I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.

I'm Levy Dalton.

I'm Erin Scala and here's our show today. Oh, You eat it in the morning, you see it all night long in restaurants, and you do it at

weddings. That's right, I'm talking about the toast. But where did this crazy

custom come from? Well, 3,000 years ago in ancient Greece, people would raise their glasses up to

the gods in a ceremonial offering before they consumed it themselves. But back in medieval times,

you didn't want to get poisoned by the neighboring kingdom, so you'd

pour a little of each of your wine into the other's chalice as a symbol of goodwill.

When the threat was less imminent, the custom of touching glasses remained. But did you ever wonder where the name

toast comes from? Well, in the 1600s, wine was pretty nasty, so people floated a piece of burnt toast in the bowl which made

it more palatable. Now today we know that scientifically the carbon on the burnt

toast lightly filtered out some of the impurities just like a charcoal stick would do today. Some people

even flavored the toast if they were wealthy enough to have access to spices. But it was

really terrible to be the host because after that drinking bowl was passed around to everyone at the table

and while you're thinking about this let me remind you about the dental hygiene in

medieval times. So after this bowl goes around to everybody, it was the host's job to eat that gross piece of toast.

I hope they all toasted to the host's health because after eating that microbial-rich

piece of toast he would need all the help that he can get.

Now floating food in your wine seems odd today but this was not such a crazy thing thousands of years ago.

In ancient Greece, a common wine garnish was grated cheese.

Plato writes about this, and archaeologists frequently find little cheese grater necklaces in tombs that were thought to be part of drinking kits.

That makes wine and cheese pairing at least a few thousand years old.

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