Can I please have a description of what lesbian wine is? I'd prefer not to start a new thread.

I can answer the first part of your question, why Lesbian wine was expensive in certain places during Antiquity, but not the second as that falls outside of the scope of my knowledge.

#Background of the question

The first question that comes to mind is whether Lesbian wine actually was expensive compared to other wines. The following is a bit of background on wine reputation and consumptions for readers who may not have known that Lesbian wine was expensive in the first place, but you are welcome to skip to the second part which answer the gist of the question.

Lesbos begins to appear in lists of regions which produce high-quality wines by the 5th Century BCE, alongside regions like Thasos, Chios, and Mende during the Classical period. These were not the only wine-producing regions in the Greek-speaking world, there were many other major wine exporters around the Aegean and the Black Sea, and by the Hellenistic period, the western Mediterranean as well. Cities like Rhodes and Knidos exported wine in bulk, but this wine had a reputation of being cheap, in terms of price and quality. The key difference between a Lesbian city like Mitylene and a city like Rhodes was not the importance of wine to their economy, but the value placed on it in the Mediterranean market.

Lesbian and Chian wines were particularly notable for their ability to improve with age, while poor wines turned to vinegar after as little as a year. This was all the more important given that imported wine had to spend weeks at sea, in relatively harsh conditions. Lesbos and Chios evidently maintained their stellar reputation and their viniculture industry into the Hellenistic and Roman periods, as later authors exalted their virtues as excellent wines.

It is possible to trace the exportation of wine through the discard wine jars, or amphorae, which were recycled or discarded when empty. Amphorae from different city-states often had unique shapes or colours. Over the course of decades, Virginia R. Grace analysed hundreds of thousands of amphorae and pottery shards to create archives of reference for styles, dating, and origin. For example, Knidian amphorae were made with distinctively red clay and ringed tips, while Rhodian amphorae were creamy and peg tipped. Lesbian amphorae often had a dark-grey colour peculiar to pottery from the island. Many amphorae from were also stamped with symbols or information which displayed their place of origin.

Excavations at Athens and Alexandria reveal that the overwhelming majority of wine imported came from Knidos and Rhodes during the Hellenistic period. This lines up pretty well with the idea that wine from these regions was cheap and widely available.

The 3rd Century CE author Athenaeus wrote that individuals were at one time able to import Lesbian wine to his hometown of Naukratis, Egypt free of tax. The Roman geographer Strabo repeated an apocryphal story in which Sappho’s brother Charaxus exported Lesbian wine to Naukratis. While these are not necessarily accurate, it is true that wine from Lesbos and other parts of Greece was exported to Naukratis from the Archaic period into the Roman era.

#How was Lesbian wine, and why was it so expensive?

It seems fairly clear that wine from Lesbos was more well-regarded than your run-of-the-mill cheap wine, and that it had a price tag to match. This leaves the question of why it was more highly valued, which is actually a simpler matter.

To answer this, it helps to get a sense of what ancient Greeks valued in a wine. Much like today, wine tasters looked for colour, bouquet, taste and alcohol content when assessing a wine. Unlike today, particular vintages were not more highly valued than others, nor were there patented regional varieties like Champagne or Bordeaux. There was however a large preference for wines from certain regions.

There are many reasons why certain regions may have become famous for high quality wines instead of others. The geography and climate of certain regions may naturally lend themselves to the production of certain wines, by virtue of their soil or aridity for example. This was probably the case on Lesbos, since each of its cities played a role in its famous wine exportation.

In Thasos, laws were put in place to protect buyers from unscrupulous wine merchants, and to hamper the sale of non-Thasian wines as Thasian. These measures are generally interpreted as an attempt to protect the reputation of Thasian wine, and it follows that similar laws protected the reputation of wine in other states which relied heavily on wine production.

Different grapes were cultivated in different regions and Greek vines were actually transplanted to Egypt and Italy. The techniques of winemaking (from cultivating and tending vineyards to ripening and mixing wines) varied considerably, with local specialties and imitations developing over time.

As a result, the contents of these amphorae also held quite a bit of variety. Wine was generally divided into three colours, with black (meaning red), white/straw coloured, and amber varieties being recognised. Sometimes, four were noted and this became black, blood-red, white/straw coloured, and amber. Athenaeus cites a line from Timotheus which calls wine “the blood of Bacchus”, and later mentions a dry white wine from Mareotis. In the 1st Century AD, Pliny the Elder noted that:

In one part they are lustrous with a rich purple colour, while in another, again, they glow with a rosy tint, or else are glossy with their verdant hue. The grapes that are merely white or black are the common sorts.

Unfortunately most of our surviving Classical Greek texts only mention winemaking techniques in passing rather than getting into the technical details. On the other hand, a wealth of Roman farming manuals from authors like Cato, Varro, and Columella exist which detail winemaking techniques in a later era.

Ancient Greek wines would have tasted quite a bit different from modern wines however. For one thing they were not aged in oak barrels like modern vintages, but in containers sealed with pine pitch and/or other resins which flavoured the wine inside. Although this flavouring was originally accidental, by the Classical period resinated wines were by design rather than simply necessity. Chian wines were heavily resinated which gave them a strong, unique flavour.

Not all resins were admired, with some trees or regions producing distasteful resins which had to be masked with additives like salt. Sea water was also used as a preservative in wines from cities like Rhodes, Knidos, and Kos.

Aromatics like flowers, spices (such as saffron and myrrh), honey, fruit, and even dough were sometimes mixed with wine to improve taste. Hesiod recounts the Boeotian method of drying grapes into raisins to produce sweeter wines, a technique still used today. Pramnian wines were also produced in a similar way.

Many references to Lesbian wine in Greek and Roman literature make note of its sweetness and the aromatics which were mixed with it. Apparently, Lesbian winemakers had their own technique of using sun-dried grapes to produce their signature sweet wine.

Pliny the Elder stated that in his time, prized Lesbian wine had “naturally a taste of sea-water”, no doubt from additives like sea water. This could mean that styles of winemaking changed, but it likely just reflects the contradictory and multi-faceted information we have about ancient wines.

James Davidson in Courtesans and Fishcakes cites a passage from Archestratus which praises the qualities of Lesbian wine, including its sweetness and its floral aromatics:

Then, when you have drawn a full measure for Zeus Saviour, you must drink an old wine, bearing on its shoulders a head hoary indeed, a wine whose wet curls are crowned with white flowers, a wine begat of wave-girdled Lesbos. And Bybline, the wine that hails from holy Phoenicia, I recommend, though I do not place it in the same rank as the other. For if you were not previously on intimate terms and it catches your tastebuds unaware, it will seem more fragrant than the Lesbian, and it does retain its bouquet for a prodigious length of time, but when you come to drink it you will find it inferior by far, while in your estimation the Lesbian will soar, worthy not merely of wine’s prerogatives but of ambrosia’s.

That might be one of the most glowing recommendations of Lesbian wine I have come across, and I am including it just for its poetry.

Hopefully this helps to answer your question and give you an insight into Greek wine tasting.

#Sources:

The Ancient Greek Economy: Markets, households, and city-states edited by Edward M. Harris, David M. Lewis, and Mark Woomer

Amphoras and the Ancient Wine Trade by Virginia R. Grace

The Origins and Ancient History of Wine edited by Patrick E. McGovern, Stuart J. Katz and Solomon E. Fleming

Wine and the Vine: An historical geography of viniculture and the wine trade by Tim Unwin

Courtesans and Fishcakes: The consuming passions of ancient Athens by James Davidson

The Deipnosophists by Athenaeus of Naukratis

Natural History by Pliny the Elder

On Geography by Strabo