The best thing about wine is that the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know. This endlessly intriguing subject is fun to explore from surface level to in-depth and everything in between.

Take a sip of some fun and interesting facts about wine.

1. “Drinking to one’s health” came from ancient Greece. The host of dinner would take the first sip to assure his guests the wine was not poisoned. Nowadays when you drink to someone’s health you have a drink as a sign of wishing them health and happiness.
2. You actually smell the wine more than you taste it. We can taste only 6 flavors (sweet, sour, salt, bitter, fat and umami) but we can smell hundreds of aromas. 
3. The world’s oldest existing bottle of wine, the Speyer wine bottle, was originally found in 1867, in what is now the Rhineland-Palatinate region of Germany near Speyer. The bottle has been dated between 325 and 350 AD, and is the oldest known unopened bottle of wine in the world.
4. Hippocrates (c.460 – c. 370 BC), the father of modern medicine, recognized the antiseptic qualities of wine and recommended it as a wound dressing. He used it to reduce fever and to treat many different ailments, including anxiety and eye pain. 
5. To get the same amount of antioxidants you find in red wine, you would need to drink 20 glasses of apple juice or seven glasses of orange juice.
6. The god Dionysus was named to honor wine. He was the god of the grape harvest and wine making as well as ritual madness and religious ecstasy. Wine became such a staple in Greek society that they soon made it a symbol for trade and religion.
7. Believe it or not, some people have a “fear of wine,” and it’s called oenophobia. Oenos is the Greek word for wine. Oenophobia is indeed a real fear which brings about paralyzing and often irrational behavior when the Oenophobic comes in contact with the wine, wine bottles or spilled wine. 
8. Melchizedek is the king of all wine bottles, holding 30 liters which means 40 bottles of wine. As you can imagine, these wine bottle giants require a specialized cellar; the Melchizedek stands at an impressive 1,21 meters tall and can serve 240 glasses of wine.
9. Women are more inclined to the effects of wine than men. They absorb and metabolize alcohol differently than men. In general, women have less body water than men of similar body weight, so that women achieve higher concentrations of alcohol in the blood after drinking equivalent amounts of alcohol.
10. 10. At a wine-tasting event, it is okay to spit the wine out. When attending such events, it is acceptable to take a sip of wine and hold it in your mouth for a few seconds and then decide to swallow or spit it out. It also allows guests to taste multitudes of wine without getting drunk.

Written by Anna Nine, co-owner of Wine Barrique, Athens.