Pliny the Elder on wine: what a Roman encyclopedia still teaches us

The short answer: Pliny the Elder (AD 23/24–79) wrote the Natural History, a Roman encyclopedia in 37 books. Book 14 is about the vine and wine, Book 17 covers growing trees and vines, and Book 23 the remedies the Romans made from wine. In it, Pliny wrote down ideas every sommelier still uses: that place matters more than grape, that great vintages are remembered, and that some wines get better with age.

Who was Pliny the Elder?

Gaius Plinius Secundus was born at Comum, today's Como, in northern Italy. He served as a cavalry officer, held posts in the provinces and ended his career commanding the Roman fleet at Misenum, on the Bay of Naples. He finished the Natural History around AD 77 and dedicated it to the future emperor Titus.

He died in AD 79, when he sailed towards the erupting Vesuvius to look closer and to rescue friends. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, described those last hours in a letter to the historian Tacitus. The short, fun version of his life is in Pliny, the first wine blogger.

What Book 14 covers

• The vines: how they grow and are trained, and the varieties, which he says are too many to count.
• The wines: the great wines of Italy, Greece and beyond, ranked.
• The cellar: how wine was made, flavoured, stored and aged.
• The drinking: Roman customs, and a long, angry passage against drunkenness to finish.

Ideas a sommelier still recognises

• Place over grape. Pliny concluded that the country and the soil matter more than the grape, and that the same vine is worth more in one place than in another. He also saw that some vines only thrive at home and lose their reputation when planted elsewhere. That is terroir, long before anyone used the word for wine.
• Crus on a slope. Falernian, the top wine of his day, came from three zones: Caucinian on the hilltops, Faustian halfway down, and Falernian proper at the foot. Burgundy would recognise the idea.
• Great vintages. The vintage of 121 BC, the year of the consul Opimius, was legendary. Some of it still survived in Pliny's day, nearly 200 years later, thickened to the consistency of honey.
• Ageing, up to a point. He ranked the Aminean vines first, partly because their wine improves with age. Wine, he observed, gains value up to about its twentieth year and then loses it, and the wines of Pompeii peaked at ten.
• A wine map of the world. About eighty notable wines, two-thirds of them Italian. Setinum, which the emperor Augustus preferred to all others; Caecuban, once the most generous, whose vineyard had disappeared; Alban and Surrentine. From Greece: Thasos, Chios and Lesbos. From Spain: Laietania for quantity, and Tarraco, Lauron and the Balearics for quality.

What would surprise us

• Seawater in the wine. Some Greek wines were seasoned with seawater. Pliny notes that the wine of Clazomenae, near today's İzmir, had become the most popular of them now that its makers used less. That coast is wine country again: see Urla, Türkiye.
• Pitch and resin. Vessels were lined with pitch and some wines were flavoured with it; Pliny ranks the pitch of different regions and praises that of Bruttium, in southern Italy.
• Raisin wine and boiled must. Passum was made from grapes dried in the sun until they had lost about half their weight. Must was also boiled down into sweet syrups.
• Jars, not barrels. Wine was kept in large clay jars, sometimes buried in the ground. Wooden casks were an Alpine habit. In Campania, he says, some wine was even left out in the open, under sun, rain and wind.
• Women and wine. In early Rome, Pliny writes, women were not allowed to drink wine.
• The first four-wine dinner. At a feast in Julius Caesar's third consulship, 46 BC, four wines were served for the first time: Falernian, Chian, Lesbian and Mamertine. A tasting menu, Roman style.

Book 23: wine as ancient medicine

Book 23 turns to remedies made from the vine, wine and vinegar, among many other plants. Read it as history, not advice: Roman medicine is not ours. And be careful with “Pliny quotes” about wine you find online. Before you share one, check it against a translation of the text; many don't survive the test.

Why Pliny still matters

The Natural History was copied by hand through the Middle Ages and was among the first classical works ever printed, in Venice in 1469. For centuries it was a standard reference on the natural world, wine included.

For a sommelier, the striking thing is how modern it sounds: place, vintage, age, rank, the joy of a good table and the cost of excess. Pliny loved wine and despised drunkenness. Two thousand years later, that's still the right balance.

More wine history: the Etruscans and wine, the Cistercian monks and wine quotes worth knowing.

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