In the 8th century BC, Homer wrote that “flashing-eyed Athena sent them a favourable wind, a strong-blowing West wind that sang over the wine-dark sea. And Telemachus called to his men, and bade them lay hold of the tackling, and they hearkened to his call.” He frequently used wine’s colour to describe a deep, foreboding sea. As with the original Greek, the 19th century English translation, “wine-dark sea,” resonated with readers.
This phrase subsequently provoked substantial modern controversy, with many very smart people trying to decipher what precise colour Homer wanted to evoke. Different authors proposed deep purple, nearly black, red, reddish, and even blue wine. In 1984, John Noble Wilford wrote in the New York Times about a theory published in Nature. The argument ran that, because the ancient Greeks frequently mixed water into their wine and “the geology of the Peloponnesus, the site of some of the action in the epics, includes large formations of marble and limestone . . . the ground water must have been alkaline, perhaps sufficiently so ‘to change the colour of the wine from red to blue’.”
These were exercises in the historical objectivity of ancient wine. Unfortunately, Homer didn’t leave detailed tasting notes; but whatever the colour was, he relied on common knowledge of its “face” to communicate with his audience. (The phrase in question is “oînops póntos”: oînos “wine” + óps “eye; face”). Referring to objectivity and subjectivity in wine analysis, philosopher Barry Smith recently wrote that “there are facts of the matter about the wine, or the coloured surface — facts that owe nothing to us, or to their being perceived in a certain way.” In history, however, we only have the subjective records of long-passed wine tasters, no matter how objective they thought they were being at the time.
Researching the history of sensorial analysis recently, I was surprised by the importance of colour when it came to describing different wines, particularly in the ancient and Medieval eras. Yet when I consulted Routledge’s very recently published Handbook of Wine and Culture, which includes sections on wine history and historical geography, the index had no entries for colour whatsoever. Culture without colour. Tim Atkin MW’s tasting notes appear to mention colour very infrequently, much like Peter Pharos’ recent journey into tasting Australian wine. Popular wine tasting methods teach us to first evaluate colour and clarity, but that they are less important than aroma, flavour, and mouthfeel. Yet during some historical eras, colour was nearly everything.
Putting oneself in the shoes of long-gone wine tasters is a useful exercise, not least as a way to make us think about current tasting methods, which tend to assess wine in a different way. As the writer Thibaut Boulay noted, “gustatory, olfactory, and somatosensory sensation are not really separable” in ancient wine descriptions.
My youthful memories of wine relate to colour. As a ten year old in the mid 1970s, I remember my father taking a long, translucent brown bottle of Chateau St. Michelle Riesling from the kitchen fridge. Poured into a glass, it displayed an almost colourless limpidity. I learned this was “white” wine. He also had what seemed to me dark wines in almost opaque green bottles, like Erath Pinot Noir and a prized 1973 Château Mouton-Rothschild (with the colourful Picasso label). I learned that these were both “red wines”, despite their obvious differences in hue and opacity.
Studying French in college, I learned that “rosé” wine could also be “gris.” I subsequently lived in China in 1986 and optimistically bought some “wine” in Beijing. This was putao jiu (literally, “grape liquor”), which, when I removed the cap, was horridly oxidised, somewhat opaque, sweet and ochre. It didn’t fit into the categories I had met before.
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