unknown Egyptian workers, entombing King Tut with a cache of wine for the afterlife, provide the earliest example of labeling wine by vintage, vineyard, and maker.
1740s: An exotic, bouncy wood pith from Portugal is discovered to be the best wine closure to date, and remains the best for hundreds of years. This invention of the airtight wine cork finally allows for the long-term aging and collecting of wine.
1855: Some French people start building a bunch of fake-fancy castles in the recently drained Gironde estuary to make their new-money land grabs look like grand agrarian estates. Too bad it’s Médoc in Bordeaux, and nothing will grow in the gravelly soil but grapevines…oh well.
1942: Oz’s dad, a returning World War II soldier, gets tricked into buying a “better than Champagne” sparkling pink wine that’s pushed on him by an enterprising maitre d’.
1974: An informal annual road derby to capture the year’s first bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau from France incurs the disapproval of the British police.
One of the points that emerges loud and clear from this book is just how many pivotal moments in wine history have occurred in the last century and a half. Or, put another way, how lucky we are to be living in a golden age of wine. Oz places the origins of wine at approximately 8000 years ago. Speaking chronologically, the author–who was born in 1949–has lived through just under 1% of the world’s wine history. And yet, from his stories and experiences, it feels like much, much more than that. From Britain’s mid-century with its flagons of claret and Chianti, to the Judgment of Paris, to the rise of Australia and South America, to modern innovations in farming and packaging, it’s all here.
I first encountered Oz Clarke’s writing through the encyclopedic Oz Clarke’s World of Wine. When I’m brushing up on wine facts, I often reach for the World of Wine over other reference material. Why? Its sprinkling of funny, opinionated prose often interrupts the dryness of the subject matter: Regional maps, labeling conventions, varietal pedigrees. (These topics are all fascinating to specialists, but not as approachable or engaging for the average imbiber.)
Story of Wine brings Oz’s humorous, anecdotal touch back to its natural habitat in a series of short essays. With its bite-sized nuggets about history and marketing, Story of Wine makes a thoughtful gift for wine lovers and history buffs alike. And while it doesn’t have the depth or density of World of Wine, its irreverence and wit are underpinned by a lifetime of wine knowledge. In these 320 entertaining pages, sacred cows get roasted (Robert Parker, Pinot Noir) and unlikely heroes emerge (Napoleon, Prohibition-era homebrewers, E&J Gallo’s Burgundy in a jug).
One small quibble: The concept of this book–and some of the content–overlap with Oz Clarke’s 2015 release, The History of Wine in 100 Bottles: From Bacchus to Bordeaux and Beyond. If you have that book, it’s not immediately clear why you’d need this one. The older stories in the book–the invention of the glass bottle, the scourge of the phylloxera louse–haven’t changed that much in ten years, after all. But if you want a smart and funny recent book that leaves you flush with amazement at human ingenuity (and inebriety) across these many 8000 years, Story of Wine just might be your cup of vino.
Oz Clarke’s Story of Wine (Hardcover, $40)
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication Date: May 28, 2024
ISBN: 9780008621490
Review disclosure: I was not compensated or provided any free products for this review. (In this case I did receive Story of Wine as a holiday gift from family–thanks, Mom!–but it didn’t influence my review.) Opinions expressed on The Wine Fairy blog are entirely my own.
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