According to a comment on this article, Gladstone is wrong about the wine-dark sea.
Another bit of nonsense in the original article was the claim about Homer and the wine-dark sea. This bit is a model of sloppy scholarship. English writers of the Victorian age knew only the gray-blue Atlantic, and never bothered to look at the Mediterranean. It is much deeper, more intense blue than the North Atlantic (because it's warmer and less rich in life), and in sunrise and sunset light, reflecting the red in the sky, the Mediterranean turns exactly the color of the purplish-red wines you often find in Greece, as I have seen many times. Homer was being beautifully precise.
According to a comment on [this article](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970), Gladstone is wrong about the wine-dark sea.
>Another bit of nonsense in the original article was the claim about Homer and the wine-dark sea. This bit is a model of sloppy scholarship. English writers of the Victorian age knew only the gray-blue Atlantic, and never bothered to look at the Mediterranean. It is much deeper, more intense blue than the North Atlantic (because it's warmer and less rich in life), and in sunrise and sunset light, reflecting the red in the sky, the Mediterranean turns exactly the color of the purplish-red wines you often find in Greece, as I have seen many times. Homer was being beautifully precise.
According to a comment on this article, Gladstone is wrong about the wine-dark sea.