by Nancy Yos

Created on: June 16, 2009

We may as well begin, more's the pity, with the lovely legend that is apparently not true.

Syrah, the grape, is so named because it came originally from Shiraz, in Persia. The vine was brought back from the Near East by a Crusader in the thirteenth century, one Gaspard de Sterimberg. He became a hermit and lived in a hut on a hillside in the Rhone valley in France, where syrah grows at its best. In fact syrah's most famous (and deeply expensive) wine is called L'Hermitage, after the recluse's home.

Sigh. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Wouldn't it be positively delicious if it turned out all this is true? It's possible, you know. Even though it seems we are forever learning that the grand things of the past really didn't happen, still each new cohort of professional historians has to earn its various Ph.Ds doing something. More often than not it seems they earn them by disproving whatever the previous cohort said, no matter what it was. Each generation gets to be brave, and call it "revisionism."

Of course, each generation can't rightly be revisionist without proof of its new contentions, and the proof is always in the written record. In the case of syrah, the problem with the legend - the mucky old "mere reality," as Oz Clarke puts it - is that the words shiraz and Hermitage, in reference to this grape and its wines, do not appear in historical records until long after the Crusades and long after the thirteenth century. (Anyway, what would Crusaders have been doing in Persia? Much too far east, surely. The Levant was about as far as they got.) It seems syrah was simply indigenous to the northern Rhone, that French Huguenots emigrating to South Africa in the seventeenth century took it with them, and then for some reason called it shiraz after planting it upon their arrival there. And the wine made from syrah in the northern Rhone valley was not called "Hermitage" or "Ermitage," in writing on paper, until the sixteenth century. That's what matters - when do we see the words on paper? We tend to forget the first lesson of the subject of history, learned with luck in first or second grade. Pre-history means history before writing; it's the writing down of things that proves they ever existed. As the great Jacques Barzun says, history is not, for instance, a traveling display of dishes from the Titanic come to a big-city museum. History is "an event and a document." Your grocery store receipt, stamped with all those prices for wine and the place and date, is a primary source.

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