All I did was innocently ask my guide in Abruzzo, Italy, an historical question. I was, in no way, prepared for his vehement response.

“The Romans!” bellowed Luigi Minnucci.  “They drank FILTHY wine!!” Granted, Signore Minnucci was effusive even by Italian standards, but he did know what he was shouting about. “First, the ancient Romans didn’t filter the juice,” he exclaimed. “Then, the pitch lining and even the terracotta from the amphorae leached into the vino and, ultimately, there was the lead!”

He was right, of course. But that didn’t stop the Roman Empire from proselytizing the product of the grape and reaping the financial rewards of selling it.

At its zenith, the Roman Empire sprawled from England to Africa, Spain to Mesopotamia. Its legacy is roads and aqueducts, architecture and art, place names and wine. The last is all the more amazing because, as Luigi Minnucci asserted, most of the vino wasn’t very good. Even back then, consumers knew what they had and how to handle it. They never drank wine undiluted (that was considered “barbarian”) and sometimes added chalk or marble dust to lessen the acidity. They also laced their wines with honey, spices, herbs, flowers, fish sauce, onions and even seawater.

But the wine wasn’t all bad. Improvements came with time and there inevitably were good wines too, if you were rich and powerful enough to buy them. Falernian was arguably the most celebrated wine of ancient Rome, and some served to Caligula had been aged for a century and a half. Other wine imbibers at the time averred that Caecuban was as good.  These top wines could cost up to 1 Denarius (there is no accurate modern exchange rate, but 1 Denarius equaled 20 asses, and 1 as could buy a loaf of bread).

But good or bad, pricey or cheap, everyone in the empire drank wine, right down to the lowliest slave. About 47,000,000 gallons were consumed each year, which averaged out to approximately half a pint a day for every living Roman. Undoubtedly, some folk had more than their share. Such huge demand required an enormous supply and therein lies the main wine contribution of the Roman world, for the ancient empire was as much built on trade as it was on warfare. Julius Caesar, leading his legions to the far frontier of Gaul, found two Roman wine merchants already there ahead of him trading with the enemy.

There’s very little in the world of wine that we don’t owe to the Romans, and that includes wine snobbery.

The Romans didn’t invent wine. Archaeologists have unearthed prehistoric pots of fermented grapes and found Macedonian presses that are almost 7,000 years old.  The Etruscans and Greeks began the cultivation of grapes and standardization of the winemaking processes in the Mediterranean. But, when the Romans entered the scene, they contributed wine barrels, glass bottling, and structures of branding, shipping and selling that are still used today. “In France, the main trade routes used in Roman times now correspond to the key wine regions,” said Johnathan Reeve of wine-searcher.com. “To travel from Rome to Paris, one passes through Provence, Rhone and either Burgundy or the Loire Valley. Provence (“our province”) was named by the Romans.”

The lasting Roman wine heritage is also prominent in the regions of the Languedoc, Bordeaux, Beaujolais, Burgundy and Champagne as well in the wines and wine regions of Spain (Rioja, Galicia, and in the sherries of Cadiz), Germany (most notably in Mosel and Rhine wines), Switzerland (the Humagne is a heritage grape still cherished there), Britain (which was warmer than it is today), Palestine (which also had a very different climate from what it has now and produced some of the finest vintages of ancient times) and, of course, throughout the Mediterranean.

Still, some former outposts of the past lead to unexpected discoveries. Phoenician Carthage (now Tunisia) was long the bitter enemy of Rome. The Carthaginian general Hannibal famously marched his war elephants over the Alps to deal the empire an unforgettable blow.  When this affront was avenged by the Romans in 146 BCE, they destroyed just about everything Carthaginian except the treatises of Magon (alternately, Mago).  He was an agricultural writer and viticulturist whose rules and advice about growing and producing wine proved so sound that they are still used.

There’s very little in the world of wine that we don’t owe to the Romans, and that includes wine snobbery. In the heyday of the Empire, classifications and consumption of wine were linked to class structure.  At the low end, for slaves and sometimes soldiers, there was Lora, a watered-down 2^nd or 3^rd grape pressing, and Posca, which was more like a vinegar infusion. Posca was popular with travelers as it helped to disinfect polluted water and acted as somewhat of a painkiller. In fact, it’s thought to have been the potion given to Jesus on the cross –which puts a different spin on the story.

Next came Mulsum, a wine liberally spiked with honey prior to serving. Usually served as an aperitif, it was in such demand that widespread planting lead to a famine and an imperial grape crop restriction that remained in place for almost 200 years.

Then there was Massilitanum, a smoky swill promoted for its health benefits, and at the top, Caecuban and Falernian. “Almost all the respected Roman wines were white and quite sweet,” writes Dr. Stuart Fleming in his book VINUM: The Story of Roman Wine.

So maybe Luigi Minnucci was right and we wouldn’t want to drink our wine exactly as the ancient Romans did: watered down three to one, redolent with lead, resinous, and hyper-sweetened. But I’m sure grateful that their soldiers, merchants, scientists and epicureans paved the way for us to enjoy what we do today.