Wine has told us a lot of stories over the 8,000 years we have lived with it. So many that we had to compile them somehow. When we started out, we realised that some elements were missing … works that would give meaning to the innumerable references to wine in specific areas and themes. In literature, in the cinema, about women, or about religion. How many things have been written about wine in films and books that have lasted through the years? There are so many, of different types, styles and authors. This is why we decided to bring them together in a single book. That was the origin of our publishing company: to search for a variety of themes, analyse them and produce landmark books on them with the aim of contributing something to the universe that is the Culture of Wine. To date, we have published seven books, the first on the construction of our Museum (the Museum of the Culture of Wine) and Architecture. Then came The Wine of the Pharaohs, The Chalice of Letters, The Cinema of Wine, A glass for two: Tales of Women and Wine, and two others with children as the theme: The Starling Saturnino in the Land of Wine and From A to Z, the Culture of Wine. They are all different and an essential part of our mission of disseminating the Culture of Wine.
Wine is drunk in innumerable films, but the Wine in Films aims to highlight those in which the drink takes on different meanings. Not just bottled wine but all the activities, scenarios, situations and figures that are associated with it: from the earth to the winery and the dining table, from the fiesta to tragedy, from the family to memories of the past. Poetic, fable-like, material, sensual, mythical. To do this, the author has explored the field of world cinema and has carried out ‘tastings’ of their production and authors. In the following pages we will visit Spanish, French, Californian or Italian vineyards – among others – to make a selection of film themes that have been shot there. We will examine the parallels between the nature of the wine and cinema sectors from the 19th century to the present day. We will start by highighting their strongest common point: both are products of the dark.
When tasted, the cinema of wine throws up films such as "The Field", "Tierra", "Providence", "Padre Nuestro", "Noche de vino tinto", "Sideways", "Mondovino", "A Good Year", "French Kiss", "Conte d’automne", "The Secret of Santa Vittoria", "Sans toit, ni loi", "Oro fino", "El extraño viaje", "Blood and Wine", "El duende de Jerez", "Year of the Comet Falcon Crest", "La Bodega", "Mala uva", "A Walk in the Clouds and many more". Through it we can see different ‘shots’ of wine on the screen: product, saga, mystery, adventure, romance and hubris.
King Solomon, lover and poet, caused the woman in love with the Song of Songs to exclaim: “Oh, if only kissed me with his mouth! Because he loves better than wine”.
Since then, few writers have been so generous when describing women and the enjoyment of wine.
In these tales we find seven voices fascinated by this relationship: from the willing female owners of the vines to the seducers that extract their charm from wine, from the vision of those who do not understand them to the dedication of those who love them: stories to read and savour.
Literature has offered wine the most beautiful and attractive glass to be poured into, right from the origins of civilisation. This book presents an entertaining yet rigorous history of wine as a literary motif in the history of the universe, highlighting quotes from works in which wine appears in all its glory. The literary representation of wine shows and clarifies major facets of human beings in classic works. Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Balzac or Neruda have linked wine to ritual celebrations and daily life, ceremonies and sentiments, to reality and symbols, and to pleasure and destruction.
As our book shows (with almost four hundred writers and over eight hundred literary works highlighted), the history of literature is – to a considerable extent – the history of wine. Both make up an important part of the cultural history of the human race. The Chalice of Letters combines the seriousness of a university study with the friendliness of dissemination, and represents a key contribution to studies on the culture of wine. The Vivanco Foundation for Research into and the Dissemination of the Culture of the History of Wine is pleased to present this new book, bringing readers closer to the world of wine and its culture and sharing the passion behind all its projects with every one of them.
The Wine of the Pharaohs tells us of the wine-making tradition in Egypt of the Pharaohs, through a book that introduces us to the history of wine. Without doubt, any winemaker should have this book in their personal library. Knowing about the history of wine is important and allows us to attach even greater value to this emblematic and transcendental drink. Maria Luz Mandago Alonso has created this great work with great care, based on her work and experience in Egyptian culture of gastronomy and wine.
The book sets out to describe architecture, which has the basic mission of trying to give a response to people’s imagination. In its pages, full of excellent photographs, it defines frameworks and scenographies and manages to create stimuli and special atmospheres in an attempt to reach the hearts of visitors.
“Treatise on viticulture and oenology in the 14th century”
Pietro de Crescenzi, a lawyer from Bologna who lived between the 13th and 14th centuries, showed a great scientific interest in agriculture. He embodied this interest in his Opus ruralism commodorum libri XII, also known as De agricultura vulgare.
In it, he described his experience as a farmer and brought together a whole range of treatises from Antiquity by Cato the Elder, Columela, Marcus Terentius Varro or Palladium. This book, which enjoyed great prestige from the start, has had several editions and translations, although never into Spanish. Book IV is entirely dedicated to winemaking and is the focus of the present edition by Ángelica Valentinetta Mendi, based on the Venetian edition by Alessandro Bindoni in 1519 which is conserved in the Wine Documentation Centre of the Vivanco Foundation. Thanks to this first translation into Spanish we are able to learn about the agricultural techniques used in Tuscany and the Po Valley in the Late Middle Ages, and also about the winemaking process used.
The book La Platería en la Cultura del Vino is the result of the research project initiated by the author in 2004 and the collaboration of the Vivanco Foundation with the University of La Rioja Foundation, with the goal of cataloguing the silverware collection of the Vivanco Museum of the Culture of Wine. It depicts a selection of the most significant works of the Vivanco collection and discusses the various types of objects created by silversmiths from classical antiquity to the advances of modern winemaking. It includes a catalogue with the study of 104 pieces, mostly unpublished, made between the 17th and 20th centuries in workshops in Spain, Europe and America. Most of them are lay, and they are divided into three different serving groups: uncorking; decanting and pouring: and tasting and drinking. It is a unique contribution to the history of art and silverware collecting which focuses on grape growing and wine drinking throughout history.
El estornino Saturnino en la tierra del vino (the Starling Saturnino in the land of wine) tells the story of a bird that is wounded and taken into care by a farmer. Over one year, we are able to witness the miracle of nature and the people who work the land through the bird and the person who looks after it. How the landscape changes, how the grapes grow, and how wine is made. “It is a way for children to get to know about the traditions and the culture related to the land from which a product is born, one that has such strong roots in our character and our history: wine”, explains Ms Sáenz de Tejada. She is determined to recover old traditions and the wisdom associated with the grape harvest through older people who still work the fields “before their wisdom disappears along with them”.
She won the Gourmand World Cookbook prize for the best illustration and photography in wine and spirits books.
Do you know your land well? Its rivers, the people, what they eat, local festivities … you will find all this in a surprising collection that will transport you, through its rhymes and descriptions, to the most special corners of Spain.
The book’s pages reveal all the mythology that surrounds wine and its culture, among fertile lands, grapes, casks, wineries and winemakers.
This catalogue includes a number of pages and covers from comics, based on a theme that aims to show how wine is reflected in these publications. Naturally, not everything is shown, and comic enthusiasts and conoisseurs will find quite a few references missing, but we had to make a selection from the enormous amount of material available. Another important point was the willingless of the authors to selflessly allow us to use their work. Among the originals, we would highlight the fact that there are three National Prizes among them: Kim, Paco Roca and Alfonso Zapico. To prepare the exhibition and the catalogue, over 40,000 covers and 25,000 inside pages of comics have been seen.
The states and situations associated with drinking wine – from encouraged drunkenness linked to rites of passage to the Greco-Roman ceremony of the symposium – wine has always been one of the elements that makes up the male identity.
We do not know if we still have time put things right, or if we men are currently responsible for the sexist behaviour and prejudices that were widely held among our ancestors.
Clearly, we should all subscribe to the words of Amelia Castresana when she says, in the first chapter of her book, that her aim is to “give a voice to women’s silence, recognise certain powers to historically incapable subjects, discover a range of skills where only imbecility seemed to exist before”. Let it be.
Since the oldest testimonies available on the origins of wine, the drink has created a mystic and symbolic value around it that has made it one of the most attractive elements to have accompanied the human race over the years. It is not by chance that its genesis, in the TransCaucus region, and its later expansion to the Mediterranean basin, have had an influence on the great civilisations that have forged human history.
The rites and celebrations associated with its consumption have gone well beyond its exhilarating effects, shared with other drinks, which brought Man closer to God. These rites and celebrations indicate other connotations that have their own deep nature.
The colour of the reds, similar to blood, has been a recurring symbol in different beliefs that linked the mortal world to the Divine right from the first drink offerings to the dogmas of the monotheistic religions.
Wine also contains a rich metaphoric element, in which its morphology or its growth cycle are manifest as a parable loaded with messages.
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