Homer makes sparing use of the adjective "wine-colored" to refer to the sea and to oxen. Like the color of ancient wine, the color that the poet had in mind is unclear. Yet certainly the phrase evokes the sea’s mystery and intoxication, in English made more poetic by the nineteenth-century translation, "wine-dark." Authors such as Thomas Cahill, Patrick O’Brian, and Leonardo Sciascia have used the phrase in book titles.
The Wine-Dark Sea is just the right description of the waters which the Greeks ruled and on which they died. It is just a short step from "wine-dark" to "blood-stained," an adjective used by Aeschylus in his description of the sea at Salamis. The wine-dark sea is a place of many undiscovered secrets, and one of them is Salamis: the world’s first great multicultural battle, in which the men of three continents met – and one woman, the first female admiral in history.
Another essay explains it:
The best history of this phrase is an article by R. Rutherford-Dyer, "Homer's Wine-Dark Sea", Greece & Rome, v. 30 (October 1983), p. 125-128. Homer's Greek for "wine-dark" is oinos, an expression that translates to something like "sunset-red." It occurs in the Iliad when Achilles, after Patroclus' funeral, is looking out over the water with the sun going down, in the Odyssey when Telemachus sails all night to Pylos, and when Odysseus' ship is destroyed in a storm. It is translated in many ways, such as "wine-blue" in Richard Lattimore's version, and scholars had thought it a romantic nonsense phrase. Pr. Rutherford-Dyer happened to be on the coast of Maine when Mt. St. Helens erupted, and the sunsets became quite glorious, turning the Atlantic to the color of Mavrodaphni wine. From that he reasoned that Homer was describing the dark red sunsets that obtain when large amounts of dust are in the air, or when storm clouds are gathering.
"The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea." - James Joyce
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