The first “wine book”

Aren’t “Wine books” cool?
You know, those guides about wine-tasting, with technical and sometimes historical info?
Yeah… sometimes they’re “biased”, or too academic, or maybe just advertising (avowedly or not) one or few brands. But they’re still cool!

And, you know when the first “Wine book” came out?
That was during the late Middle Ages. Annus Domini 1224: a Norman poet called Henry D’Andeli writes “La bataille des vins” (The battle of wines) a poem about a “wine contest”, organized by the French King himself, Philip II.

Several messengers have been sent by the King all over the known world, to collect the best white wines they could find, in order to rank them.
An English priest is the “grand jury”: his task is to taste the wines, and then pronouncing an “excommunication” if the wine is bad (excluding it from the competition), or keeping them running untill there’s only one left.

For the record, that’s a wine from Cyprus that wins eventually. It is commonly believed this to be the “Commandaria“, an amber-coloured sweet dessert wine with a long history that can be tracked back to 800 BC