Wine in the West I

"It is to the Early Bronze Age cultures of the Aegean and Anatolia (Asia Minor), in the early period from 3500 to 2000 B.C., that we must look for the immediate origins of the diffusion of alcohol throughout Europe. These communities consumed their wine from metal drinking vessels, and their more northerly neighbors of the Baden culture in central Europe have been shown by the archaeologist Nandor Kalicz to have echoed the design of these vessels in their own pottery (see fig. 7). [I substituted this image found on the internet for the figure in the book. It's also of Baden culture pottery.]

"Various features of Baden ceramics, such as their fluting, strap-handles and dimpled bases, clearly have their origins in the techniques used for shaping metal prototypes.
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"The Baden culture not only lacked the necessary knowledge of sheet metalworking to make metal cups, but was also beyond the limits of viticulture, which only reached this area in Roman times. So the liquids consumed from their pottery imitations of southern metalware were also a substitute. They probably drank mead, rather than grape-wine." [my emphasis]
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-Richard Rudgley, Essential Substances: A Cultural History of Intoxicants in Society©1993, p33.
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(If interested, this book also provides a survey of early intoxicants other than alcohol.)
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to be continued...