I heard today in 'The History of Rome' podcast by Mike Duncan, some rather interesting bits about common Roman life, including that the ancient Romans were very likely more wine-conscience that we are today, and that there were vintage years that wealthy Romans would focus on. Also, he described wine as a sort of concentrate that you added water to to become drinkable (though some apparently went straight-up). Anyways, I am wondering how he knew this, what the sources say, and do we know specifically which years were considered 'vintage' by the Romans? Can we confirm vintage through other, non-historical means (geology for example)?
Yes, Pliny the Elder mentions the wine from the year of the consulship of Lucius Opimius (122 BCE) as noted to be particularly good. This was of course two hundred years before Pliny wrote, and as he himself notes it is quite undrinkable now, and the few remaining amounts are only used to flavor newer wines. Cicero also mentions the Opimian vintage as part of a moral passage about not overvaluing old things (Brutus 287). It is sort of amusingly fitting, incidentally, that Cicero mentions it in an elegant didactic passage while Pliny mentions it in a bit about commodity valuation.
As for the general wine culture, gong by Pliny the Elder you can definitely see plenty of similarities in that Romans talked about vintage years, and terroir, and obsessively valued the location of growing. There were a few differences, however, the big one being that the Romans were more liable to drink their wine mixed. The ancient tendency to drink wine mixed with water is pretty well known (there are plenty of mentions of drinking unmixed wine, however), but wine might also be mixed with snow to cool it, seawater, honey, sparrow eggs, and who knows what else. I suspect this is where Duncan gets the idea that wine was a concentrate, which is a good demonstration of how information can get garbled when you go two or three removes from the sources.