A Vintage Wine Course (UC Davis, 1973)

Rum­mage through our col­lec­tion of 1700 Free Online Cours­es, and you’ll find many recent­ly-record­ed cours­es from great uni­ver­si­ties, cov­er­ing top­ics like “How Han­ni­bal Crossed the Alps,” “Exis­ten­tial­ism in Lit­er­a­ture & Film,” and “Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­er Cod­ing.” But you’ll also find on our list of Free Online Cours­es some vin­tage lec­tures record­ed dur­ing gen­er­a­tions past.

Take for exam­ple Wal­ter Kauf­man­n’s Clas­sic Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960), which sit nice­ly along­side Michel Fou­cault’s UC Berke­ley Lec­tures on Truth, Dis­course & The Self (cir­ca 1980). Or per­haps even Leo Strauss’ numer­ous polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy cours­es record­ed at The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go between 1959 and 1973. You can also dig into “Quan­tum Physics Made Rel­a­tive­ly Sim­ple,” a Mini Course from Nobel Prize-Win­ning Physi­cist Hans Bethe. Endear­ing­ly, Bethe pre­sent­ed the course at a retire­ment home in 1999 when he, him­self, was pret­ty long in the tooth.

Then, above, you can watch, UC Davis Pro­fes­sor May­nard Amer­ine present a course on Wine (YouTube — iTunes). It’s a vin­tage 1973.

Cal­i­for­nia is wine coun­try, and the place to study wine there is UC Davis. As for Pro­fes­sor Amer­ine, he was wide­ly con­sid­ered “the father of Amer­i­can wine,” an influ­en­tial sci­en­tist who taught gen­er­a­tions of wine­mak­ers and stu­dents how to eval­u­ate wine accord­ing to appear­ance, fla­vor and aro­ma. As he lec­tures on Cal­i­forn­ian, Ital­ian, and French wines, you can almost see the US com­ing into its own as a respectable wine-drink­ing, wine-pro­duc­ing nation.

Find Pro­fes­sor Amer­ine’s “Wine” course in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Harvard’s Free Com­put­er Sci­ence Course Teach­es You to Code in 12 Weeks

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

Down­load 55 Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es: From Dante and Mil­ton to Ker­ouac and Tolkien