The ancients, according to their wisdom, associated certain food and drinks with religious ceremonies. Of course, these were the attributes of the gods. Whether it’s ancient Orientals, North Africans or Europeans. Of all these products, three have retained their sacred value to this day, although you may have somehow missed the moment. It is about bread, oil and … wine. This is an idea that has been transmitted through Christianity to the present day, although its origins are much earlier than Christianity itself.

It is probably its red color, associated with blood, like ocher, widely used in the Paleolithic, that made the wine somehow associated with religious practices. Then the state of euphoria or intoxication it induced, often associated with a mystical trance, led people of the past to see many metaphysical valences in wine. Or, let’s call them superstitions.

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Because of this, for some reason, wine was not just an alcoholic drink. It was something that was found in most Eastern, North African and European cultures, from the dawn of the Neolithic to Antiquity, because we stop at Antiquity with the first part of the history of wine. And in absolutely every culture to which it reached, wine gained valence, which made it the drink of royalty, deities, priests and, no less important, representatives of the lower classes.

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Through the prism of these ideas, we invite you on a journey through the history of the most important ancient cultures, and especially how they perceived and interpreted the consumption of wine. From the Mesopotamians to the Egyptians, from the Phoenicians to the Greeks and then to the Romans, from the barbarians to the civilized world and from the pagans to the Christians. All this by simply accessing the audio material with one click of the mouse.

Plot: Adrian Nicolae | Sound design: Adi Jacob

Music: Epidemic Sound