Monks and Wine

Publisher description -- Monks and Wine is an original, authoritative and elegant study of the one really important area of wine-making that has been almost entirely neglected to date. For well over a thousand years almost all the biggest and best vineyards were owned and cultivated by monks. To a large extent it was the monastic orders that saved viticulture when barbarian invasions destroyed the Roman Empire. Though the monasteries lost most of their vineyards in the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, monks are still active and often distinguished wine-makers in many parts of the world. Extraordinarily, this story has never been properly told until now.