The Vine Follows Power

The modern wine map looks surprisingly tidy.

Bordeaux here. Rioja there. Champagne in the north. Port in the Douro. California across the Atlantic. Australia on the other side of the world.

We explain them through climate, soil, altitude and grape variety.

All important.

But none of them explains why the vine arrived there in the first place.

For thousands of years, vines have travelled with merchants, armies, missionaries, settlers and empires. They crossed seas, survived wars and changed nationality without moving.

Soil and climate help explain how a wine tastes.

Power often explains why the vineyard is there at all.

Wine started as agriculture, but it did not stay that way for long. From around the eighth century BCE, Phoenician networks linked the eastern Mediterranean with North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia and Iberia, helping expand viticulture in parts of the peninsula, while Greek colonies carried that wine culture into southern France and north-eastern Iberia. Then Rome arrived, and Rome did what it often did best: it scaled everything. Roads connected vineyards with cities, ports connected provinces, and amphorae carried wine across the Mediterranean and north towards Gaul and Britain. Wine travelled with the army too, as Roman supply networks provisioned soldiers across an enormous territory, and soldiers were associated with posca, a cheap drink made from water mixed with wine vinegar. An empire needs soldiers, soldiers need supplies, and wine became part of the logistics. As Roman power expanded, Gaul and Hispania became important wine-producing regions, while estates, roads and settlements created a structure that survived long after the Western Roman Empire disappeared. The empire fell, but the vines stayed.

When Roman political control fragmented, wine did not disappear with it. Christianity helped preserve its place in society, especially because wine was essential to the Eucharist, and monasteries and religious orders became important vineyard owners and growers. Burgundy is the most famous example, where Benedictine and Cistercian communities, alongside secular landowners, helped develop the relationship between particular parcels of land and the wines they produced. A monk did not invent terroir, but monks certainly helped observe, record and preserve knowledge about vineyards. Yet medieval wine history was never purely Christian. After the Umayyad conquest of Iberia in 711, much of the peninsula came under Islamic rule. Although Islamic law prohibited intoxicating drinks, vineyards did not disappear. Grapes continued to have value as fruit, raisins, must and vinegar, while wine production persisted particularly among Christian and Jewish communities, with restrictions varying between rulers and periods. Different rulers. Same vine.

From the fifteenth century onwards, European expansion changed the wine map permanently. Before vines crossed the Americas, they crossed the Portuguese Atlantic. Portuguese settlers carried vine cuttings to Madeira from the earliest years of settlement, and by 1455, Funchal was already surrounded by vineyards. The vine then reached the Azores, first on Santa Maria and later, in the fifteenth century, Pico, where growers enclosed tiny plots behind black volcanic walls to protect them from Atlantic wind and salt. The vine travelled farther south too, as Portuguese settlers introduced it to Cape Verde, where Fogo became the clearest success, with altitude and volcanic conditions helping overcome the challenges of tropical viticulture.

Then came Brazil. In 1532, Portuguese colonists introduced Vitis vinifera at São Vicente, demonstrating how closely the movement of the vine followed Portuguese expansion. The Portuguese could move the vine, but geography decided where it prospered. Yet geography was not the whole story. Portugal built much of its empire around maritime trade and coastal strongholds rather than vast settler territories, while colonial policies sometimes discouraged local viticulture in order to preserve markets for Portuguese wine. This helps explain why Portugal’s wine footprint is less obvious than Spain’s, although its legacy remains visible in Madeira, the Azores, Cape Verde and Brazil, and elsewhere through trade routes and wine consumption. Not every empire left vineyards behind. Sometimes it left customers.

Spain encountered a different geography and a different colonial model. Its American vineyard story also began early: in 1524, Hernán Cortés ordered settlers in Mexico to plant vineyards, eight years before the first documented Portuguese introduction of vines to Brazil. From there, Spanish viticulture spread throughout the Americas, from Mexico and Peru to Chile and Argentina, eventually reaching California. One grape tells this story particularly well: Listán Prieto. In California, it became known as Mission; in Chile, País; and in Argentina, Criolla Chica. The same vine travelled across different colonies, acquiring different names while tracing the expansion of Spanish influence across the Americas.

Same vine. Different colonies. Different names. You could almost use the grape as a map of Spanish expansion. Empire moved the vine, while geography — and sometimes politics — decided what happened next. Other European powers followed this movement. Dutch settlers produced the Cape’s first recorded wine in 1659, and Constantia would later become famous across European courts. In Australia, James Busby brought European vine cuttings in the 1830s, helping shape the country’s emerging wine industry. Places like these would later be labelled the “New World”, a phrase that sounds almost innocent. The history often was not. Vineyards were frequently established alongside conquest, land appropriation and the displacement of Indigenous populations, revealing that the expansion of wine was often inseparable from the expansion of political and colonial power.

By the nineteenth century, European vines had travelled across much of the world. Then globalisation returned the favour. Phylloxera, a vine-root pest native to North America, reached Europe through imported plant material, and from the 1860s onwards vineyards began collapsing across the continent. European Vitis vinifera produced the wines people wanted, but its roots were vulnerable, while American vine species showed far greater resistance to the pest. So Europe compromised: European varieties above ground, American rootstocks underneath. Pinot Noir remained Pinot Noir, Tempranillo remained Tempranillo, and Touriga Nacional remained Touriga Nacional, but beneath most European vineyards, the roots became American. Europe had spent centuries exporting its vines around the world; now, American vines helped save Europe. Wine history has a sense of humour sometimes.

For centuries, people had moved vines across borders, but the twentieth century created another possibility: borders moved across vineyards. Alsace is one of the clearest examples. Control shifted several times between France and Germany, and its wine culture still reflects both worlds, combining French appellation law with Germanic grape varieties, bottle shapes and place names. The vineyard stayed where it was; nationality moved around it.

Champagne experienced something far more violent. During the First World War, Reims became part of the front line, while the underground chalk cellars known as crayères served both as shelters and as places for making and storing wine. The Second World War brought occupation and requisitions. In 2010, an inventory at Bollinger uncovered an abandoned cellar containing bottles and magnums of reserve wines, with archival research identifying vintages dating back to 1830. Not every bottle in that cellar tells a war story, but few industries can preserve history quite so literally.

War and colonialism could create wine industries, but they could dismantle them too. Algeria is one of wine history’s most extraordinary examples. Under French colonial rule, vineyards expanded dramatically, and by 1930, Algeria was producing around 22 million hectolitres of wine, making it one of the world’s major wine producers. Much of this production travelled to mainland France for blending, revealing how closely the industry was connected to the needs of the colonial market. After independence in 1962, however, settler departure, nationalisation, vineyard uprooting and restricted access to French and European markets drove a long decline. The industry had been designed around an empire, and once that empire disappeared, much of the reason for its enormous scale disappeared with it. Markets can build vineyards. Markets can abandon them too.

South Africa experienced almost the reverse story. During apartheid, boycotts, sanctions and commercial pressure isolated its historic wine industry from important export markets. Then the politics changed. After Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990 and the 1994 democratic election, South African producers re-entered international markets and modernised rapidly. Sometimes a market disappears because of politics. Sometimes politics gives it back.

By the late twentieth century, countries once described mainly as colonies, suppliers or “New World” producers were challenging Europe’s traditional authority over fine wine. Then came Paris. In 1976, British wine merchant Steven Spurrier organised a blind tasting in which French judges compared leading French and Californian wines. California won both categories: Château Montelena Chardonnay placed first among the whites, while Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon placed first among the reds. The result did not prove that California was “better” than France, but it demonstrated something more important: serious fine wine was no longer the exclusive preserve of Europe’s historic regions. Europe had spent centuries exporting vines, winemaking knowledge and ideas of quality around the world. Now those regions were answering back.

The forces shaping wine today are different — mostly. Empires no longer decide where every vineyard should be planted, but climate, capital, markets and consumer taste still move wine around the world. Climate change is pushing harvests earlier and encouraging growers towards higher elevations, cooler exposures and once-marginal latitudes. At the same time, producers are also looking backwards, recovering old varieties, reconsidering field blends and reviving ancient cellar techniques. Georgia is a beautiful example: its traditional qvevri method uses buried earthenware vessels for fermentation, ageing and storage, and today winemakers far beyond Georgia are studying the technique. For centuries, Europe exported vines and winemaking techniques to the rest of the world. Now knowledge travels in every direction.

Look again at a modern wine map. It still looks tidy, but underneath it sits something much messier: Phoenician trade routes, Greek colonies, Roman roads, monastic vineyards, Islamic Iberia, Portuguese sea routes, Spanish missions, Dutch colonial ports, American rootstocks, French Algeria, South African sanctions, wars that moved borders, and markets that created industries and then removed them. None of this means soil, climate or grape variety matter less. Of course they matter. But terroir did not build ships, climate did not send missionaries to California, and limestone did not colonise Algeria. Vines do not move themselves. People move them. And wherever people have traded, worshipped, conquered, settled, fought and rebuilt, the vine has followed power.