Pliny the Elder was basically the first wine blogger

Long before somm reels and “what I drank this week” carousels, Pliny the Elder was out here writing about grapes by hand. In a scroll. In a toga. No hashtags. No grid. Just ink, curiosity and a lot of opinions.

Who even was this guy?

A Roman author, naturalist and military commander, born in AD 23 or 24. Think scientist, writer and forever-curious wine nerd in one person. His Natural History (Naturalis Historia) is an encyclopedia in 37 books, covering everything from the stars to farming.

Book 14 is his wine book: the vine, how it grows, and the famous wines of Italy and the wider world.

What he wrote down

• Ninety-one varieties of the vine. That's the heading of one chapter in the classic English translation. He also admitted a complete list was impossible: the varieties, he wrote, were countless.
• About eighty great wines. He reckoned the world had about eighty notable kinds of wine, two-thirds of them from Italy.
• The legendary vintage. The Opimian vintage of 121 BC was the stuff of legend. Pliny says some of it still survived in his day, nearly 200 years later, thickened to the consistency of honey.
• The emperors' favourites. Augustus preferred Setinum to every other wine. In Pliny's own time, no wine ranked higher than Falernian.
• Truth in wine. He noted that truth was proverbially credited to wine: the old idea we now quote as in vino veritas.

Pliny: still more detailed than your favourite wine influencer.

Serious about wine, not a snob about it

Pliny loved the subject, not the excess. Book 14 ends with a long, furious passage against drunkenness: the waste, the bad behaviour, the people who throw away tomorrow chasing tonight. A wine lover with a conscience. His words have lasted longer than any bottle.

Curious to the very end

In AD 79 Pliny was commanding the Roman fleet at Misenum, on the Bay of Naples, when Vesuvius erupted. He set out to see the strange cloud up close, then turned it into a rescue for friends along the coast, and died at Stabiae. We know this because his nephew, Pliny the Younger, described those last hours in a letter to the historian Tacitus.

So the next time you post a bottle, raise your glass to the man who did it first, on a scroll. He didn't just drink history. He wrote it, one grape at a time.

More Roman wine: Bacchus, the original winefluencer, and the longer story of Pliny's influence on wine. For the proverb and many more, see wine quotes.

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