them with tracts of land, which they then cleared of forest and reclaimed from swamps, bringing systematic, organized agriculture to sparsely settled regions, and the grape to northern France and Germany Wine was required for the sacrament of Communion, and it and beer were made for daily consumption, to serve guests, and to sell It was in the Middle Ages that the wines of Burgundy became famous From the late Middle Ages on, France slowly became the preeminent source of wine in Europe By the 1600s the wines of France, and especially Bordeaux, which had the advantage being a port, were important exports to England and Holland Meanwhile Italy fell behind, a victim of political and economic circumstance Until the middle of the 19th century it was not a nation but a collection of city-states, each with protective tariffs and little of the international trade that brought competition and improvement to the wine regions of France Most of the wine was consumed locally, and the grapevines grown not in vineyards but in sharecroppers’ plots, between rows of food plants or trained on trees Food Words: Wine, Vine, Grape Our language bears witness to the fact that from the very earliest times, people thought of the grapevine not as the source of edible fruit, but as the source of wine Our words vine and wine come from the same root word, and that word meant the fermented juice of the vine’s fruit This root is so ancient that it predates the divergence of Indo-European from other prehistoric languages of western Asia The words for the fruit itself, on the other hand, are different in different languages The English word grape appears to come from an Indo-European root meaning “curved” or “crooked,” probably referring to the ...wine regions of France Most of the wine was consumed locally, and the grapevines grown not in vineyards but in sharecroppers’ plots, between rows of food plants or trained on trees Food Words: Wine, Vine, Grape... Our language bears witness to the fact that from the very earliest times, people thought of the grapevine not as the source of edible fruit, but as the source of wine Our words vine and wine come from the same root... word, and that word meant the fermented juice of the vine’s fruit This root is so ancient that it predates the divergence of Indo-European from other prehistoric languages of western Asia The words for the fruit itself, on the other hand,