Of Bread & Wine

Taking stock of fermentation

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Bread may be a meal, but wine is life and it’s little surprise that we’ve had both for more or less the same amount of human history.

We shall never be allowed to forget that traces of winemaking were found in Georgia dating to 6,000 BCE and while we seem to have made some form of bread for nearly 15,000 years, leavened breads in Mesopotamia also date to that 6,000 BCE timeframe, giving us 8,000 years of bread and wine.

I’m not shocked by this as, in addition to pairing well with one another, both require a key component for their creation, which is for a people to be settled. One can’t ferment wine on the go from “found” grapes, nor can one attempt to bake bread based upon the hope you’ll encounter enough rando wheat to make flour, which I need to add, requires something heavy and not terribly portable to grind it.

Sigmund Freud may have declared “soap is the yardstick of civilization” but for me, being “civilized” is defined as baking bread and making wine; all else is window dressing, or at the very least just riding the coattails of excellence that is bread and wine.