By the beginning of the 13th century Zürich’s traders had created a vast amount of wealth, mainly from textiles such as wool and silk. Two monasteries in Zurich, the Grossmünster, and particularly the Fraumünster, maintained considerable influence over the city. The official governing body was the aristocratic council, made up of one third nobility and two thirds the city's patriciate, mainly merchants. But it was the abbess of the Fraumünster that appointed the mayor from among the council.

The year 1336 was a year for both a massive expansion of the monastery land, mostly as vineyards, and the year that the presiding mayor, Rudolf Brun, decided that the existing power structure in Zurich was not a tenable situation, and in a subtle political ploy, started a revolution. Ok, let's call it an aggressive rebalancing of power.

Read more: Zurich Politics

Wine is good for you. But that’s not news. Wine has long been known for its medicinal benefits, it figures in almost all the remedies recorded by Hippocrates, from a general antiseptic to cooling fevers, and this connection to health continued through the middle ages. The grape has been part of the triumvirate of good throughout history, and the triumvirate are those benevolent institutions: the church, hospitals, and vineyards.

Now, the way I see it, the church, some of them at least, had a tradition of helping the poor, and hospitals are one way of helping. Further, most of them also had the tradition of making life comfortable for their own members, and wine, in addition to its medicinal uses, was both enjoyable and profitable. This seems to hold true in respect to the Barefooted Monastery near Zurich, which was first documented in 1247. The monastery was renamed "Holy Spirit Hospital" in 1293.

Wine’s medicinal and financial properties were also the reason secular hospitals maintained extensive wine cellars. Again, this was true later in the century when the house of “Zähringer” founded the “Hospital of the poor," in the region.

With all the places in the world today producing wine, and good wine at that, Europe still is way out front with 75% of world wine production. As an interesting aside: there is a worldwide wine glut. Again with Europe’s production leading, and their major partner in crime, Australia. It’s so extreme that producers are requesting to be allowed to dump, or distill into industrial alcohol, millions of liters of wine backlog.

Read more: Politics over common sense

Researchers from the University in Basel have found evidence that grapes were cultivated almost 3000 years ago in Valais, Switzerland. The researches found increases in pollen concentrations, an indication of cultivation, in sediment from Lake du Mont d’Orge, located above Sitten.