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No one knows who made the first wine. Perhaps a cave man stored grape juice in a skin bottle of some kind, forgot about it and then drank it after it had fermented. There are references to wine in ancient Egyptian stone engravings. Greece and Rome have traced mention of it back to their pre-history. There were laws in ancient Babylon concerning the keeping of wine shops. This wine was not quite the same kind as we enjoy today. It wasn’t until man learned that wine could be kept and improved with age, that fine wines were born.

An ancient wine bottle found in Germany and dated about 325AD still had wine in it. Olive oil was used to prevent evaporation and oxidation. It was the Romans who invented wooden barrels in which to age wine; up until then skins or clay jars had been used. They may also have been the instigators of glass bottles, for glass blowing was starting to become more common during Roman times. Certainly, they influenced the beginnings and spread of grape growing in Europe through their own expertise in growing and caring for grapes and their winemaking expertise.

While wine producing was common in Europe, grapevines were at first unsuccessful in America; no one seemed to know why. However, eventually there was success with different varieties and Agoston Harazsthy, an Hungarian soldier and merchant is considered to be the founder of the wine industry in California. With much enthusiasm, he imported at least 300 different varieties and started up several different vineyards, introducing new practices for the new country that others had not thought of. He was obviously a man who could think outside the box.

Surprisingly it was Louis Pasteur who first began to understand the science of wine and he discovered that it was yeasts that caused the fermentation process. This led to improved winemaking with much less spoilage, a factor important for commercial growers.

Through the years, wine making has survived ignorance, vine-killing bugs and viruses, taxes and politics, though the first wines produced hastily after the Prohibition was lifted were of poor quality. The technology of the last thirty years has increased both yield and quality of wines and worldwide demand for US wines continues to grow. In fact in 1976, at a blind wine-tasting event, expert French wine-tasters chose two Californian wines as winners over any European wines, French included.