:: INTRODUCTION TO THE TEXTS ::

:: The object of this library is to present an anthology of early texts on the making and understanding of wine, with many, many others just thrown in because I think they're pleasures. These texts span the entire spectrum from obscure to more so. Some are known, although actually read only under academic duress; some are unknown altogether. The fact is, inexplicable though it may (and to me does) seem, that apparently no such anthology has ever previously been published, in print, on the internet, or anywhere else.
:: One might well object, "Who needs it? Perhaps we should let sleeping texts lie. Life is short."
:: And so life is; which is exactly why we need all the help we can get; and whatever enlightens, helps. I happen to think these texts are each and all, in various ways, enlightening; that's why they're here, and that's why I think they should be read.
:: I've tried to say a bit more about what I think makes each text worth reading by writing a short & informal introduction to most of them; but originally, the introduction was only available by downloading the entire file, and yet the purpose of the introduction is to explain why you might want to do that in the first place.
:: Hence, these pages, which present those introductions by themselves, in a format more accessible to browsing, and in each case, with a link to the relevant text itself. Since it's in html, it looks a bit different from the rest of the site, but permits spiders to crawl, bots to search, & generally encourages the fauna of the net to chug away comfortably in their ecological niches, calling each to each. ::

::

:: XENOPHON (c. 430 - c. 355 BC) ::

:: Xenophon, to the degree he is remembered at all by any but classics scholars, is remembered for the Anabasis, his very lively account of the escape - led by Xenophon himself - of a Greek army marooned in the heart of a hostile Persia. But he was also a friend and disciple of Socrates, and wrote several Socratic dialogues, which for a variety of reasons are much less often read than Plato's.
:: Among these is the Oeconomicus, really the first in a long tradition of works dealing with the management of a rural estate; works that continued to be written over the next two thousand years, and which preserve most of what we know of country life and labor (and winemaking) throughout the course of Western history.
:: In this excerpt, Socrates questions Ischomachus, a just and honest man, about his relations with his wife. Particularly in the charming Tudor English translation of Gentian Hervet, it's a far more amusing and tender view of Greek domestic life than the one we're likely to have gotten from reading, say, Agamemnon or Medea, where the picture is much less promising.
:: I haven't yet had time to do much research about Hervet or his translation. The earliest edition of it in the British Library is dated 1534; the present transcription is from the later edition of 1767, by which time the 16th-century editions were, apparently, already unfindable. The page numbers refer to the 1767 edition.
:: Yes, I admit this excerpt has absolutely nothing to tell us about wine-making, & is here simply because I like it. But it does bring up a question that has always intrigued me, as to when and how often winemaking has been considered the province of the husband, and how often that of the wife? The question deserves research.
:: And, on a related topic, I must note that Xenophon understood the queen bee to be female. Not rocket science, you may say. But for some two thousand years after him, she was thought to be a king, whose realm was just God's little metaphor of the perfect Kingdom, and an ideal symbol of the ways authoritarians feel we should be governed.

::

From, Treatise of Householde, translated by Gentian Hervet before 1534, transcribed here from the reprint edition of 1767.

TO THE TEXT

::

:: MARCUS VITRUVIUS POLLIO (b. 1st century BC ::

:: In, Architecture, ou Art de bien bastir, de Marc Vitruue Pollion Autheur Romain Antique, Paris, 1547.

:: Probably most people who recognize that Vitruvius isn't, let's say, a Swedish rock band, also realize that he is author of the most important treatise on architecture that has survived to us from Classical antiquity. But very few even of these very few, are likely to realize that in this very same treatise, he provides a remarkable exposition of the influence of geological factors on the taste of wine.
:: It is incomparably the clearest statement of the importance of what we would now call "terroir" that is known from the ancient world - or, for that matter, from anywhere else until the early 19th century. And I owe my own knowledge of this passage entirely to the kindness of Jean-Claude Martin, of the Ecole d'Agronomie de Montpellier, who sent me his own transcription of the text as it appears in the first edition of Vitruvius in French, which was translated from the original Latin by a previous incarnation of Jean Martin and published in Paris in 1547.
:: Since I was later fortunate enough to acquire a copy of that same quite rare edition, it seemed only fitting to continue Jean Martin's gesture by putting transcriptions from it on my own website, so that it would be & remain available to others, which of course is the essential purpose of the site to begin with.
:: Thus, what follows is transcribed from - as is stated on the title page - Architecture, ou Art de bien bastir, de Marc Vitruue Pollion Autheur Romain Antique: mis de Latin en Francoys, par Ian Martin Secretaire de Monseigneur le Cardinal de Lenoncourt. Pour le Roy Treschrestien Henry .II. A Paris. Avec Privilege du Roy. On les vend chez Iacques Gazeau, en la rue sainct Iacques a l'Escu de Colongne. M.D.XLVII.
:: What this translates is the De Architectura Libri Decem of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, about whom essentially nothing is known that he does not tell us himself, in that same book. It is dedicated to Caesar Augustus, who was in some way his patron; and Vitruvius already was mature and active during the reign of Julius Caesar; so we have a fair idea of his dates.There is no evidence he had any great reputation as an architect; but Pliny, nearly his contemporary, quotes him both at length and without acknowledgment, thus establishing that he was obscure enough to be so slighted, yet was already accepted even then as authoritative in matters of architectural theory.
:: The first selection is, of course, the one concerning wine; but wine is merely one example used by Vitruvius to illustrate the importance of water, what its sources are, and what veins of earth it flows through. So I thought it would be enjoyable for all concerned to read more of what Vitruvius has to say on this very same subject; for example, about the fountains of Ismuc, which cause those who live in their vicinity to have good singing voices - so much so that "merchants" bring their more attractive young slaves there to copulate, so that the resulting children will be beautiful both to hear and to see - or the actual soil of Ismuc, which quite reliably kills snakes (or any other "mauuaise beste" that touches it) in less than no time ("en moins de rien"); proving at least that the theory of terroir was being stretched on out into some pretty dubious territory even then.
:: This said, it would seem to me nearly perverse to offer a selection from Vitruvius without including anything about architecture itself, particularly given my own complete agreement with him that any "art of good building" begins with constructing a solid but resilient structure for the human mind. It's what used to be called "education", or to be even more adorably out of date than ever, a "liberal education"; and Vitruvius discusses this antique concept extremely well; so, although I can't include his entire analysis of architecture, at least, by the rule of first things first, I've included his analysis of how to build a good architect.
:: He's equally as eloquent in discussing literacy itself, the virtues of books, and the transmission of knowledge; so of course I couldn't leave all that out, either. Finally, in terms that have to charm anyone who has ever pondered the question since, he objects to the excessively great rewards given to athletes, as opposed to the reward of those whose contributions to human well-being are with equal excess, so excessively greater:"just what good does it now do humanity to know that Milo of Croton was unbeatable...?" etc.
:: And through all of this, there is the addictive charm and splendor of the language itself. It tells us a little something about what we've lost to realize that such beauty is simply characteristic, to a greater or lesser degree, of nearly any text of the 16th-century; and is untrue of, if not simply unrelated to, all but a few texts of our own time. ::

TO THE TEXT

::

:: PLINY the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus, ad 23-79) ::

:: in, The Historie of the World, London, 1601.

:: Of Earth and the nature thereof — Pliny's extraordinary soliloquy on the suffering and strange mercy of the goddess: an unheralded masterwork of Roman meditative darkness and of Elizabethan prose, as translated by Philemon Holland. Along with some other magical passages having nothing (except pleasure) to do with wine, on the power of the Dog starre, the nature of Honie, the mountains of Affricke, etc. (In English)

TO THE TEXT

::

:: MAGO/COLUMELLA ::

:: Carthaginian wine.
:: A tantalizing fragment of a long-destroyed civilization: the winemaking instructions of Mago the Carthaginian, transmitted by Columella & transcribed here from the first French translation of his works.(In French)

:: Among the only survivors of the genocide of Carthage by the Romans were the books on agriculture of "Mago the Carthaginian", which were saved and translated by order of the Roman senate. Ironically, so much of Roman culture was later destroyed in turn that Mago's books have not survived even in translation; but some of his ideas have, since he was so generally respected by the later Roman agricultural authors, such as Columella.
:: The little excerpt below is thus only a tantalizing fragment of a culture now utterly lost to us; in this case, an image of wine-making in North Africa a thousand years before Islam. And the instructions are entirely reasonable.

:: The text is taken from the first French translation of Columella, Les Douze Livres de Lucius Iunius Moderatus Columella des choses Rusticques, translated by Claude Cotereau and published by Kerver in 1551. ::

TO THE TEXT

::

:: THE GEOPONIC AUTHORS ::

:: The Making of Ancient wine
:: in, Les xx. liures de Constantin Cesar, ausquels sont traictés les bons enseignemens d'Agriculture: traduicts en Francoys par M. Anthoine Pierre, Licentié en droict. Poitiers, 1543 (1545)
:: The first translation into French of the most important wine-making text to have survived from the ancient world; ascribed to Constantine Porphyrogenitus, but in fact a Byzantine anthology dedicated to him, of authors already described then as being ancient, and about whom we otherwise know almost nothing.

:: Of whatever may have been written about wine-making in classical antiquity, virtually nothing remains. A few lines in Hesiod, a few more in Virgil; a compilation of rumors in Pliny; some appropriately monstrous suggestions from Cato (1); a few dubious recipes in Columella; a paragraph or two in Palladius; and that's nearly it.
:: Essentially, the only exception is this present text, which is what makes it so important to us now; more so, no doubt, than it was in its time, although for all that, it isn't even particularly clear when its time was.
:: In fact, about all we can safely say is that it is a Byzantine anthology compiled in Greek from various writers - now generally called the "Geoponic authors" - about whom we generally know nothing except that most were already described as "ancient" when the compilation was assembled, which was at some point in the half-millenium between the 4th and the 9th centuries AD.
:: This is all very vague; but then archaeology very often is; and our ignorance in no way diminishes the fact that this text remains, quite aside from all the other subjects it includes, the only surviving anthology of wine-making instructions to have survived from classical antiquity, and remains, whatever the identities and dates of its authors, generally the only record that survives of their work.
:: To the best of my knowledge, no translation of the complete text was made into Latin or any vernacular language until the 1530's; yet the chapters on wine-making - essentially what I've transcribed here - were translated as early as 1137 by a Pisan named Burgundio or Borgondione, consul for the Pisan merchants in Constantinople, and under the title Liber de Vindimis, were widely circulated in manuscript form throughout medieval Europe.
:: Having said this much, and granting both that this is the major surviving record of wine-making technique in classical antiquity, and that it was widely disseminated in manuscript form during the later latin Middle Ages, yet it would still be rash to conclude that it exerted a significant influence on the development of European wine-making; because in fact, it did not. By the twelfth century, European wine-making had already evolved into a recognizable version of its modern form, and a large part of the Liber de Vindimis simply no longer applied to the way wine was being made.
:: For example, except in Spain and Portugal, most medieval Western European wine-makers - if they had known how to read, which we must assume very few did - would have had no more use for pages of instruction on the preparation and application of pitch to a dolium than their descendants would today, nor, for that matter, would they have been much more likely to know what a dolium was to begin with.There was no such word in their language, and no need for one: wine was no longer made and aged in large pottery containers sealed with an inner glaze of pitch, but in wooden tanks and barrels.
:: Its actual influence was more complex, and was limited largely to the literature of "learned advice about wine-making" rather than to the practice of the craft itself. It may be ironic, given the text's lack of relevance to the evolution of "modern" wine, that it should have become a standard font of information whenever wine was written about; but indeed it shows up, if only in bits and pieces, as a sort of untiring party animal, in nearly any book written about wine until the nineteenth century.
:: This is not in any way to disparage the text itself, but only the ways in which it was read and used; which is to note that:
A. Quite separately from texts useful in wine-making, there was an entire literary genre of "displays of erudition about vineyards, wine-making, and wine", a genre which consisted largely of astonishingly uncritical compilations of any and all references to these subjects by ancient authors. This genre has evolved, if that is the word, into the modern coffee-table wine book, where it is the uncritical reprinting of publicity releases from the local syndicat d'initiative that is passed on to the reader as wine history.
B. Uncritically is not the way to read ancient authors, or any others.
C. Books about craft should be written by those who practice that craft, who have at least some possibility of knowing what they're talking about, since that knowledge has been acquired by experience in actually trying to carry out what they recommend.
:: So much for why we shouldn't read the book; one may well ask, why should we?
:: In my opinion, it is ironically just its strangeness that gives the text its importance to us now: which is to say, ancient wines really were different. They already seemed strange in the twelfth century; and this text is our best guide to how they were made.
:: That should not imply that it tells us what we most want to know, which is how ancient wines actually tasted; nor does it in any way justify the assumption that they simply tasted worse; much less that they all tasted like Retsina; much less that since we actually don't know what they tasted like, there's no real point in being interested in them. Despite centuries of scholarly guesswork, we don't really know what ancient Greek sounded like, either; but, does that keep us from reading Aeschylus? Of course not; and all that scholarly guesswork aids us immeasurably in doing so.
:: One can only regret that no one has bothered to make a similar effort to understand ancient wine; and such a project, which one would think would be the very foundation of an intelligent "enology" program, would want this text as a cornerstone.
:: For example, the common fallacy that all ancient wine resembled retsina is based on the fact that the porous pottery containers in which wine was made and stored were glazed on the inside with an impermeable varnish of boiled pitch. Since the purpose of this varnish was to be essentially insoluble in wine, the assumption that it flavored wine in the same manner as a water-based natural tree sap is essentially stupid; furthermore, most of the hundreds of surviving recipes for these "pitch" varnishes are complicated, and do not contain pine resin at all. That is not to say they didn't powerfully influence the flavor of wine; generally, they were intended to; but so do oak barrels, and the effects are various and extremely complex. To even begin to find out what those effects might be would require years of actual experiments, which one might suppose to be just where the scientific component of a true enology could make a major contribution.
:: But of course ignorance is easier, if only the question can be dismissed; and if there is any academic program of enology, anywhere in the world, where the question of the tastes of ancient wine has ever been established as an issue for sustained research, I don't know of its existence.
:: The second reason for reading this text, as always on this website, is pleasure. Part of this pleasure is in savoring the ideas themselves, and in contemplating the inhabiting of a world where they are thought to be truths; so, I have included instructions concerning how to tell if palm trees are in love, and what to do about it; about ridding your garden of moths by the circumambulations of a menstruating nude with only a handkerchief on her head; and about how to engender a swarm of bees from the rotting corpse of an ox.
:: And of course part of the pleasure is the beauty and charm of the prose itself. In this case, it consists of the earliest translation of that text into French, done by a lawyer in Poitiers, Antoine Pierre, and first published in 1543 . The quite wonderful dedication to Hugues de Commanges, with its spirited and moving defense of the honor and nobility of agriculture, may sound as though Pierre wrote it himself, as one might reasonably expect of a dedication, and as he almost certainly would have wanted de Commanges to think he had done.
:: But, he hadn't; it's simply the translation of Janus Cornarius's introduction to his Latin edition of the text, which was the edition Pierre used for his own translation into French. ::

_________

(1). Yes; Cato. That genocidal hero of slave-holding avarice, & thus of our current plague of American "neo-cons", whose name so wonderfully describes their ethics.

TO THE TEXT

:: LINK
:: The Liber de Vindemiis of Burgundio, which is the medieval translation into Latin of this same text, available on the website of the invaluable Thomas Gloning. TO THE TEXT

::

:: Crescenzi and the writing of rural life ::

:: The ancient world understood, far more clearly than we do, that all human life, once it ceases to be nomadic, depends entirely on agriculture. For us, farmers are seen more often as suspect polluters of a food supply which without their interference would somehow appear on our tables anyway, as if by magic, with no need for tired people to get up before dawn, go out into the mud, and come up with actual solutions to real problems.
:: Necessity being as much the death of petulance as the mother of invention, the ancient world did not think this, and wrote widely on the management of agrarian life. Most of this literature, along with most of the rest of the ancient world, has been lost to us, even including any reliable record of what was once there; but much has been saved as well, perhaps an indication of the depth of the tradition.
:: With the fall of the Roman Empire, that ancient tradition of agrarian texts came to a sudden end, and did not resume again until the 16th century. In the entire intervening era of more than a thousand years, there are only three significant exceptions known to me. The first of these barely counts as original, since it is a Byzantine compilation of excerpts from the "Geoponic" authors, already identified as ancient then, about whom otherwise we know nothing; not even in what century they lived. Another is the Pelzbuch of Gottfried von Franken, about grafting, fruit-growing, and wine. Then there is the Libri XII Ruralium Commodorum of Piero de'Crescenzi.
:: Crescenzi (ca. 1228 - ca. 1321), a native of Bologna, engaged himself in its politics, and suffered among the more benign of traditional results, which was exile. He travelled, returned, enjoyed a long career as "«guidice» quale Rettore e Podestà di numerose città dell'Alta e Media Italia: e cioè (in ordine cronologico) Sinigallia, Asti, Imola, Ferrara, Pisa, Brescia, Piacenza", and then retired to his Villa dell'Olmo - of which traces apparently still survive - in Rubizzano, some ten miles from Bologna itself. There, beginning his work when he was no less than seventy years old, and completing it between 1304 and 1309, he wrote the most important agricultural text in a thousand years; to the point that it is hard to think of anything European even to put in second place.
:: His sources included, of course, the classical authors, such as Palladius and Columella, whose works survived in various versions throughout the middle ages. His treatment of wine relies as well on a text entitled Liber de Vindemiis, which was a translation into Latin of the sections on wine and wine-making from the Greek "Geoponic" anthology, produced in about 1137 by a Pisan named Burgundio or Borgondione, consul for the Pisan merchants in Constantinople. But by far and away Crescenzi's most important source was his own experience, and that of his fellow agricultores experti Bononiæ; and that is exactly why his work is so valuable to us.
:: It was an immediate best-seller, if that conception can apply to any mediæval work of a practical nature; Lodovico Frati, in 1933, could find 133 still surviving manuscript copies, which is a remarkable number for a text neither pious nor classical.
:: And it was translated very quickly from Latin into a number of vernacular languages, no doubt on the understanding that while most persons of an impractical nature could read Latin, those of a practical nature mostly couldn't. So, as a provisional introduction to Crescenzi, what I have posted at the moment (April, 2001) are brief extracts from three of these vernacular translations, as they appear in three early 16th-century printed books. The translations themselves are undated; to my ear, they're clearly late mediæval, and most probably late 14th-century; but I'm not a philologist.
:: The passages I've chosen are essentially of the same text as it appears in each of these different versions: the first passage concerns harvesting & wine-making, and is here because that's what this website is about; the second passage concerns the thought that the moon is as crucial as the sun in determining the growth of plants, and is here because it's very beautiful.
:: Eventually, I'd like to post the complete Liber IV on vineyards & wine, in each of these vernacular versions plus the Latin & a translation into English; but needless to say, that's not going to happen for a while.

::

:: A general introduction to Crescenzi & the writing of agriculture [as above]. TO THE TEXT

:: On wine-making, and on the influence of the Moon: two quite different texts, in three quite different mediæval translations, from the most important agricultural work of the middle ages:

:: In French, from Le liure des prouffitz châpestres et ruraulx.TO THE TEXT

:: In German, from Von dem nutz der ding die in äckern gebuwet werden. TO THE TEXT

:: In Italian, from Piero Crescientio de agricultura vulgare. TO THE TEXT

::

:: LINKS
:: Das Weinbuch im Codex Donaueschingen 787. Thomas Gloning's transcription of an important late medieval German manuscript on wine and winemaking - essentially the Pelzbuch of Gottfried von Franken mentioned above, with later additions. TO THE TEXT.
:: The Liber de Vindemiis of Burgundio, also mentioned above, also available on the website of the invaluable Thomas Gloning. TO THE TEXT