Wine is known to the world's original alcoholic beverage. Author Paul Lukacs reveals through his latest book "Inventing Wine: A New History of One of the World's Most Ancient Pleasures" that wine was originally appreciated more for its supposedly "divine origin" than its taste.

Lukacs talks to Fresh Air's Terry Gross about wine and inspiration:

On using wine to improve the quality of the water

"You've got to remember [that] for thousands of years, if you lived in a town or a village, the water was pretty undrinkable. ... [I]f you lived in ancient Athens or if you lived in ancient Babylon or Alexandria, you couldn't drink the water, so wine was something that people drank from morning to night. Babies drank it; old people drank it; soldiers drank it; everybody drank wine all the time, and in order for them not to be falling down drunk by 10 in the morning, they mixed it with water and used it to sanitize or purify the water."

On the Cistercian monks of Burgundy

"Starting around the year 1000 after Christ - and they were the first people to, in a systematic way, associate wines of a specific type with a specific place and a specific variety of grape. So they started, on a very small scale, the notion of particularity and individual taste from certain wines from certain places that has, in the thousand years since, become so important for wine appreciation."

On Robert Mondavi's role in popularizing American wine

"He was American wine's great champion and a great showman. Paradoxically, the wine that Mondavi promoted and sold and cared about was wine that was very much made on a European model. He wanted to make wine that rivaled white Burgundy, so he used the same grape - chardonnay - and he wanted to make wine that rivaled red Bordeaux, so used one of the main red Bordeaux grapes - cabernet sauvignon. ...

On the vocabulary we use to talk about wine

"When we talk about it, it gets pretty boring in contemporary wine-speak. ... We talk about echoes of blueberries and earth and hay or all this kind of language that's used to describe wine. It gets pretty boring. The French are much nicer. They talk about, 'This is a lacey wine,' or 'This is a muscular wine,' and 'This is a wine that has the fragrance of spring in it.' It just sounds much prettier than the way we talk about it. But invariably these are all metaphors; the language of taste is metaphor. We're drawing analogies all the time."