Wine Law

reached the shores of the Gulf of Paria, he found fermented beverages made from several kinds of corn, and he referred to them as “wine of many ways, white, red, but not grapes” 14 . A similar observation is attributed to Americo Vespucio, who affirmed: “And in peace, we went ashore with the boats, and they received us with great love and took us to their homes where they had very well-prepared things to eat. Here they gave us three sorts of wine to drink, not grapes, but made with fruits like beer and it was very good (…)” 15 . The taste for these “(…) wines made from juices from various plants that are cooked and fermented in the manner of Mediterranean grapes (…)”, such as pineapple, palma moriche ( Mauritia flexuosa ) or jobo ( Spondias Mombin ), passed from aboriginal Venezuela to Hispanic Venezuela, but it was not to the liking of Europeans, who considered them excessively sweet 16 . The grape, as said, was brought by the Spanish, and it began to be cultivated in the provinces of Coro and Cumaná. At first, the crops, from which little was expected due to the widespread belief that the tropical weather was hostile to grapes, had purely ornamental purposes. It was not thought to eat its fruit and, of course, neither to ferment it to obtain wine. Experimentation beyond the ornamental purposes began with the arrival of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese migrants at the end of the 19 th century 17 . The first commercial wines produced in Venezuela, in the middle of the 20th century, were produced from imported concentrated musts, with a somewhat poor result. The economic condition was the reason that led the incipient national industry to work with national musts. In effect, the loss of value of the national currency – the bolivar – against the dollar in the 1980s “produced the change that stimulates the creation of companies dedicated to the production of wines from national natural musts obtained in the country” 18 . 14 Cunill Grau, Pedro, Geohistoria de la sensibilidad en Venezuela , Caracas, Empresas Polar, 2007, Tomo II, p. 478. 15 Letter attributed to Américo Vespucio, dated 18 July 1500. Cited in Cunill Grau, Geohistoria de la sensibilidad en Venezuela …, op . cit ., p. 478. 16 Cunill Grau, Geohistoria de la sensibilidad en Venezuela …, op . cit ., p. 478. 17 Bianco Dugarte, Hugo Waldemar & Ana Luisa Medina, Reseña histórica del vino en Venezuela, su control de calidad, en: Revista de la Facultad de Farmacia, Universidad de Los Andes , 2001, 2001, pp. 32 ff., at p. 32. 18 Bianco Dugarte / Medina, Reseña histórica del vino en Venezuela…, op . cit ., p. 33.