Blooming Wine Glass – 58600-195 – MacKenzie-Childs

Year 195 (CXCV) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known in Rome as the Year of the Consulship of Scrapula and Clemens (or, less frequently, year 948 Ab urbe condita). The denomination 195 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years.

Glass is an amorphous (non-crystalline) solid. Because it is often transparent and chemically inert, glass has found widespread practical, technological, and decorative use in window panes, tableware, and optics. Some common objects made of glass are named after the material, e.g., a "glass" for drinking, "glasses" for vision correction, and a "magnifying glass".

Glass is most often formed by rapid cooling (quenching) of the molten form. Some glasses such as volcanic glass are naturally occurring, and obsidian has been used to make arrowheads and knives since the Stone Age. Archaeological evidence suggests glassmaking dates back to at least 3600 BC in Mesopotamia, Egypt, or Syria. The earliest known glass objects were beads, perhaps created accidentally during metalworking or the production of faience, which is a form of pottery using lead glazes.

Due to its ease of formability into any shape, glass has been traditionally used for vessels, such as bowls, vases, bottles, jars and drinking glasses. Soda–lime glass, containing around 70% silica, accounts for around 90% of modern manufactured glass. Glass can be coloured by adding metal salts or painted and printed with vitreous enamels, leading to its use in stained glass windows and other glass art objects.

The refractive, reflective and transmission properties of glass make glass suitable for manufacturing optical lenses, prisms, and optoelectronics materials. Extruded glass fibres have applications as optical fibres in communications networks, thermal insulating material when matted as glass wool to trap air, or in glass-fibre reinforced plastic (fibreglass).

Wine is an alcoholic drink made from fermented fruit. Yeast consumes the sugar in the fruit and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Wine is most often made from grapes, and the term "wine" generally refers to grape wine when used without any qualification. Even so, wine can be made from a variety of fruit crops, including plum, cherry, pomegranate, blueberry, currant, and elderberry.

Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts are major factors in different styles of wine. These differences result from the complex interactions between the biochemical development of the grape, the reactions involved in fermentation, the grape's growing environment (terroir), and the wine production process. Many countries enact legal appellations intended to define styles and qualities of wine. These typically restrict the geographical origin and permitted varieties of grapes, as well as other aspects of wine production.

Wine has been produced for thousands of years. The earliest evidence of wine is from the present-day Georgia (6000 BCE), Persia (5000 BCE), Italy, and Armenia (4000 BCE). New World wine has some connection to alcoholic beverages made by the indigenous peoples of the Americas but is mainly connected to later Spanish traditions in New Spain. Later, as Old World wine further developed viticulture techniques, Europe would encompass three of the largest wine-producing regions. Based on statistics gathered by the International Organisation of Vine and Wine in 2022 the top five wine producing countries were Italy, France, Spain, the United States, and Australia.

Wine has long played an important role in religion. Red wine was associated with blood by the ancient Egyptians, and was used by both the Greek cult of Dionysus and the Romans in their Bacchanalia; Judaism also incorporates it in the Kiddush, and Christianity in the Eucharist. Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Israeli wine cultures are still connected to these ancient roots. Similarly the largest wine regions in Italy, Spain, and France have heritages in connection to sacramental wine, likewise, viticulture traditions in the Southwestern United States started within New Spain as Catholic friars and monks first produced wines in New Mexico and California.