Wine In Its Time

To the ancient Greeks, it was a mysterious, potent force that inspired the Dionysian rites and their artistic offspring, Attic drama. To Christians, it represents the blood of their Saviour. To the secular connoisseur, it is the most profound of liquids -- at its finest, poetry in a glass.

| The beverage, of course, is wine, which is the subject of a convivial yet scholarly 13-part series that appears on public television this month. In lesser hands, such a project could have been a mind-numbing compendium of trivia about Brix levels and Appellations Controlees. As written and narrated by Hugh Johnson, Vintage: A History of Wine is an excursion into cultural history, enlivened by the author's pithy insights on ritual, commerce and warfare.

Wry, learned and low-key, Johnson is an ideal host for the series, which first appeared on Britain's innovative Channel 4. The author of a standard encyclopedia of wine, as well as an invaluable World Atlas of Wine, Johnson is Britain's foremost wine critic; he is admired by his peers as much for his prose as for his palate.

In tracing wine's history, from its discovery more than 4,000 years ago in what is now Soviet Georgia to its potential for future greatness in California and Australia, Johnson offers some provocative comparisons. For example, he describes the monastic orders, which preserved viticulture in the Dark Ages, as "forerunners of modern multinational corporations," with outposts (abbeys and priories) scattered throughout Europe.

Johnson is serious about wines, but not too serious. Vintage offers some deadpan send-ups of oenophile pretension. One segment displays a dinner at a Madeira Club in Savannah, where tuxedo-clad grandees, after a traditional meal of turtle soup and roast duck, grope for words to describe some rare 19th century Malmseys and Verdelhos. "It's like the young Brahms and the mature Liszt," burbles one member.

Why, Johnson asks in the final episode, is wine alone among beverages considered an art? His answer: wine's amazing range of flavors, and its subtle changes while aging provide both nourishment for the body (in moderation, of course) and sustenance for the mind. Taste and experience, he urges. Many viewers will consider that sound advice.