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•144 The 100 Greatest Business Ideas of All Time

The origins of the business idea of fermenting vegetables and selling the results

as alcoholic beverages, early on evil-tasting and later with a palate fit for experts,

goes back to prehistory. The likelihood is that fermentation was discovered acciden-

tally in pre-agricultural times. Early man clearly liked the effect if not the

Few products taste, and quickly moved to purposeful production. From merely gather-

have been sold ing the raw materials which grew wild, he planted vines and other suitable

in such a crops.

flexible way to Few products have been sold in such a flexible way to fit in with the

fit in with the rituals that accompany the drinking of alcohol. The traditions and regula-

rituals that tions that surround the product have, on one hand, proved inhibiting to

accompany the sale and consumption of the product. On the other hand, from the

the drinking of earliest pre-literate times, alcohol was stitched into social ceremonies,

alcohol. particularly rites of passage, marriage and so on. A guaranteed market,

with or without its potentially addictive nature.

There are records of the regulation of drinking houses in 1770 BC, and not

much later beer and wine were popular prescriptions of Egyptian doctors.

The growth of alcohol consumption continued into classical times with an ebb

and flow of what was regarded as an acceptable quantity to imbibe. From the Greco-

Roman habits surrounding huge drinking binges in honour of the God Bacchus to

the Judaic intertwining of religious ceremonial, which to the present day links drunk-

enness to irreverence and inappropriate behaviour.

The conditions of early societies foreshadowed those of complex societies in-

cluding our highly industrialised one. Its role in a modern-day diet is largely irrel-

evant, with only the calorific value adding anything to the easy availability of other

foods. As medicament it has a limited surviving place in tranquillising and pain

killing. In religion alcohol has a symbolic role where it is not completely eliminated.

What remains is the satisfaction of personal and group needs, a breeding ground

for advertising brilliance and long term marketing strategies of the highest order.

Alcohol consumption has gone steadily up since the 1950s and the market capi-

talisation of the UK drinks industry exceeds £65 billion, with combined sales of