The Origins and Ancient History of Wine

Many individuals, not least the conference participants, have brought this volume to fruition. At the Robert Mondavi Winery, we are especially grateful to Harvey Possert and Regina Lutz for coordinating the myriad details of the symposion-travel from around the world to Napa, local tours, special events, and a memorable week of meetings. Robert Mondavi and his wife, Margrit Biever, were our hosts extraordinaires. On the first evening, Margrit and Nina Wemyss welcomed the conferees to the winery with the illustrated Mission presentation on wine in art and history, followed by a tour of the winery. Our proceedings (and the wine!) had an excellent finish-a farewell dinner at Robert and Margrit's home, looking out across the vineyards of the valley.

The conference was jointly sponsored by The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The University Museum and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto kindly provided ancient artifacts from their collections to be displayed at the winery on the public media day. Institutional sponsors from the Napa Valley included Swanson Vineyards and Winery in Rutherford and the Clos Pegase Winery in Calistoga, whose owner, Jan Schrem, treated us to a luncheon in the wine grottoes, with Roman satyrs laughing down on us.

The task of readying this manuscript for publication has been shared by many students and personnel at The University Museum, including Desiree Martinez, Paul Zimmerman, Irini Haralambopoulou, Michael Danti, and Susan Bing. Other credits to publishers, artists, photographers, mentors, reviewers, and so on, too numerous to list here, will be found in the captions to the figures and in the acknowledgments to individual chapters.

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