Grape Wine, A Social History of

”Never have I known a taste more bitter than the sweet tang of wine drunk at the behest of my adversary.”

- General Ishkamet, as quoted in the prose-poem
A General without a King about the Regicide of Baitha.

Being among the oldest and most popular of human endeavors, grape wine cultivation and production have a history deeply intertwined with the social history of the Northwest. Studying the evolution of wine can offer a detailed if unconventional window into the cultural, societal, and technological changes that have shaped the daily lives of the Northwest’s inhabitants.

Lost Histories and Contested Origins

The hot, arid summers and cool (but rarely freezing) winters of the Haifatneh Basin and its surroundings make a virtually ideal environment for vineyards. Certainly, the Basin is second to none in hosting the known world’s widest range of wine grape varietals. The most sought-after vints, disproportionately from the coastal foothills of the Southern Bounds, have been exported as far as the tropics of Au-na-Lai, and wine amphorae have been found among the treasure-laden burials of Golden Steppe nomadic chiefs.

Traders and customers exchange amphorae of wine in the ancient Haifatneh Basin.

^{By the 2000 HE, amphorae full of wine had become a commonplace trade good throughout much of the Northwest, with the coastal communities of the Haifatneh Sea being both recipients and intermediaries for this trade.}

However, a combination of linguistic and botanical evidence has demonstrated that grapes were most likely cultivated for the first time in the high river valleys of Saukkan-Ghat. Whereas the written records of the Haifatneh Basin and Agratekt are woefully patchy due to the ravages of the Interencine Wars, leading to circular and contentious debates among historians, fieldwork conducted by philologist Chamra Ham-Shantih among the Saukkanese hill tribes proved more fruitful. Not only did Ham-Shantih find that the dialects of Saukkan-Ghat employ a small library of terms for viniculture, grapes, and their flavors, but with the help of local herblorists, she confirmed that wild grapevines there exhibit a species diversity not seen elsewhere in the Northwest.
The relatively prosperous chiefdoms of ancient Saukkan-Ghat likely enjoyed a favorable environment for viticulture. The most abundant rivers are known to have supported considerable agricultural operations; this paired with the dry yet relatively mild climate of the lowlands would have granted wine-growers optimal control over their crops’ exposure to moisture while minimizing the threat of damaging frost. The Bay of Maherat, Saukkan-Ghat’s gateway to the Haifatneh Sea, would have greatly accommodated wine exports to the early cities of the Basin.
How it is that Saukkanese wines have since fallen in prestige—with some scholars even assuming they were first produced in faraway Agratekt!—is a question best answered in the context of the civilizational history of the Northwest.

Hierarchies of Wines and Drinkers

Thanks to the relative ease of maritime travel across the Haifatneh Sea—during times of peace—viticulture quickly became a feature of urbanized societies and other large settlements throughout the Basin. It is thought that grapes were grown for wine production at least as early as for any other form of consumption, given the ubiquity of beer and ale across the settlements of the Sea Peoples. The perishability of fresh grapes, too, made wine itself a crucial agricultural product. Sun-dried raisins are also widespread in the archaeological record but were a secondary product of lower-quality grape crops or else were produced using non-wine cultivars.

Wine and social status

Agratekti laborers transport amphorae of wine, which they likely never drank themselves.

As viticulture is more labor-intensive and lower in yield than the production of barley for beer and wheat for ale, grape wine soon came to be associated with wealthy private landowners, relatively well-paid specialists, and tax-collecting rulers and administrators of all sorts. This was seen most prominently in the Isthmus of Agratekt, where rigidly hierarchical city-states and monarchies once commanded massive irrigation projects. Agratekti nobles and priests found wine to be useful as a social lubricant and as an effective alternative to currency for paying their subordinates, ensuring the drink’s prominence in high society. By the first golden age of Agratekti civilization (roughly 1400 to 1800 HE), Agratekti urban centers were host to the largest varieties of wines, whether home-produced or imported, and the prestige of Agratekti high society and its vints eclipsed that of even the most powerful Saukkanese chiefdoms, never mind those of the Haifatneh Basin and elsewhere in the Northwest.

Adulteration or purity?

It was also in Old Agratekt that the practice of modifying wine with flavor additives became best known—a curious development, given that later in the history of the Isthmus, conoisseurs would denounce such adulterations as mere compensations for poor quality.
The early adulteration of wine is attributed to the notorious sweet tooth of the Agratekti nobles (less so the priests), which resulted from the ubiquity of beekeeping across the Isthmus plus the varied, indulgent diets of high society. In fact, Agratekti drinkers’ palates may have initially hampered the popularization of wine, as early imports likely came from Saukkan-Ghat via the Bay of Maherat; Saukkanese wines are famous for being the driest in the Northwest. Anise was another popular additive, and Agratekti vintners may have experimented with nearly every herb and spice available to them in hopes of sating their clients’ desire for novel flavors—not the least to impress their guests and associates. Toward the end of Agratekti civilization’s first golden age, a few cliques of nobles acquired a taste for syrups boiled in lead vessels, a development which apothecaries now understand to have been disastrous for their health. (Not that the Agratekti nobility were known for being health-conscious. In the rudimentary works of Old Agratekti physicians, gout is simply referred to as “noble’s feet.") Such adulterations did not make their way into ale-brewing to nearly the same extent, another feature of the

Anise, a cornerstone spice in Agratekti and western Haifatnehti cuisines.

particular distribution of wealth and luxuries in Agratekti society. During the second, lesser golden age of Agratekt, when internal court politics proved more dangerous than conflicts between polities, lesser nobles constantly searched for new marks of social distinction. This and the considerable evolution of grape varietals since the previous golden age set the stage for new heights of wine connoisseurship. Rather than having wine flavors wholly customized to suit their palates, a number of nobles grew obsessed with identifying the highest-quality (subjectively defined) wines—and flouting their superiority over contemporaries of less refined tastes. As adulterated wines became the mark of the relatively humble artisan castes, connoisseurs’ writings on the finer details of acidity, dryness, and flavor notes came to signify their alienation from the mainstream society they saw as being beneath them. To an extent, this new, more pretentious approach to drinking made its way across the trade routes to many polities throughout the Basin.

Viniculture elsewhere in the ancient Northwest

The Agratekti vocabulary of wines (and their at times pretentious approach to drinking) made its way across the trade routes to many polities throughout the Basin, thus partially consolidating a unified wine culture across much of the Northwest. Nearly all the Agratekti terminology for wine flavors and characteristics has been fully retained, save for superficial changes in pronunciation, in the Haifatnehti dialects. A few exceptions elsewhere in the Northwest are worth noting, however.
Viticulture does not appear to have taken hold among any of the civilizations across the subcontinent of Takhet. This might be a predictable outcome in Far Takhet, a desert expanse populated by a smattering of camel-herding nomads, though it is possible that some of the ruins there hold historical evidence waiting to be uncovered. The soaring mountains and scorching inland valley of Takhet Alay seem inhospitable to both civilization and agriculture. But Coastal Takhet has long hosted sizable maritime communities, and the drier foothills between the coast and the mountains ought to have potential for viticulture. Yet even the proximity of the Isthmus of Agratekt did not noticeably influence the drinking cultures of Takhet.
The wet season and hurricanes of Near Takhet’s cooler months bring ample moisture to the high mountains, producing abundant snowmelt to feed crops during the dry, sunny half of the year. Certainly, yields of cereal grains and fruits are high, at least when storms and droughts do not damage crops. Local tastes or social mores might account for the lack of viticulture in Near Takhet instead. The herding nomads of Far Takhet have historically dominated the overland trade caravans of the western Haifatneh Basin and Agratekt; being that herders are accustomed to more meat and fat in their diets, Agratekti wines may have simply been distasteful to them and thus overlooked as exports. Yet Takheti traders were surely savvy as to the tastes of potential customers abroad. The communities of Near Takhet have also been stereotyped as being relatively conservative—as seen, most notably, with their apparent acceptance of the Reborn Theocracy’s suzerainty—but if Takheti oral traditions are to be trusted, their notions of morality and uprightness changed dramatically under the Theocracy’s influence. A reserved attitudes toward drinking, then, may not have been a significant factor prior to the Internecine Period.
In Saukkan-Ghat, meanwhile, resistance to Agratekti wines is more readily attributed to their sometimes defiant preference for stuff fermented from local varietals. After all, one of their most beloved local wines—so dry that Saukkanese hosts rarely offer it to guests from afar—is potently dry and high in tannins that it has long been nicknamed Abzaresh for its supposed ability to make a young man start growing out his beard.
As for Shadrusun drinking culture, little is known to human scholars, as is typical of attempts to understand those reclusive people and their civilization. Only a few human scholars in the Revival Era are known to have willingly spent time in Shadrusun communities, and the Shadrusun have proven taciturn when interviewed on topics far more mundane than their physiologies and customs.

Hill Wine and Black Wine: Drinking under the Theocracy

While Agratekti leadership in the wine culture of the Northwest managed to persist through the rise and fall of multiple dynasties, and even through the increasing scarcity of water across the Isthmus, it did not survive the persecution of the Reborn Theocracy. Agratekti civilization was already a shadow of its former self when the Order of the Returning Sun carried out their brutal region-wide purge of the Agratekti culture and people, and little now remains of their greatest works, never mind their vints.

Your admonitions, my admonitions

While the Reborn Theocracy is rightly seen as enforcing their particular view of moral uprightness throughout the lands they annexed, present-day audiences may be surprised to learn that the Bairhanii religious leaders never wholly banned the consumption of alcoholic drinks. Indeed, not a single telling of the parables from the Collected Wisdom of the Saints implores listeners to abstain from alcoholic drinks entirely; at most, they sometimes encourage moderation and prudence in the cases of those whose vices have worsened their tendencies to harm to themselves or others. Collective mis-rememberings of the Theocracy as enforcing full abstinence from drink might be the result of Wiradinus the Campaigner’s own sobriety and the popularization of abstinence among both the upper priesthood and the Order of the Returning Sun under his influence.

Nonetheless, there is ample historical evidence that enforcers of the Theocracy’s moral order regularly cracked down upon wineries’ operations, as well as festivities involving significant amounts of alcohol—at least in Haifah-majority communities. This is most evident in the evolution (or perhaps devolution) of wine festivals at the end of Haanin-Qal (early autumn, customarily a week or so after wine fermentation was complete). These celebrations once took diverse forms and were usually designated as official holidays in pre-Internecine polities across the Haifatneh Sea, as per historical accounts. Yet contemporary celebrations are comparatively lacking in fanfare; a few festivals in Andaen and the northwestern Haifatneh region dispense with parades and holiday markets, instead involving furtive activities such as scavenger hunts for cleverly hidden drinks and games involving play-acting and trickery. There are no wine festivals at all in the relatively conservative city-state of Kailrana, among the oldest cities founded by the Theocracy—never mind that ale and beer flow more or less freely in the city's seaside taverns.
The lacking diversity of present-day wine festivals is also seen in the Lafargha—an ethnically Haifah-majority region on the northeastern Haifatneh coast, between Andaen and the Bay of Maherat. Although the region has long been subject to heavy Saukkanese cultural influence—including, presumably, their viticulture—contemporary wine festivals there barely differ from the those traditions practiced in the coastal settlements along the Haifatneh’s southeastern coast. (Notably, the southeast, including Feshanharit Bay and the foothills of Feshan Alay, were early rallying

Downtrodden vintners in rural Wal-Kishish ponder their situation after their wine stores were damaged during a raid.

points for the Haifatnehti insurgence that would eventually overrun the Reborn Theocracy.) It seems that while in the broad sense the Haifah-led Rebel Coalition overthrew the Theocracy's social mores along with its political system, they never were able to restore the full diversity of the Haifatneh Basin's pre-Theocracy viticulture.

Marginalization and Persistence

While the particulars of the Theocracy's injunctions against wine consumption may never be definitely established, it remains clear that the authorities took measures to suppress the practice—and it was inevitable that those who lived at the edges of the authorities' reach would find increasingly creative ways to preserve their traditions.
Within the Theocracy's core territories—the Gamarh, Laewerge, and Andaen itself—wine production was marginalized to secreted-away places in the few urban centers large enough to host illicit business activities without readily being noticed by city authorities. Vintners in these cities thus had to accept a considerable downgrade in the quality of their vints as they smuggled grapes and hid their fermentation vats away in far-from-ideal conditions. For example, preferable as it may be to crush grapes shortly after harvesting and then promptly move on with preparations for fermentation, in the core territories, grapes from the countryside were often shipped en masse in large crates (under the pretense of being sold for mass consumption the resulting goods were already tarnished and often beginning to turn moldy upon arrival.
It is also in these settings that the now-important distinction between red and white wine seems to have developed. Red and other dark wine colors result from grape pulp being fermented with exposure to grape skins and seeds; a whole range of wine colors are possible based on the exact ratios of ingredients. But in Old Agratekt and locales under its influence, the skins were often discarded or used only minimally, as they were seen as resulting in a less "pure" flavor and lighter shades like white and yellow were preferred for their smoothness. In Theocracy-controlled cities, however, grape skins could not conveniently be disposed of as they were obvious evidence of illicit activity; instead, the most convenient way to hide excess grape skins was inside the fermentation vessels themselves. It wasn't long before ethnic Haifah drinkers in these urban areas grew accustomed to their mouth-puckering reds, regardless of their predecessors' tastes. (It remains a matter of etymological dispute whether the epithet "black wine" refers to the pitch-black cellars and other hiding places where urbanists' fermentation vessels were stashed or to the color of the wine itself as characterized by naysayers.)
It was in the Theocracy's frontiers and beyond its borders, if anything, where a diverse and robust viticulture thrived. The far south of the Haifatneh Basin, from the coast to the rugged hills of the Sheven Bounds, was a rare locale which was both (largely) beyond the Theocracy's imperial reach and graced with adequate access to fresh water for agricultural productivity. (The aforementioned southeast saw a few wine-growing operations but it relatively arid, even during the Haifatnehti winter.) Those southern Haifatnehti vinyards nestled in the hills additionally enjoyed a cooler (though not exceedingly harsh) winter as well as a fairly hot summer; the grapevines turned out to thrive from the combination of the two, yielding consistent harvests of sweet, juicy wineberries. Vintners in this region were also freer to use the most suitable earthenware vessels for fermentation, unlike their northern, urban counterparts who, if anything, resorted to using the least probably vessels for wine, including metal ones, as these were the least likely to be searched during stings targeting underground businesses. Haifah viticulture remains largely Southern in its varietals, yeasts, and the types of storage vessels that are considered ideal to this day.

Revival Era; Revival Wines

The years-long rebuilding of Andaen and the century or so of civilizational instability that followed the Campaign of Reconquest was not conducive to the flourishment of the arts and high culture, less so cuisine. In fact, the Grim Era is broadly viewed as a time when drinking was more often a self-medicating activity than a social one (though this is an oversimplification, as is any attempt to characterized six-odd centuries of history in a single statement). Advances in viniculture and viticulture slowly trickled from the southern Haifatneh region and the distant reaches of Saukkan-Ghat where they were most robust, but progress in these areas accelerated greatly in the end years of the Grim Era and the onset of the Revival Era.
Aside from the steadily faster propagation of Southern-style styles (and of Saukkanese styles around the Bay of Maherat), many other Revival Era developments in the Northwest's viniculture have resulted from the spirit of inquiry, experimentation, and consumerism that era has ushered in. A great many brews, incorporating wine grapes or not, were either traditional or novel liquid remedies for one ailment or another, meeting increasingly relevant needs across the urbanizing (and therefore overcrowded, diseased, and polluted) population centers of the Haifatneh coasts. A demand for overall higher-quality wine, likewise, is fueled by the growing wealthy class of merchants and entrepreneurs in Andaen and other prominent Haifatneh city-states. The tastes of this class (and for wine-selling entrepreneurs, their clienete) grow ever more diverse, too, as the (hegemonic) regional peace under Andaen helps interregional trade to thrive.

A vintner fires an oven for distillation.

Professional vintners and historians alike widely agree that the single greatest innovation in all manner of brewing arts has been distillation. Having control over the exact concentration of liquid (including ethanol) in spirits has resulted in nothing short of a revolution in drink selections across the Northwest, especially in high-society circles where customers will pay for premium liquors. Throughout the Revival Era, Andaen's social venues have been known as something of a library of brandies.
The origin of this technology, however, remains in dispute. It is at least known that alchemists of the University of the Esoteric Arts and Lore had developed instruments and applications for distillation sometime after the Second Assault on Andaen. It is popularly alleged that University alchemists kept the knowledge to themselves for some time, perhaps even centuries. This seems unlikely, however, given that other universities in Andaen and abroad regularly engage in scholarly exchanges with the Esoteric University—not the least with its alchemical college, the most famous institution of its kind. Distillation is also sometimes characterized in folklore as a Shadrusun innovation; this is perhaps a more understandable misconception given the exceptionality of Shadrusun glasswork, but their kind were involved in the founding of the Esoteric University ever since Andaen's reconstruction.
Few alternative claims are better substantiated. A few fringe scholars allege that the science of distillation had been invented in Old Agratekt, its secret kept by refugees from the purging of their country. How, in such an event, a keystone technology of the Northwest's single most influential civilization remained successfully guarded for

so long remains unexplained. Oddly enough, the best indication of the provenance of distillation is a widely attested piece of folklore from the initial Assault on Andaen. Many facts of the city's seizure and destruction by the Rebel Coalition have been lost by the very destruction they wrought, not to mention the rapid reconstruction effort which itself destroyed or buried a significant portion of the city's history, but the legend of the Rebel Vintner of Andaen is widely agreed upon as being based at least some established facts. Among these facts is the manner in which the Rebel Vintner, her name long since lost to history, pried open the city's southern gate: Not with any instrument of siege warfare, but with a generous offer of her signature , allegedly to help the watchmen stay vigilant through the night before the assault was expected to take place. Rumors abound as to what additional means she may have used to distract the guards, but given the time-sensitive dangerousness of her mission and the beer- and ale-drinking customary among the Theocracy's Frulthudii majority, it stands to reason that she used a brew more powerful than ordinary ale or wine to incapacitate them.
Whatever exactly this latest and greatest innovation in brewing can be attributed to, distillation is evidently a key facet of Andaeni history. And the viniculture it reformed is, by extension, a microcosm of the social divisions and political intrigue that have shaped life and culture across the Northwest.