The Italians, like the Greeks, were wine drinkers, and there is no evidence, literary or archaeological, for the use of beer in Italy at any time in its ancient history. It has even been claimed that the extent of the Roman Empire was the extent of the cultivation of vines in the known world. By the first century BC, the agricultural writer Saserna had noticed that vines were then being grown in the far north, and assumed that there had been a change in climate. The change in fact was cultural.1