*When did humans first start making wine?  It's hard to say with certainty, but archaeological evidence suggests that the earliest known production of wine, made by fermenting grapes, took place in sites in Georgia  and Iran, from as early as 6000 BC.  These locations are all within the natural area of the European grapevine Vitis vinifera.

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*The use of wine in religious ceremonies is common to many cultures and regions. Libations often included wine, and the religious mysteries of Dionysus used wine as a sacramental entheogen to induce a mind-altering state.  Wine is an integral part of Jewish laws and traditions.  In Christianity, wine is used in a sacred rite called the Eucharist, which originates in Gospel accounts of the Last Supper.

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*A chemical in red wine called resveratrol has been shown to have both cardioprotective and chemoprotective effects in animal studies.  To fully get the benefits of resveratrol in wines, it is recommended to sip slowly when drinking wines. Due to inactivation in the gut and liver, most of the resveratrol in imbibed red wine does not reach the blood circulation. However, when sipping slowly, absorption via the mucous membranes in the mouth can result in up to around 100 times the blood levels of resveratrol.

 

 

*Where do corks come from?  Cork material is an impermeable, buoyant material, a prime-subset of generic cork tissue that is harvested for commercial use primarily from Quercus suber (cork oak) that is endemic to southwest Europe and northwest Africa.  There are about 2,200,000 hectares of cork forest worldwide; 33% in Portugal, and 23% in Spain. Annual production is about 340,000 tons; 52% from Portugal, 32% from Spain, 6% Italy.

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*The Paris Wine Tasting of 1976 or the Judgment of Paris was a wine competition organized in Paris on 24 May 1976 by Steven Spurrier, a British wine merchant, in which French judges did blind tasting of top-quality chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon wines from France and from California. California wines rated best in each category, which caused surprise as France was generally regarded as being the foremost producer of the world's best wines.  Maybe the real lessons learned are that taste is subjective from person to person, and one should always have an open mind when it comes to wine, regardless of where its from!

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