Wine in the Roman Empire

The Empire That Ran on Wine

At the height of Roman power, around the first and second centuries CE, an estimated 50 to 80 million people lived within the empire's borders. Nearly all of them drank wine. Not just the wealthy — wine was the default everyday beverage of the Roman world, consumed by senators and slaves, soldiers and merchants. Understanding Rome means understanding wine.

The Romans did not simply drink wine; they thought about it, wrote about it, traded it across thousands of miles, and used it to mark every significant moment of private and public life. When Roman legions marched to the edges of the known world, they planted vineyards wherever the climate would allow, leaving a viticultural legacy that defines European wine geography to this day.

Wine in Daily Roman Life

The Social Hierarchy of Wine

Roman society stratified its wine consumption with the same precision it applied to everything else. The finest wines — Falernian, Caecuban, Setian, and a few others from the volcanic slopes of Campania and Latium — were reserved for the wealthy and for special occasions. These aged wines, sometimes kept in sealed amphorae for decades, commanded extraordinary prices and inspired genuine aesthetic appreciation.

Common Romans drank vinum, undistinguished table wine produced in enormous quantities across Italy and the provinces. Soldiers drank posca, a mixture of acetum (sour wine or vinegar) and water that served as a safe, mildly energizing beverage. The sponge soaked in posca that a bystander offered the crucified Jesus, described in the Gospel of John, was almost certainly the everyday drink of a Roman legionary — an act of ordinary mercy, not cruelty.

At the bottom of the hierarchy sat lora, a thin liquid made by soaking the pressed grape skins (the pomace) in water and fermenting the result. This essentially waterless wine was given to slaves working the harvest — a reminder that even the lowest-quality wine was considered preferable to water, which was often unsafe to drink before modern sanitation.

Wine Bars and the Urban Landscape

Roman cities were full of wine bars. Pompeii, preserved by Vesuvius in 79 CE, contains over 150 thermopolia — establishments that served hot food and drink, with wine jars set into the counter. Analysis of residue in these jars has revealed a range of wines: some sweet and spiced, some mixed with saltwater as a preservative, some infused with herbs. The variety rivals a modern wine bar's menu.

Wine consumption was embedded in the urban fabric in a way that even modern wine-loving cities cannot quite match. Rome had no coffee, no distilled spirits, no carbonated beverages. Wine, water, and wine mixed with water were essentially the entire beverage world of a Roman citizen.

Roman Viticulture: The First Science

Columella and Agricultural Expertise

The Romans wrote extensively about wine. Cato the Elder's De Agri Cultura (around 160 BCE) includes detailed instructions for establishing a vineyard, calculating expected yields, and managing farm labor. Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia (77 CE) devotes two entire books to viticulture and winemaking, classifying hundreds of grape varieties and regional wine styles. Virgil's Georgics (37 BCE) treats vineyard farming as noble, poetic work worthy of the finest Latin verse.

The most practically sophisticated treatment came from Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, a Spanish-born farmer who wrote De Re Rustica around 60 CE. Columella's twelve-volume agricultural encyclopedia includes detailed chapters on vine training systems, pruning schedules, soil preparation, irrigation, and the specific qualities that make one vineyard site superior to another. His descriptions of how north-facing versus south-facing slopes affect grape ripening, and how proximity to water bodies moderates extreme temperatures, anticipate concepts that modern viticulture would not systematize for another 1,800 years.

Columella knew that Terroir mattered, even if he had no word for it. He observed that identical grape varieties grown in different locations produced noticeably different wines, and he drew careful distinctions between soil types and their suitability for viticulture. This observational precision was extraordinary for its era.

The Opimian Vintage

Roman connoisseurship of wine reached its peak in the appreciation of aged wines from great Vintage years. The vintage of 121 BCE — known as the Opimian vintage, after the consul Lucius Opimius in whose year it was produced — became legendary. Romans were still drinking and selling amphorae of Opimian Falernian a century later, and even an empty jar labeled "Opimian" commanded a price. This is the first documented case of a specific vintage year being treated as a mark of quality — a practice that remains central to fine wine culture today.

Pliny wrote disapprovingly of the hoarding of old wine, suggesting that some Romans bought aged amphorae purely for status rather than pleasure. The dynamic is instantly recognizable: old wine as trophy, as conversation piece, as social currency. Two thousand years have changed the bottles and the labels but not the human behavior.

Rome's Viticultural Legacy

The Vine Follows the Legion

Roman territorial expansion was followed, almost inevitably, by viticulture. The legions needed wine, and transporting heavy amphorae across hundreds of miles was expensive and logistically difficult. The practical solution was to plant vineyards in the provinces. Over several centuries of expansion, Roman viticulture transformed the agricultural landscape of Europe.

The Rhône valley was planted with vines by at least the first century BCE. The Rhine valley received Roman viticulture by the first century CE. The Moselle — the Mosel — was planted by the second century, and Ausonius, the Bordeaux-born poet and Roman official, wrote rapturously about its vineyards in the fourth century. Bordeaux itself, the Burdigala of Roman Gaul, was exporting wine to Rome by the second century CE. Even Britain received experimental vine plantings, though the climate limited their success.

In the Iberian Peninsula, Roman colonists transformed existing Phoenician and Greek wine traditions into systematic viticulture. The regions that would eventually become Douro, Languedoc-Roussillon, and the Spanish interior all received Roman vine cultivation. The Iberian provinces became major wine exporters; Spanish wine in Dressel 20 amphorae has been found at sites across the empire, from Hadrian's Wall to the deserts of Egypt.

Italy: The Original Heartland

Within Italy, Roman viticulture concentrated on the volcanic soils of Campania and Latium, the hills of Tuscany (future home of Toscana and the Sangiovese grape), and the slopes of the Apennines. The Italian wine regions that dominate today — Tuscany, Piedmont (Piemonte), the Veneto — were all producing wine in Roman times, though under different varieties and methods.

The Nebbiolo grape that makes Barolo and Barbaresco likely has pre-Roman origins in the Piedmontese hills. Sangiovese, the backbone of Chianti and Brunello, may trace its ancestry to grapes the Romans cultivated across central Italy. The thread from Roman vineyard to modern Italian denomination is not unbroken — phylloxera, warfare, and centuries of changing agricultural practice have intervened — but the geographic intuition for which hills and valleys produce wine worth drinking appears to have survived.

The Church Inherits the Vine

When the Western Roman Empire fragmented in the fifth century CE, the institutional structures that maintained Roman viticulture — the legions, the estates, the trading networks — collapsed. But one institution survived and, with it, the vine: the Christian Church.

Wine was theologically essential. The Eucharist required it, and no monk could in good conscience allow his monastery's vineyards to fall into neglect. In Burgundy, the Benedictines of Cluny and later the Cistercians of Cîteaux inherited Roman vine-planting traditions and refined them over centuries of meticulous observation. The Cistercians in particular became extraordinary viticulturalists, enclosing the best plots with stone walls — the origin of the Burgundian clos — and keeping detailed records of which parcels consistently produced superior wine. These observations, accumulated over centuries, eventually produced the classification of Burgundy's Grand Cru and Premier Cru vineyards.

A Foundation Still Standing

The Roman Empire's wine legacy is not merely historical. Walk the vineyards of Bordeaux today and you are walking land that Roman merchants recognized as exceptional wine country two thousand years ago. The Mosel's Riesling vineyards descend from the terraced slopes that Roman farmers carved into the slate hillsides. The village of Nuits-Saint-Georges, heart of the Côte de Nuits, takes its name from the Roman Nodus — a knot or node on the Roman road that ran through what is now Bourgogne.

Wine history did not begin with Rome. But the Roman Empire did more than any other civilization to transform wine from a regional product of the ancient Near East into the defining beverage of Western civilization — a status it has never quite relinquished.