Ancient Rome and wine Gaul. The Romans established lucrative trading relations with local tribes of Gaul, despite their potential to produce wine of their own. The Gallic tribes paid high prices for Roman wine, with a single amphora worth the value of a slave. From the Mediterranean coast, the Romans pushed further up the Rhone Valley, to areas where olives and figs were unable to grow but where oak trees were still found. As a result of their experience in what is now northeastern Italy, the Romans knew that regions where "Quercus ilex" were found had climates sufficiently warm enough to allow the full
Ancient Greece and wine served cold). The Greeks believed that only barbarians drank unmixed or undiluted wine and that the Spartan king Cleomenes I was once driven insane after drinking wine this way. They also believed that undiluted wine could even kill the drinker: the Gallic chieftain Brennus was recorded as having committed suicide by drinking wine full-strength. Greeks asserted that the dilution of wine with water was a mark of civilized behavior, whose contrast was embodied in the myth of the battle of Lapiths with the Centaurs, inflamed to rape and mayhem because of wine drunk undiluted with water. In addition to its