The question is simple enough: Which wine did you serve on Christmas Day? But the answer is far from straightforward, for your choice of wine is laden with meaning. Is it from the Old or New World? Does it emphasize fruit over terroir? Did you have to put your name down on a boutique winery's exclusive waiting list to get hold of it? And, of greatest importance to many wine buffs, what score did Robert Parker, the world's most influential wine critic, give your chosen bottle on his famed 100-point scale?

Most of us don't worry like this about our choice of beer or coffee. But wine is the king of drinks and the drink of kings, unique in its association with status. A wine's rank is expected to correspond to both drinker and occasion: An inappropriate choice of wine reflects badly upon the host, and an apparently straightforward choice thus becomes a social minefield.

But do not blame Robert Parker; blame the Romans. The contemporary obsession with obscure grape varieties, arcane vocabulary and suspiciously precise numerical scales is merely the latest incarnation of a tradition with deep historical roots. Millenniums ago, in beer-drinking Egypt and Mesopotamia, scarcity and high cost limited the consumption of wine to the elite and made it a status symbol. But by the Roman period, production of wine had so increased that even slaves could drink it. That meant that simply drinking wine was no longer a sign of status, so distinctions among wines became far more important.

The Romans were the first to use wine as a finely calibrated social yardstick - and thus inaugurated centuries of wine snobbery. Drinkers at a Roman banquet might be served different wines depending on their positions in society. Pliny the Younger, writing in the late first century A.D., described a dinner at which the host and his friends were served fine wine, second-rate wine was served to other guests, and third-rate wine was served to former slaves.

Falernian, a wine grown in the Italian region of Campania, was generally agreed to be the finest wine of the Roman period. Parker's Roman predecessors decreed that its best vintage was that of 121 B.C.; it was served to the emperor Caligula in A.D. 39, though by then it was probably undrinkable. In the second century A.D., Galen of Pergamum, personal doctor to Emperor Marcus Aurelius, prescribed Falernian for medicinal use, on the ground that the finer the wine, the greater its curative properties.