Random Events that Wine Changed World and Altered History (17 items)

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  (#5) Wine Led to Glass and Glass Led to Basically Everything Else

  Somewhere in all this Greek and Roman winemaking, people started to think that it was high time we found a new way to store wine. We were already using glass to make beads, cups, and little bits of jewelry, but the full range of its use wasn't really explored until the Romans started making glass containers for wine around 100 BC. From there, uses for glass began to pop up everywhere in art and science - and it all began with wanting to store wine better. 
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  (#3) The Pharaohs Used Wine to Seem Like Crazy Powerful Gods

  If you were rich and lived in Egypt back around 1,500 BC, then you drank wine. If you weren't, you didn't. It's as simple as that. Pharaohs drank wine and offered it to the gods, and even had wine buried with them from multiple wineries (yes, they had multiple wineries). Given that Egypt was a slave-loving country, the use of wine as a means of status kept the rich on top and the poor on the bottom, where they only drank beer. 
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  (#6) Cleopatra Used Wine to Win a Bet (But She Probably Cheated)

  Wine was always one of this fabled beauty's ploys for greatness. She used drinking to get to know Julius Caesar, and she allegedly had wild drunken parties with her guests. But her most notable use of alcohol was to win over Marc Antony and form one of the most famous romances in history.

  The story goes like this: Cleopatra made a bet with Antony over whether she could spend a small fortune in a single meal. She was determined to impress him and so at dinner time, she brought forth one of the largest pearls then known. She dropped it into a glass of wine, then drank the concoction down. He was, needless to say, impressed. The catch is that she might have made the cocktail using red wine vinegar, in order to dissolve the pearl, instead of plain wine.
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  (#8) "The Blood of Christ" Became a Religious Staple, Even in Prohibition

  Whether or not you believe Jesus existed, it's hard to deny what his existence in religious lore has meant to the world. According to the Bible, he was also quite fond of wine, as shown by his water into wine miracle. It was also written that, at the Last Supper, he gave his disciples wine and told them it was his blood, shed for them. The moment those words were penned, they became a part of religious ceremonies still used today. When Prohibition in the United States came around, the only wineries that stayed open were those that claimed to make sacramental wine, so we can thank the Lord for that too!
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  (#14) Louis Pasteur Studied How to Prevent Illness Using Wine

  Ever heard of pasteurization? We use it nowadays to make things like milk and juice drinkable, by heating them to remove harmful bacteria and microbes. This has helped us be much healthier as a society, and it all started with Louis Pasteur heating some wine in order to keep the French wine industry from collapsing. We no longer use pasteurization for wine, but the food industry was forever changed, thanks to one man trying to help us get drunk safely. You might recognize his name for another reason too: he used all this knowledge of bacteria to develop vaccines, some of which are still used today.
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  (#2) Wine Determined Whether or Not the Greeks Thought You Were Civilized

  If the ancient Greeks thought you were cool, chances are, you really were. And the best way to get those Greeks to like you? Why, give them wine, of course! You see, the ancient Greeks believed that creating wine was a fine art, so much so that they had a god that was focused on drinking it. If you could create wine, the Greeks would consider you civilized rather than backwards and barbarous, at least according to Thucydides, and many alliances were formed when the Greeks respected other "civilized" societies. In short, the ancient world looked the way it did because the Greeks respected other winemakers. 

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