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, Most scholars believe that the locations in the Odyssey had real life correlations on the Mediterranean map.

In Book 9 of the Odyssey, Odysseus and his men were captured by a Cyclops, possibly near what

is today Mount Etna. In the epic poem,

the Cyclops people are described as a group of arrogant and lawless people of no

industry. In the poem, they have enough raw materials from nature to subsist without really working or farming

But we do know that at least they made cheese

for Odysseus's men found some in the Cyclops' cave.

Once captured, Odysseus used wine he had brought with him to make his capture drunk.

Then as the Cyclops fell into a drunken sleep, Odysseus and his men blinded the Cyclops with a hot

wooden staff.

In the morning Odysseus and his crew held on upside down to the bellies of sheep and escaped unseen as the blind Cyclops sent out

his flock.

Could the Homeric description of Cyclops culture be a metaphor for what the Odyssey's Greek contemporaries thought of Sicily's

inhabitants? If so, around a thousand BC, Sicily's inhabitants had a

reputation for being lazy, uncultured, unfriendly, and easily angry. The at least two groups before the Greeks arrived.

Did they make wine?

We don't really know, but they did have indigenous wild grapes,

so it would have been possible.

It also would have been possible for the Mycenians

to have brought winemaking technology by 1200 BC.

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