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When Neil Diamond sang, “Red Red wine” and Paul Anka sang “Bring the Wine, oh Lady, Bring the Wine,” they knew what they were talking about, because since 6000 B.C., everybody knows about the strength and power of fine red wine. The historical story about the origin of wine might be apocryphal, but the story goes that the favorite Queen of a Persian sultan had a raging toothache, which made her want to create mayhem as well as commit homicide or suicide.

After raging at her slaves for not doing anything to take away the pain, she decided to commit suicide, in the noisiest manner possible, because the sultan had not come to cajole her out of her megrims. She saw a jar full of some liquid, which smelt nearly as bad as anything, rotting in the sun, so she drank it up to the last dreg. If one goes by the size of ancient amphorae, it must have been a really large jar full of fermented juice of the grapes, and our sultana was soon as merry as a cricket and as high as a kite. She grew so cheerful under the influence of the fermented grape juice that people began to wonder about the magic power of that red wine and decided to ferment the juice and drink it in large quantities.

And so the story of red wine goes on into the annals of history. Nevertheless, the Greeks had a god consecrated to red wine, and they had regular wine festivals, a tradition which was happily accepted by the Romans, who called this wine festival Saturnalia when the god of wine, Bacchus was left free to do as most mischief as he could, because after all it was the festival, which was celebrating the power of red wine and its benefits in ridding a body of care and pain. Anybody wants to know about how the Romans got a sure fire cure for their hangover can read one of the adventures of Asterix and Obelix, where Asterix concocted a hangover is to be by putting in soap, red pepper and an un — plucked fowl, among other ingredients into a cooking pot and let it stew. Of course, this hangover cure also happens to be quite apocryphal, and that is why we need to come back to red wine.

You do not need to add any enzymes or sugars or even acids to grapes to have them fermenting to make red wine or white wine. The most popular French wines like Chardonnay, which incidentally happens to be one of Australia’s most popular white wines, as well as Pinot Noir, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon are made from the European grape species. Nevertheless, many wines are blended together by using different varieties of grapes of one same particular vintage. Out of these blended wines, the Bordeaux wine is most popular (and expensive!). If anybody wants to know what a vintage means that a number of grapes were grown in a particular year and turned into red wine or white wine.