Fact Sheet

Gift of the Gods

Did you know?

A sample of fascinating facts from the exhibition Gift of the Gods: The Art of Wine from the Ancient World to Canadian Vineyards

Did you know that...?

Wine is the natural product of the interaction between yeast and the sugars in fruits and flowers, which produces alcohol and carbon dioxide. It is best known and most delicious when made by fermenting crushed grapes and their juice.
Wine originated at least 7,000 years ago somewhere in the highlands of northeastern Turkey and northwestern Iran, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
Civilizations in the Near East regarded wine as a luxury. Most of the peoples of Mesopotamia, Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt drank beer.
Viticulture came to Crete by way of Egypt and Asia Minor. The Minoans of Crete then brought wine-making to the Mycenaeans of mainland Greece.
The Greeks embraced wine drinking more completely and enthusiastically than any culture before them. They democratized wine so that it was no longer just a drink for the rich and powerful.
Wine was so important to the Ancient Greeks that more than half of all the vessels they used each day were related to the pleasure of wine drinking.
The Greeks never drank their wine "straight"; to do so was considered the act of a barbarian. They always mixed wine with water in varying proportions.
Wine quickly became an essential component of Greek culture, and the Greeks took grape vines and wine-making technology with them when they began to colonize the western Mediterranean in the late eighth century B.C.
The most celebrated vintages in Greece came from Macedonia, Thrace and the Greek islands along the coast of Asia Minor.
The usual containers for shipping wine were large clay amphorae. For land transport, these were tied on to the backs of pack animals. For sea voyages, the amphorae were massed together in the holds of ships.
From their colony of Massilia (Marseille), the Greeks introduced wine to the Celts in Gaul. Eventually, some 10 million litres of wine a year were delivered from Marseille to these "barbarians" - the Greeks' best customers.
The Romans inherited viticulture from the Etruscans and from the Greeks in southern Italy and Sicily. By A.D. 1, each person in the city of Rome drank an average of about half a litre of wine a day.
Two hundred bars for selling mulled wine have been excavated in Pompeii, near Naples. This is a density approaching that of taverns and pubs in modern cities.
Because wine was such an integral part of the liturgy of the Eucharist, the monasteries and cathedrals that sprang up across Europe between A.D. 800 and 1400 amassed substantial vineyards. These religious establishments became some of the most important wine producers of Medieval Europe.
From ancient times to the Middle Ages, bowls were frequently used for drinking. Turned maple wood bowls, known as mazers, were common in England until the early 1500s.
The glass bottle, cork and corkscrew, which we take for granted today, represent a very recent and extremely important milestone in the history of wine. It was not until around 1700 that vintners realized that wine could mature safely and splendidly in a glass bottle lying on its side and sealed with cork.
From the late 1600s to the early 1800s, the form of the bottle evolved from an onion shape, to a mallet shape and then to the classic cylindrical shape we know today.
Since most of the basic forms of wine glasses and accoutrements had been introduced by 1850, the glassmakers of the Victorian era focused on the decorative qualities of glass.
The introduction of the cocktail in the 1920s reduced the need for numerous wines with supper courses. Not until the second half of the twentieth century were fine wines restored to the status they had enjoyed in the Victorian era.
German and Italian immigrants brought the culture of grape growing, wine-making and wine drinking to Canada in the nineteenth century.
Provincial liquor control boards used to monitor the quality of wine, testing imported wines before they were bottled and sold.
To make icewine - an icon of the Canadian wine industry - the grapes are left on the vine until they freeze.
Canada's first Aboriginal winery is owned by the Osoyoos Band in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, which is Canada's only desert region.