Nobody knows from which particular part of the world the grape-bearing vine originally came, but man has been drinking wine with his food for at least 5,000 years and the antiquity of the custom goes back far beyond the days of ancient Greece to Egypt and the early civilizations of the East. The sacrificial wine which was offered as a tribute to pagan gods became the sacramental wine of the early Christian church. When we contemplate the wine in our glass we are looking at the oldest known agricultural product in the world which remains, despite the miracles of automated vinification and computer techniques, a comparatively simple commodity.