in 1990 and 1991, a Roman winery was discovered in the Mosel region of Germany. It is understood that the Romans had brought viticulture to this region by cultivating and harvesting grapes in vineyards along the Mosel and Rhine rivers so it was fitting that they’d have created facilities best equipped for creating wine.
This particular example was unearthed near Brauneberg on the vineyards of Brauneberger Juffer-sonnenuhr and it is believed to date back to 250 CE. It was a tidy-looking construction, with thought given over to both the process and the workers – a good number of them slaves. Dug into the sloping earth, it remains in use during an annual wine festival, showing the continued effectiveness of this age-old idea.
Brauneberg is certainly typical of a wooden winepress that used large beams and a screw to exert pressure on the solid remains of grapes in order to produce a juice that would ferment into wine. It was more productive than simply trampling the grapes alone and a good 150,000 square metres (15 hectares) could be served by each winery, ensuring that there would be a plentiful supply for market.
Such wineries have been found across the former Roman Empire, in areas that can take advantage of a mountainous landscape and sunny climate, such as Israel. It’s no surprise, however. Wine was a popular drink – and remains so today – so quenching that thirst needed producers to constantly refine the process.
It would affect the wine, though. Presses such as these would result in darker wines that were sometimes more bitter but it would usually depend on the care taken. Of course, the Romans knew that storing wine would allow small amounts of oxygen to react with the tannins and make the taste more complex and pleasant so they gave good thought to that too.
The wooden press would sit inside a recess in the basin floor. A weight was set over the basket and, as that was lowered in increments, it would put gentle pressure on the grapes and cause the juice to ooze out. Cloth or porous clay would act as a filter for pulp and pips. To exert the pressure on the floating weight above the basket, a large beam that could be as long as five or six metres in length was positioned between two supports. On the opposite side of the beam to the basket, a large screw was placed into a hole cut into the wood. This formed the innovative screw press. The men operating the screw would walk in a clockwise rotation, pushing the beam down on to the basket to press on the weights and press the juice.
The beam and weight presses made crushing more efficient and they would help to squeeze every last drop of juice from the grapes.
When ready and needed, the stomped-upon grapes from the treading pool would be manually transferred to the adjacent pressing basin that contained a wooden basket press. The idea was to carefully extract as much juice as possible from the grapes without crushing the seeds – doing so would release bitter tasting ‘tannins’. After flowing into a trough, the juice would make its way from the top-left basin and settle into the two basins below. It was now ready to be collected by the workers, with all of the basins containing steps so that the men could get inside and empty them properly. The workers would be able to get around the wine press by using the middle steps that would lead to a wide accessible platform. It would allow them to easily fill the top basins and climb inside, although ladders may have also been used, propped up against the press’ side. The fermentation process began when the wine was in the large vessels. The yeast on the skin of the grapes reacts with the sugars in the juice, turning them into alcohol. To ensure a stable temperature, the containers or wooden barrels storing the juice would be buried close to their tops in the earth. More workmen would lean over the bottom basins to scoop out the juice that was flowing down through the hole or spout from the upper-left basin. They would do this using easily handled pottery that they would then use to fill larger ceramic containers or wooden barrels, ready for storage. Following fermentation, the ceramic containers or barrels were dug back out of the ground and taken to the market where they were sold to enthusiastic buyers. In most cases, water was added to the wine before it was drunk and it would also be mixed with other substances such as honey. The earliest wine presses are likely to have involved barefooted workmen manually treading grapes and it was a practice which stood the test of time. Up to five cubic metres of fresh grapes would be poured into a large pool such as this where they were crushed under foot by workers who would often hold each other for support.