Ancient Rome’s Greatest Wine: The Opimian Vintage of 121 BC

For a long time, the great wine in Rome came from Greece. Chian, Thasian and Lesbian were the names to pour, and they were rationed: a guest at a Roman banquet got one cup of Greek wine and no more. Varro recorded that Lucius Lucullus, the general whose lavish feasts gave us the word Lucullan, never saw Greek wine served twice at his father’s dinners.

Italian wine was still on its way up. Pliny the Elder dates its rise from about 154 BC, the year Opimius’s father was consul, but its vineyards were still anonymous, and its wines lived in the shadow of the Greeks. In 121 BC that began to change, with a vintage Romans were still talking about two centuries later.

The consul

Back then the years, and thus the vintages, were named after the two consuls in office. Appropriately, the wine of 121 BC became the Opimian, after the consul Lucius Opimius. A Roman would have dated a jar of it consule Opimio, “in the consulship of Opimius.” His colleague, Quintus Fabius Maximus, spent the year fighting the Allobroges in Gaul and earned a surname for it, Allobrogicus. Opimius got the wine.

Opimius is otherwise remembered for a massacre. As consul he led the crackdown on the reformer Gaius Gracchus, who was killed along with many of his followers, and about 3,000 of his supporters were then put to death without trial. Needless to say, the wine had the better career.

The cooking of the grapes

With an entire harvest under one name, every grape, every hillside and every winemaker’s hand fell under the same title, which raises a fair question: what could so many different wines have had in common? Luckily, Pliny tells us: the weather.

121 BC was famously hot, and the bright sun ripened everything. Romans called it coctura, the cooking of the grapes, and Pliny says every kind of wine came out well.

Nobody has tasted the Opimian for nearly two thousand years, but the big picture is clear. Riper grapes carry more sugar. Fermentation turns that sugar into alcohol until the yeast gives out, at around 15 or 16 percent, and whatever sugar is left stays in the wine as sweetness. So, the wines of the Opimian vintage were almost certainly strong, and many of them sweet.

After harvest, the wine went into amphorae, tall clay jars lined with pitch and sealed with cork and mortar, and the best of it aged for years. By Pliny’s reckoning, nothing gained more value in twenty years, and the physician Galen put Rome’s finest wine at its best between fifteen and twenty years old. Romans also believed heat and motion did the work faster. Pliny thought the finest wines of Campania did best when left outdoors in their jars, under sun, moon, rain and wind, and that a sea voyage could double a wine’s age. Centuries later the same logic made Madeira, which was found to improve on long, hot voyages through the tropics.

Time in the jar changed the color, too. Was the Opimian red or white? Pliny doesn’t explicitly say, and as a whole year’s wine it was surely both, since he describes Roman wines as white, tawny, blood-red and black. Whatever color they started, decades in clay would have pushed them all toward amber and brown. A Roman white found still liquid in a tomb at Carmona, in Spain, had turned reddish-brown after two thousand years.

The price of sweetness

A hot year meant sweeter, stronger wine, and in Rome sweetness was more than a luxury; at this time sugar barely existed. Pliny knew it only as a honey from reeds in India and Arabia, used as medicine. Ordinary sweetness came from honey, or from grape must boiled down to syrup, which Pliny says was poured into wine to cover its harshness. Ripeness from the vine was the real thing, and sugar and alcohol were also what allowed a wine to keep, enhancing its ability to age.

Sugar stayed scarce in Europe for more than a thousand years after Pliny. Arab growers spread the cane across the Mediterranean, crusaders met it in the Holy Land, and Europe first knew it as a spice and a medicine. In 1226 Henry III asked the Mayor of Winchester for three pounds of Egyptian sugar, “if so much is to be had at one time.” Malmsey from Greece and Crete was costly enough that England and Venice fought a tariff war over it in the 1490s.

Through the 1700s the most prestigious wines in Europe were still sweet. Louis XIV is said to have called Tokaji the wine of kings and the king of wines, and Napoleon had Constantia shipped from the Cape to St Helena by the barrel; on his deathbed, the story goes, it was the one thing he would take. As late as 1855, the Bordeaux classification put a sweet wine at the very top: Château d’Yquem was the only estate classed Premier Cru Supérieur, a rank above first growth. Dry took over only at the end of that century, when the British, who drank Champagne with dinner rather than with dessert, pushed it drier, and Pommery made its first brut from the 1874 vintage – a trend that has continued in modern markets.

Today dry is the prestige style, and in a hot year the scarce thing is balance. The premium goes to whatever is scarce. In Rome that was ripeness, sweetness and age. Now that sugar is everywhere and warming makes ripeness easy, it is restraint.