Most French people would doubtless agree with François Rabelais, the great Renaissance humanist, who declared that “from wine, one becomes divine.”1 He may have been frequently accused of obscenity and heresy in his day, but it was not for this indisputable statement.
There was indeed a time, however, when wine was virtually unknown in the land we now know as France. Twenty-five hundred years ago, before the arrival of the Romans, wine was considered a foreign drink; most people in pre-Roman France preferred to drink cervoise, a fermented barley brew. Only the wealthier classes drank wine, shocking the Romans and Greeks by drinking it pure, not watered down, and to excess—and by allowing women the same drinking rights as men.2 Most of the wine was imported from Italy, in apparently huge quantities.3 Wine was cultivated only on a small scale around Marseille, the oldest French town and port, founded by seafaring Greeks from Phocaea around 600 B.C.E.
This vast territory between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, and the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, came to be known as Gaul, and it forms a natural starting point for history lessons in French schools. Most people who have survived the French education system will know at least two things about the Gauls.
First, they are “our ancestors.” For many years, “Our ancestors, the Gauls,” was a common refrain in history textbooks in France, somewhat willfully defying the considerably more complicated genealogies of modern French students. (This kind of approach is inevitable, perhaps, when one’s idea of a “melting pot” is a fondue.)
Gaul in the first century B.C.E., on the eve of the Roman conquest. Department of History, United States Military Academy.
The second thing most French schoolchildren learn about the Gauls is that they had a magic potion, made by druids, that made them extraordinarily strong. This is because French children, like all children, fall asleep during ponderous descriptions of their ancestors and much prefer to read comic books about superheroes—like Asterix, the diminutive but wily warrior from Gaul. Asterix and his friend Obelix, thanks to a magic potion supplied by their druid pal Getafix, have various adventures that mostly involve beating up Roman legionnaires, feasting on boar meat, and downing barrels of cervoise. The Asterix books have been enormously popular since the 1960s, and have even spawned a film series starring—in perhaps the most perfect case of typecasting in history—Gérard Depardieu as the drunken, boisterous Obelix.
But who were the Gauls, really? According to the Romans, they were pretty much like Asterix and Obelix: they were their noisy, drunk, uncultured, ever-fighting, banquet-and party-loving northern neighbors. As the Gauls did not provide much written history of their own, most of what we know about them comes from the Romans, so the above definition of them may not be entirely correct. Even the idea of a Gaul nation or political identity is not very accurate: they were actually Celts, a people who lived throughout most of Europe at the time, and they were ruled by many different tribal chieftains. The Gauls themselves would probably not have known that they were Gauls, but the Romans decided to call them Gauls, and so they came to be known to us.
The everyday Roman started to really pay attention to the Gauls in about 390 B.C.E., when they sacked Rome. In his History of Rome, Livy suggested that the Gauls had invaded Italy in pursuit “of the delicious fruits and especially of the wine,” but in the end it was gold they demanded in exchange for peace—a thousand pounds of it.4 The Romans acquiesced, but when it came time to weigh the gold, they complained that the Gauls were trying to cheat them with inaccurate weights. The leader of the Gauls used a simple yet efficient technique to shut the Romans up: he threw his sword on the scales and declared, “Vae victis!” (“Woe to the vanquished!”). The Romans got the message—so well, in fact, that they spent the next 350 years conquering the Mediterranean shores, and finally Gaul itself. “Gallia est pacata,” wrote Julius Caesar in 52 B.C.E., after his victory over the tribal chieftain Vercingetorix. “Gaul is subdued.” For the next five centuries, Gaul would be one of the most important and prosperous provinces of the Roman Empire, and its people would gradually evolve into “Gallo-Romans.” Nearly every aspect of their culture, from religion to language to eating habits, became blended with Roman elements. The beautiful French language we appreciate today, for example, has its roots in this Gallo-Roman marriage.
As the Gauls became more and more Romanized, they began to adopt the habits of Roman wine drinking and vine growing. New vineyards emerged throughout Gaul, producing intriguing varieties of wine that were appreciated even in Rome. In the first century C.E., Pliny the Elder noted that the Gauls around Vienne, in the Rhône Valley, were producing an excellent red wine. From the writings of Ausonius, a Gallo-Roman poet and winemaker, we know that wine was produced in the Bordeaux region in the fourth century (one of today’s finest Saint-Émilion estates, Château Ausone, is named for him). Nascent wine-growing cultures emerged in the now-famous regions of Burgundy, Alsace, and Savoy, and possibly even in the far northern region that is now Normandy.
These wines would probably not have pleased our modern palate. They were much more intoxicating, for one thing, which was why “civilized” drinkers tended to dilute them with water. They were stored and aged in porous containers and thus spoiled easily, so it was usually necessary to soften their flavor with honey or herbs. Notions of vintage and terroir had yet to be invented. Wine was appreciated not so much because of its taste but because of its disinhibiting qualities, so useful for social occasions and religious rituals, and because it was known as a disinfectant for suspect water. As we shall see in future chapters, the celebrated French wines of today emerged only after centuries of obsessive experimentation with grape varieties and winemaking techniques. Thus, the tendency for French winemakers to emphasize the ancient roots of their products should not be taken as an indication of consistent quality over the centuries. This marketing approach in fact emerged in the nineteenth century, when all sorts of gastronomic traditions were exaggerated or invented to counterbalance the dislocating effects of industrialization and urbanization.5
The Gauls may not have been big wine producers before the Romans arrived, but they had managed to invent one thing without which we simply could not enjoy wine and alcohol the same way we do today: the wooden barrel. It is hard to pinpoint when they invented it, but it is certain that when Caesar conquered the Gauls in the first century B.C.E., they were already using barrels—mainly for their cervoise, but also to transport items of food, such as salted or smoked pork or fish. They were thus a step ahead of the civilized Romans, who were still using amphorae to carry their goods around. Now to us, it seems easier to use something made of wood that can be rolled around, instead of a big ceramic vase with two handles. But then, the Romans had slaves to do the most backbreaking work.
Given that many of our modern tipples are aged in wooden barrels, which add some lovely flavors to the alcohol, we should really thank our ancestors, the Gauls, for making a glass of cognac, whiskey, or wine so much more enjoyable. Even the Romans, or the Italians as they are known these days, can thank the Gauls, as one of the staples of Italian food—balsamic vinegar—would not exist in its current form if not aged in barrels for months, or even years, prior to consumption.
It is not difficult to appreciate France’s Gallo-Roman era today, as many cities and towns—especially in the southern reaches of the country—are still graced by buildings, aqueducts, and bridges built nearly two millennia ago. The ancient city of Arles, for example, has a remarkably well preserved collection of sites around its imposing Roman arena. Its narrow winding streets evoke both long-gone antiquity and the sunny scents of modern Provence, encouraging a perception that time does not always run in linear fashion in France. It is a land where the ancient and the modern cradle each other, creating a history that is uniquely and ineffably French.
The Roman arena in Arles, built in 90 C.E., hosted chariot races and gladiatorial contests for audiences of up to twenty thousand people. Today, it is a remarkably well preserved UNESCO World Heritage site. Concerts and bullfights are still held here. © Gilles Lagnel (Pixabay Photos).