What Wine Would Jesus Drink? (a new book tells you)

(Patheos) - Today’s post is an interview is with Randall Heskett, co-author of Divine Vintage: Following the Wine Trail from Genesis to the Modern Age. Heskett holds advanced degrees in biblical studies and ancient Near Eastern languages from Yale (S.T.M.) and University of Toronto (Ph.D), and his publications include Messianism within the Scriptural Scroll of Isaiah and Reading the Book of Isaiah: Destruction and Lament in the Holy Cities. A resident of Boulder, CO, Heskett has been studying wine seriously for 20 years. He is also the founding president of Boulder University, which hopes to offer courses in the areas of Wholeness, Theology, Wine, and Business in the fall of 2014.  His co-author, Joel Butler, is a world famous wine judge and the first of two Americans to pass Master of Wine exam, the most distinguished credential in the wine industry. Also a historian, Butler completed his undergraduate program at Stanford University and graduate school at University of Colorado.

Tell us about Divine Vintage and what influenced you to write it? 

Divine Vintage is a book about the Bible and wine, more specifically the function of wine in the Bible and the kinds of wine people in the ancient world would have drunk.  This book treats the origins of wine, how it spread through the ancient world and how the Bible describes this. 

We trace the role of the “cupbearer” who was very much like a modern day sommelier (wine expert).  We cover the function of wine during war in the Bible and even explain “how the west was wined” during the Greek and Roman periods and how the wine industry had become rather sophisticated by the New Testament age.  We look at what the same “Bible Wine Trail” is producing today as a way of trying to discern what wine in the Bible may have been like.  Finally, we speculate “What Wine Would Jesus Drink” (WWWJD).