With the Reformation, the church’s role in wine production and marketing declined, especially in northern Europe, but it didn’t upset the wine world half as much as discovering the usefulness of cork nearly a century later. For the first time since the Roman Empire, wine can now be stored and aged in bottles.
Throughout the Middle Ages wine was kept in casks which presented a double drawback: first, too long in wood could rob the wine history of all its fruit; Second, once the cask is opened the wine inevitably goes bad unless drunk within a few days. The bottle, with its small capacity, solves the former problem by providing a neutral, non-porous material that allows the wine to age in a different subtle way, and removes the latter problem by providing a manageable-sized sealed container for single-session drinking.
However, the cork and bottle revolution was not an immediate success; The bottles were then so bulbous that they would simply stand upright which meant the corks eventually dried out and consequently let the air in. But, by the mid-18th century, tall, flat-sided bottles were designed that would lie flat, keeping their corks moist by contact with the world wine history timeline. As a result, winemaking has reached a new dimension.
For a winemaker to try and excel becomes worthwhile, wines from specific plots of land can be compared for their merits, and the most exciting can be categorized and distinguished from more mundane plot wines. As a result, today’s great names of Bordeaux, Burgundy, and the Rhine first began to come into focus.
In the early 19th century, Europe seemed like a vast vineyard. In Italy 80% of the people made their living from wine and in France, there were extensive plantations south of Paris. The vine also went abroad for explorers, colonists, and missionaries. It went to Latin America with the Spaniards, South Africa with the French Huguenots, and Australia with the British. Can anything stem this tide of wine expansion?
Well, yes and it came in the form of an aphid called phylloxera, which feeds on and destroys vine roots. It came from America in the 1860s and, by the early 20th century, had devastated the vineyards of all of Europe and the rest of the world. The solution was to graft the weak European vine, Vitis vinifera, onto the phylloxera-resistant American rootstock, Vitis Riparia, naturally a very expensive endeavor. The most immediate effect in Europe was that only the best sites were transplanted and as a result, the total area under vines shrank greatly. Elsewhere the devastation has been comparable and vineyard land is now expanding on old original sites destroyed a century ago.