Inventing Wine

Wine is around 8,000 years old but the wines that people buy and drink today are mostly quite new. Modern wine exists as the product of multiple revolutions - scientific, industrial, social, even ideological. Though it has the same basic chemical substance as its ancient forebear, it is in every other respect very different. For many thousands of years, wine was a basic need. Contemporary wines taste unlike those from earlier eras and are valued in novel ways. Today it is a cultural choice and the reasons why millions of people choose it tells us as much about them as about the contents of the bottle or glass. In Inventing Wine, Paul Lukacs chronicles wine's transformation from a source of sustenance to a consciously pursued pleasure, in the process offering a new way to view the present as well as the past.