Wine lover's rules. How to choose, taste, and what you need to know about wine

Alice Smahina

The Day of the Winegrower and Winemaker will be celebrated annually on the second Sunday of November from 2020. In September this year, President Volodymyr Zelenskyi signed a decree on establishing an official holiday for people associated with grapes and wine. According to him, introducing this holiday will be a symbolic step in expressing respect to this profession.

Celebrating the winemaker's holiday is not new. In France, in particular, celebrations dedicated to winemaking take place from June to December. In Bordeaux every year, there's an unlimited tasting for all wine lovers. In Burgundy, in the ancient City of Chenôve, there's a festival of wine presses built by the Dukes of Burgundy in 1238. Médoc holds one of the most famous marathons in the world. The major highlight is wine tasting stops; the marathon winner receives the key prize: an excellent wine in an amount equal to the champion's weight.

Similar festivals take place in Austria, Hungary, Israel, Peru, Chile; basically, wherever grapes grow and cultivate, wherever it's made into a beautiful, intoxicating, gourmet-revered drink — wine many poets and philosophers sang odes to.

People got the first evidence of the wine existing in Georgia. There, archeologists found fragments of clay jugs decorated with grapes images dating back to about 6 thousand BC. Evidence that a person could make wine in the early history stages was found in Mesopotamia, in the southern regions of the Caucasus, on the Nile, and in Palestine. It is unlikely that the drink had a pleasant taste in those days. Otherwise, why sweeten it with honey or season it with herbs, such as absinthe? People might've valued wine solely for its alcohol content.