In the early nineties of the XVII century, the German city of Ulm and its environs were struck by an unusual epidemic. The victims had a severe stomach ache, there were cases of loss of consciousness and even death. The city doctor Eberhard Gokkel, who served at the same time two nearby monasteries, turned his main attention to the monks. Since the monastery community was a closed team with a common way of life and nutrition, Dr. Gokkel decided that it would be easier to understand the causes of the disease on this material than on free citizens with their heterogeneous lifestyle. It turned out that those monks who, for various reasons, abstained from wine, remained healthy. And two monks who came on pilgrimage from another community recovered and returned to their monasteries.
Epidemiology was then only in its infancy, but Dr. Gokkel proved himself to be a shrewd epidemiologist. He settled in one of the monasteries and began to live the life of a brethren. At every meal, he, like all monks, was offered a glass of wine. And soon the doctor developed the first symptoms of a mysterious illness.
Then Gokkel turned to the supplier of wine - the butler of the local prince. And I learned that wine is sweetened with a special solution. Sugar was still unknown, and either honey or boiled down sweet juices of certain fruits were used instead. But often used, especially in winemaking, another method. Lead litharge (a white powder, which is the oxide of lead) was dissolved in wine, and the solution was then evaporated to give a sweet liquid. It was added to sour wine. And, although the doctor noted that this sweet solution turns the worst and most sour wine into the best kind of claret, he suggested that the disease was caused by lead.
But this discovery was somewhat belated: the abbot and treasurer of one of the monasteries died (apparently, taking advantage of their official position, they consumed more sweet wines than ordinary monks). Many doctors of that time, especially those who lived in wine-growing regions, approved the use of lead compounds to "ennoble" wines and did not see any danger in this.
It is possible that medicine and toxicology were benefited by the fact that Ulm, the hometown of Gokkel, was not wine-producing, but wine trading: hundreds of wagons with barrels of wine from the Neckar valley arrived in the city every day, here the barrels were reloaded onto ships and floated along the Danube to other areas. and countries. The wine trade was the main source of income for the Principality of Württemberg, and no one wanted to destroy it. When in 1696 the Prince of Württemberg learned from his court physician about Gokkel's yet unpublished discovery, he issued a decree banning the improvement of wine with lead solution. And violators and even those who knew, but did not inform about the crime, the decree threatened with the death penalty.
In 1697, Dr. Gokkel published a book with a long title: "A noteworthy account of a previously unknown WINE ILLNESS, which in 1694, 95 and 96 was caused by the sweetening of sour wine with lead swallow, which led to cities, monasteries and castles, and sometimes in villages , to many cruel symptoms, as a result of which many persons, both high and low, were seriously injured, and even lost their lives.
In fact, the use of lead compounds to "improve" wine began in ancient Rome, from where wine was exported in clay amphoras to Germany, and even to British Isles. So that the wine would not turn sour during the journey, the Greeks, who carried it along the Mediterranean Sea long before the Romans, added pine resin to the amphoras, the phytoncides of which killed unwanted bacteria of acetic fermentation (and there is still a kind of Greek wine "rettsina", it is easy to hear in its name the word "rubber" - that is, resin). But the Romans preferred a different way. They boiled fresh grape juice for a long time in a lead cauldron, reducing it by two-thirds of its volume to a syrup called sapa, or defrutum. This syrup, which included lead compounds, effectively stopped the spoilage not only of wine, but also of fruits and olives. Many compounds of this heavy metal are sweet in taste, so that the wine became sweeter not only from grape sugar, but also from lead tartrate, which arose as a result of long boiling of juice in a lead boiler. And this sweet wine also could not turn sour during storage!
Sapa recipes are found in the books of Pliny, Columella and other authors. The liquid obtained according to ancient recipes is a dark viscous aromatic syrup with a lead content of about a gram per liter. By adding it to wine in the usual proportions for that time, we get a drink with a lead content of about 20 milligrams per liter. Drinking a liter of such wine a day (and in Germany of the 17th century they drank more, as a rule), you can acquire symptoms of lead poisoning in a few weeks.
On the early stages poisoning is typical headache, insomnia, jaundice, diarrhea, then there are severe pains in the stomach and joints, intestinal paralysis occurs. Even later (lead accumulates in the body, almost not excreted), nervous symptoms appear: deafness, blindness, general paralysis ... The case often ends in death.
It took several centuries for the harm of the Roman way of preserving wines to become apparent. True, many Germanic tribes even in the time of Julius Caesar forbade the use of Roman wines, noticing their poisonousness. And the symptoms of chronic poisoning with lead wine were described in 1639 by the personal physician of Cardinal Richelieu Francois Situa (however, he blamed the epidemic on a supernova, the outbreak of which Tycho Brahe wrote about in 1572). But in 17th-century Germany, Roman recipes were widely reprinted and used. They tried to treat lead poisoning with a common medieval remedy - bloodletting and even horseback riding (shaking somewhat stimulated the movements of the paralyzed intestines). Of course, such methods did not bring relief. Effective remedies from lead disease are found only in our time - these are medicines that actively bind with lead and remove it from the body.
Curiously, the Ulm epidemic was indirectly affected by the then-occurring climate change, the so-called little glaciation. The weather in Germany in the last decade of the century was especially cold and rainy, which caused the grapes to ripen poorly, gain little sugar and the wines turned out sour - hence the desire to sweeten them according to the old Roman recipe.
Even before Gockel, lead poisoning was described by another german doctor- Samuel Stockhausen from the city of Goslar. Lead was mined in the Harz mountains, and Stockhausen noticed that the miners and metallurgists who dealt with the dust of lead ores or with lead fumes during its smelting suffered from severe disorders. Gokkel, after reading the book of the doctor from Goslar, realized that the symptoms occupational disease miners are identical to the symptoms of "wine disease", which Stockhausen apparently did not know about: in northern Germany they drink mostly beer, not wine.
News of Gokkel's discovery spread very slowly. Only about a hundred years later, the practice of "improving" wine with lead compounds became a thing of the past, and then only because cheap cane sugar spread from Cuba and Jamaica, and besides, a new food antibacterial agent was found - sulfites (they are still used in our time in winemaking and in the production of fruit juices).
But occupational lead poisoning remained for a long time. business as usual. Charles Dickens described in one of his essays the sad fate of the poor in London, forced to choose between starvation and work in the production of white lead, which often ended in death from poisoning after a month or two. Now lead paint is banned almost everywhere, but then the white powder was sometimes mixed with flour by dishonest traders to make it whiter and add weight.
Last notorious case food poisoning lead occurred in 1994 in Hungary, where a batch of paprika powder was discovered, in which red lead, red lead oxide, was added to enhance the red color.
He called me the other day asking if it was true that Greek wine was so thick that they could not drink it, which is why they diluted it with water. He read it somewhere.
I wanted to answer with a joke, "Why are you drinking this muck? - Because it's liquid, it would be solid - it would gnaw." But I remembered that I had already joked similarly on this topic, and I don’t like to repeat myself.
Therefore, I simply replied that this was not true and promised to post my old article on the reasons for diluting wine with the ancients.
LEGENDS AND FACTS ABOUT WINE DILUTION
Youth! Modestly feast, and noisy Bacchus moisture
With a sober stream of water, interfere with wise conversation.
fokilid
When it comes to ancient winemaking and drinking, one and the same intriguing question pops up with enviable constancy: why did the ancients dilute wine?
With the spread of the Internet and thanks to search engines any invention of a home-grown "specialist" has a chance to serve the enlightenment of a wide range of people interested in the subject. Therefore, the genre of popular science presentation has been enriched today with a direction in demand - a consistent analysis and refutation of popular conjectures. Our essay also belongs to this direction.
The collective mind represented by the Internet has already offered many answers, both partly reasonable and fantastic, to the question of diluting wine. There are suggestions that this custom contributed to the disinfection of bad musty water. That ancient wines were cloyingly sweet or, on the contrary, terribly nasty and bitter, and therefore it was impossible to drink them without water. That the wines were incredibly thick due to special cooking techniques and therefore required dilution. Someone ascribes an unprecedented strength to the product of ancient winemakers, which needed to be reduced with water. The masterpiece of such explanations is the categorical assertion that ancient wine is not really wine, but various herbal infusions that contained, among other things, narcotic components. The funny thing is that in each of these statements there is some truthful grain, but none of them can explain the tradition of drinking diluted wine.
Was it not wine?
To believe that the ancients prepared wine not from grapes, but from some herbs, can, of course, only be a complete layman who does not know about the numerous images of the entire wine-making process by ancient artists and sculptors, or about the wineries that have survived to this day, or about poets and writers who sang of the vine, nor that modern technologies allow the tartar, often preserved on the walls of amphoras and grape seeds, found near wine presses, to even judge the type of drink. However, indeed, ancient wines often contained vegetable aromatic additives - there were tar, rose, saffron and many other wines, and the Romans even invented vermouth ... But still, to assume that some kind of drugs were used in the wine is not at all. than unfounded conjecture. Wine itself served as a traditional Mediterranean drug, if by this word we mean any means for a voluntary change of consciousness. We know of the only mention of a certain narcotic drug that was mixed into wine in order to bring the drinker into a state of euphoric joy. Homer, describing a rich feast given by the Spartan king Menelaus and his wife Helen, says:
A clever thought then awakened in the noble Elena:
She intended to pour juice into the bowls
Woeful, peace-giving, oblivion to the heart
Calamity giver; the one who drank wine, with beneficial
Drained with juice, was cheerful all day and could not cry,
If I had lost both my mother and father by an unexpected death,
If you accidentally lost a brother or a dear son,
Suddenly, in front of his eyes, struck by battle copper.
Dieva's bright daughter possessed that miraculous juice;
Generously in Egypt, her Polydamne, wife of Thoon,
endowed them; the land there is abundant
Cereals give birth to both good, healing, and evil, poisonous;
Every one of the people there is a doctor, exceeding deep knowledge
Other people, since everyone there is from Pean's family.
(Odyssey, IV, 219-232)
It is clear that this mention refers to extremely ancient times, and the drug itself was imported and was used sporadically. That is, we have a typical case of an exception that proves the rule.
Narcotic substances in our modern sense, of course, were also known in antiquity, for example, opium. But they used it either as a sleeping pill, as can be seen from the verse of Parmenon from Byzantium:
Who drinks wine like a lathered horse water,
Can't pronounce a single letter clearly.
Without words, he will sleep over his barrel,
As if he was drunk with poppy infusion
(Athenaeus, 221 a),
or as a poison, which follows, for example, from the recipe for an antidote for opium from the book of Scribonius Larga.
Did the wine serve to disinfect the water?
Disinfection of water with wine is a much more likely matter. For example, the historian Xenophon directly writes about this in the book Cyropedia: an army on a distant campaign should have so much wine that, by gradually reducing its addition, accustom the soldiers' stomachs to unfamiliar water and not catch a gastric infection (VI, 2, 36-37). It is known, moreover, that the Roman legionnaires had to carry wine vinegar with them in order to add it to the water. This was apparently also a means of disinfection. It is clear that the soldiers encountered water of various properties, and an army suffering from diarrhea in a war is doomed to death.
There is another authoritative evidence. It belongs to Achilles Tatius, a Greek writer of the 2nd century. AD In his novel Leucippe and Clitophon, there are the following lines: “Then for the first time I drank the Nile water, not mixed with wine, because I wanted to taste the pure pleasure of drinking. After all, wine distorts the natural taste of water. I scooped up the water in a bowl of transparent crystal and immediately saw that the brilliance of the water surpassed the brilliance of the crystal. It was sweet to drink this water, icy just to the extent of pleasure. I know that in other rivers of Hellas, the water simply hurts with its cold. So I could compare the water of the Nile with them. It became clear to me why the Egyptians drink the Nile water without fear, not needing the services of Dionysus ”(Tatius, IV, 18).
It would seem, what else?
But after all, supporters of the assumption about the disinfecting function of wine proceed from the fact that in general all drinking water in antiquity was unimportant. That water was allegedly kept in large vessels, where it quickly deteriorated, for which it was required to add wine to it. Where the legend of stale water came from is not very clear. Indeed, in order to agree with this opinion, one will have to agree with the fact that the laziness of the ancient Greeks, and after them the Romans, extended so much that they embarked on the most difficult, long and costly winemaking activities, instead of once again going to the source or to well. Considering that people settled near constant sources of fresh water, and where there were none, wells were dug, the depth of which could be more than two tens of meters, the quality of the water was usually quite satisfactory, and such an explanation seems to be a stretch.
Did the wine have an unbearable taste?
Were ancient wines terribly sweet or terribly bitter? One of the first mentions of the most excellent wine is already found in the Odyssey. All the same Homer tells about a truly amazing drink - wine from Ismar:
If you ever enjoy that purple-honey wine
In whom desire awakened, then poured it into the cup,
Twenty times more water was added, and the smell from the bowl
It was inexpressible: no one here could abstain from drinking.
(Odyssey, IX, 208-211)
But, of course, this message should not be taken literally. The poetic hyperbole, so characteristic of epic works, speaks only of how highly fragrant and pronounced wines were valued.
It must be remembered that the taste of ancient wines was very different. Of course, some wines made from berries dried on the vine with a high sugar content or sweetened specially - raisins, honey and the like, clearly belong to the category of dessert according to the modern classification. The first manual on winemaking known to us - Hesiod's instructions in "Works and Days" - recommends making wine from dried grapes:
Cut, O Persian, and take home the bunches of grapes.
Ten days and nights keep them in the sun continuously,
Days on the heels after that, put in the shade, on the sixth
Pour already into the barrels the gifts of Dionysus, who brings joy.
(Works and days, 611-614)
So, sweetness and strong aroma are the two most valued properties of good wine according to the ancient Greek version. But this did not at all cancel the circulation of other, simpler, as we would now say, table wines, which did not differ in particular cloying. If we do not know much about the taste of the most ancient wines, then, for example, about Italian wines of the 1st century BC. BC. - I century. AD we know the details. And many of them were characterized by contemporaries as "sour". And, by the way, they were diluted in the same way as everyone else. Since they were produced in the same wine-making tradition as the most ancient predecessors, it is clearly not correct to attribute the supposed sugariness of the wine to the dilution.
Was the wine impossible to drink?
Was ancient wine diluted because it was extremely thick? Perhaps it is appropriate to recall a bearded anecdote: when asked why you drink vodka, a certain lover answers: “Because it is liquid. It would be hard - it would gnaw!"
If the whole problem was only the convenience of drinking thickened wine, the ancients would not have practiced making exquisite craters, kylixes and kanthars, but instead would have used a long spoon with which it is convenient to lick the wine. At the same time, the opinion about the density of ancient wines was by no means born out of nowhere. True, such a statement does not apply to all drinks, but only to those that were aged great amount time. Pliny the Elder spoke about the legendary Opimian wine: “These wines are still preserved; they are almost two hundred years old, and they have turned into something like bitter honey - such is the property of wine in extreme old age - to drink them in pure form it is impossible and impossible to destroy their irresistible bitterness with water; but the slightest admixture of them corrects other wines ”(Natural History, 14, 6, 55-57).
So, thickening over time was typical for ancient wines, but, firstly, this does not apply to everyday drinking, and secondly, old wine was used only when blending to ennoble younger ones. No, that's not why wines were diluted.
The strength of the wine was - not like the current one?
The last, perhaps, myth is that the ancients managed to make wine of an unheard of strength, which is why water was required. It is believed that during normal fermentation, the maximum possible strength of wine is about 15 degrees of alcohol. Special alcohol-tolerant wine yeast can withstand up to 17 degrees of alcohol. Further fermentation cannot go on for natural reasons. This statement could be limited. But we repeat: even the strangest of the listed versions has some true starting point.
Probably, the myth of the fantastic fortress of ancient wine was born from a phrase casually dropped by Pliny the Elder. A truly enigmatic phrase regarding the famous Falerno wine: “There is no more famous wine now; it's the only one that burns." Burning wine! An absolutely unheard of case, and we will touch on Falernos in more detail in the chapter allotted to him. Now for us keyword- "the only thing". Even if this variety miraculously had a similar strength, it still had no analogues. The rest of the wines kept within the limits assigned to them by nature, and some - and this is reliably known - were weak.
It should be noted that the famous researcher F. Lissarrag also sees the root of the tradition of mixing wine in its relative strength, but he means the strength of wine with high sugar content. However, as it was noted, the technology of preparation and the drink itself changed over time, the wine became more diverse, and behind the thousand-year tradition there had to be something more than just a collective memory of the oldest recipes. So, the reasons for diluting wine should be looked for elsewhere.
In antiquity they also drank undiluted wine!
For some reason, almost everyone who is looking for an answer to the question of mixing wine and water proceeds from the fact that the ancient could not drink wine in its undiluted form. But this is absolutely not true! Not only the notorious Scythians and the Spartan king Cleomenes, who joined them, drank the wine undiluted. We know numerous examples of how the Greeks and Romans drank pure wine and obviously enjoyed it a lot. There are dozens of references to this.
Moreover, every Greek symposia began precisely with unmixed wine. “Unmixed wine, served at the end of a dinner in honor of the Good God, is drunk little by little, just so that its taste reminds of the power of wine and the gift of God. They drink it on purpose after saturation in order to drink less. They take it straight from the table and three times pay honor to God, as if begging him to protect us from everything obscene and from an exorbitant thirst for drink, and send us only what is good and necessary ”- Athenaeus quotes the words of Theophrastus (Athenaeus, 693 d). But it was by no means only for symbolic purposes that they drank pure wine.
In Lysitrates by Aristophanes, women, swearing an oath to each other, decide to act like this:
We put a huge black bucket on the ground,
Then we'll stab the skin of Thasian wine
And we vow to drink everything without admixture!
The organoleptic properties of an undiluted drink by no means turn away the fair sex from it, who, by the way, were often accused of drunkenness in Greece:
Kleonica
The color and appearance of the blood is excellent!
Lampito
And it smells sweet, the gods are my witnesses!
Myrrina
Girlfriends, let me be the first to swear!
The men also paid tribute to the unclouded vine:
Let's drink pure Dionysian wine! The morning is short.
Shall we wait for the lamp, the messengers of imminent sleep? -
exclaims Asclepiades.
Drink pure, you are a sufferer in love, and a flame to the youths,
Bromium, giving oblivion, let him calm you down;
Drink clean! Having drained the filled cup to the brim,
Drive away the bitterness of suffering from your soul, -
The poet Dionysius echoes him.
But here come the victims of addiction:
The drunkard Eraksiksen was ruined by wine bowls:
He drank unmixed two cups of wine at once.
(Callimach)
However, daring drunkards are not translated in this world, and already the Roman Catullus drives away water from his bowl with Falerno:
Well, water, run, guilt is death,
and to others who are strict in temper, from here
get out: a pure Fionets is here!
It is easy to see that drinking pure wine is a kind of marker, indicating either the recklessness and brutal disposition of the character, or the mental crisis he is experiencing. But the main conclusion: undiluted wine throughout antiquity was quite possible to drink and enjoy it. Therefore, the correctly posed question sounds like this: why did the ancient Greeks and Romans for the most part didn't want drink undiluted wine?
What made the ancients dilute their wines?
“If, for example, someone drank unmixed wine, you were upset,” the orator Hyperides says, referring to Demosthenes (Athenaeus, 424d). Why?
The Greeks themselves answered this question quite definitely and bluntly:
Bring me a cup, boy, I'll drain it at once!
You pour a dozen buckets of water into a bowl, five - intoxicating mash,
And then, embraced by Bacchus, I will glorify Bacchus decorously.
After all, we will arrange a feast not in the Scythian way: we will not allow
We are neither hubbub nor screams, but to the sounds of a wondrous song
We will drink from the cup.
(Anacreon)
Obscene behavior at the feast was attributed to the barbarians. Xenophon in the already mentioned "Cyropaedia" describes the conversation of King Astyages with little Cyrus, who had just replaced the royal cupbearer Sak at the feast:
“- Why, Cyrus, you, imitating Sak in everything else, did not drink wine from the cup?
“Because,” answered Cyrus, “I swear by Zeus that I was afraid that poison would not be in the crater with wine.” After all, when you treated your friends, celebrating your birthday, I definitely noticed that he added poison to all of you.
- How did you, my boy, notice this?
- I noticed this, I swear by Zeus, by the very upset state in which both your bodies and souls turned out to be. First of all, you did everything that you forbid us children to do. You shouted in chorus, not understanding each other, you sang very funny; not hearing the singer, they assured him that he sang unusually well. Each of you boasted of your strength, but when you wanted to get up to start dancing, you not only danced to the music, but you could not even get up. And you completely forgot that you are a king, and others - that you are master over them. It was then that I realized for the first time that this is freedom of speech - what you were doing then. After all, you spoke without stopping.
Then Astyages asked:
- Isn't your father drunk?
- No, I swear by Zeus!
But what happens to him in such a case?
- He only quenches his thirst and nothing bad happens to him. As I believe, grandfather, this happens because it is not Sak who serves as his cupbearer ”(Kyropedia, I, 3, 23-24).
Violence, intemperance, the inability to control one's behavior - these qualities inherent in an intoxicated person were categorically condemned. Light snacks traditional in antiquity, consisting of plant foods and cheeses, a predominantly warm climate contributed to a quick, and most importantly, unexpectedly onset intoxication. A person who was unpredictable in his behavior could not find a place for himself in the polis society. Even the paintings on wine vessels often reminded of this, clearly demonstrating the consequences of drunkenness: fights, stabbings and nausea at an obviously inopportune moment. Diluted wine largely removed the danger of suddenly losing control of oneself. It allowed one to quench one's thirst and at the same time control the degree of intoxication, very precisely dosing the amount of alcohol. The drinker rather quickly came into a state of elation, that slight euphoria, when the tongue is unleashed, friends become more sincere, and all problems turn out to be small and insignificant. Mixed wine easily made it possible not to step over this stage, and to maintain oneself in such a pleasant state for a long time. This is the most important - the social component of the tradition. In addition, there were co-benefits, for example, it was much more economical than drinking whole wine.
Some believe that the degree of influence of wine on the body is directly proportional to the degrees, and if, for example, wine with a strength of 12% vol. dilute 1:3, then the resulting drink will not be stronger than kvass. We will not undertake to sum up the toxicological base, but we note that in practice the intoxicating effect of such wine is much higher than expected.
So, we undertake to assert that the basis of the tradition was an exclusively moral imperative, and not at all the physical impossibility of drinking undiluted wine.
Wine is as old as the world. Together with civilization itself, it came to us from the East, as evidenced by the tablets, papyri and scrolls found in Egyptian tombs. That humanity, to which we reckon ourselves, working, fighting and loving, could not do without the support of this life-giving drink.
We cannot make any conclusions about wine in the era of the pharaohs based on the numerous works of artists and sculptors - this time is too far from us. Our era of wine, whose origins are still discernible, begins with the Phoenicians, who settled on the banks of
the Mediterranean around 1100 BC, and the Greeks who settled there about 350 years later. Subsequently, these lands - Italy, France and Spain - became the true home of wine (although the Etruscans already cultivated grapes between the 8th and 4th centuries BC). The Greeks called Italy "the land hung with vines" - just as the Vikings, having visited America in 1000 after Christ, gave her the name Vinlandia for the abundance of local grapes. In North Africa, southern Spain, Provence, Sicily, mainland Italy and on the shores of the Black Sea, the first vineyards appeared during the Greek and Phoenician civilizations.
The wine of Greece itself is not God knows what from the point
The sights of later times were praised by poets who left many testimonies about them. In Athens, there was even a widespread post-feast game of kottabos, during which the players splashed the rest of the wine from their bowls, trying to get into a vessel balanced on a prop. Refined young men were taught the subtleties of this game. However, such treatment of wine, as well as the information that it was almost invariably drunk from what we would call a “wine cup”, flavored with herbs, spices, honey and diluted with water (sometimes even sea water), cast doubt on its merits. Only one thing is certain - various Aegean wines, in particular from Chios, were valued above others, and the demand for them remained unchanged. It is impossible to know whether we would like these wines today.
The Greeks were engaged in the industrial cultivation of grapes in southern Italy, the Etruscans in Tuscany and north of it, followed by the Romans. About wine and winemaking ancient rome so much has been written that one can sketch a rough map of the distribution of wine in the early Roman Empire. The greatest of writers, even Virgil himself, composed instructions for vintners. One of Virgil's maxims - "The vine loves an open hill" - probably best advice, which can be given to a European winemaker.
Other authors were more prudent and speculated about how much a slave could do with a minimum of food and sleep without reducing labor efficiency. The Romans were engaged in winemaking on a large scale. It spread throughout the empire, so that over time, Rome began to import amphorae from colonies in Spain, North Africa - from all over the Mediterranean. Since Pompeii was a resort and an important transit point for the wine trade, the excellently preserved ruins of this city provide us with a lot of detailed evidence.
How good were Roman wines? Some of them appear to have been stored for an unusually long time, suggesting careful craftsmanship. Heat was often used to concentrate the must, and the wine itself was kept over the hearth, exposed to smoke, apparently to give it the qualities of the present Madeira.
Roman wines of the best vintages became the subject of general discussion, and they were consumed for much longer than we can imagine. The famous Opimius, from the same year in which Opimius became consul, was drunk on the 121st BC, when the wine was 125 years old.
The Romans had everything they needed to age wine, even though they didn't use the same materials that we do. Glass, for example, was not used to store wine. Wooden barrels were used only in Gaul (including part of Germany). Like the Greeks, the Romans used earthenware amphorae that could hold about 35 liters. 2,000 years ago, Italians probably drank the same wine that their descendants drink today: young, sharp, sometimes sharper and bitter, sometimes stronger and stronger, depending on the vintage. Even the Roman method of growing vines on trees—its festoons became part of the friezes of classical buildings—is still used, albeit to a lesser extent, in southern Italy and northern Portugal.
The Greeks brought grapes north to southern Gaul. The Romans acclimatized it, and by the time when in the 5th century. after the RH, they left the places that have now become France, the foundations were laid for almost all of the now most famous vineyards of modern Europe. Starting from Provence, in which vineyards planted by the Greeks had existed for several centuries, the Romans moved to the Rhone Valley and Languedoc (Narbonne). Even today, in the 21st century, we do not have reliable evidence of the beginning of viticulture in Bordeaux. The earliest mention is contained in those relating to the IV century. before the writings of Ausonius (the poet lived in Saint-Emilion, perhaps even in Chateau Ausone, but, most likely, grapes were grown in these parts long before him).
It seems that the ancient Egyptian gods drank wine with no less pleasure than people. Pharaoh Thutmose III of the 18th Dynasty (1479-1425 BC) offers vessels filled with wine to the god Nun.
Early spread of the vine. Starting its journey from the Caucasus or Mesopotamia 1 in 6000 (probably) BC, it came to Egypt and Phoenicia 2 about 3000 BC. By 2000 BC the vine had reached Greece 3 and around 1000 BC it was growing in Italy, Sicily and North Africa 4 . In the next 500 years it reached at least Spain, Portugal and southern France 5 and possibly southern Russia. And, finally (see the map on the next page), it spread with the help of the Romans to northern Europe 6, even reaching Britain.
The Wines the Romans Drank: An Approximate Map of Winemaking in Italy in 100 AD. The names of modern cities are in bold type, the names of wines are in normal.
Pompeii and Herculaneum, the Roman coastal resorts that perished in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, have not been fully explored to this day. However, their houses (the house of Lucius Caius Secundus is shown here), streets, cellars and drinking establishments give a clear idea of what and how the Romans drank.
This map shows the approximate distribution of the vitis vinifera vine in the Roman Empire in 100 AD. There is a striking resemblance to 21st-century vineyards, although Spain, Portugal, and France had far fewer of them, and vastly more in Eastern Europe (and presumably Britain).
The early development of viticulture took place in river valleys and along natural ways messages cleared by the Romans from forests initially in order to protect themselves from ambush attacks. The reason, among other things, is that wine was most conveniently transported on ships and boats. Bordeaux, Burgundy, Trier on the Moselle (the city which has a carved Roman wine-carrying ship on display in its museum) probably originated as centers for the trade in Greek and Italian wines. Later, their own vineyards appeared, gradually replacing imported products.
By the 1st century vineyards were already on the Loire and the Rhine, by the 2nd century. - in Burgundy and further north, in Paris (not the best of ideas), in Champagne and on the Moselle. The Côte d'Or in Burgundy has remained the least accessible of the viticultural regions worth mentioning - there are no convenient waterways. It lies where the main northern road (leading to Trier on the Moselle - to the north of the Roman Empire) skirts the rich province of Autun. Local residents, seeing great commercial opportunities in their position, also found the most fertile slopes. Thus was laid the foundation of the French wine industry.
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The ancient Romans ate and drank, as you know, reclining. And this, looking in retrospect, seems to be a kind of guarantee of their subsequent degradation and complete dispersal. It is hard to imagine: breakfast, lunch and dinner in bed. Breakfast would be fine - the person has not yet fully woken up, so he lies. It would be nice to have dinner - a person wound up during the day, you can lie down, all the more - soon it's time to go to the side. But to lie down at dinner is beyond any comprehension. Especially if you remember that getting up, even for a very great need, was not accepted. And to demand a special pot to relieve yourself without leaving a pleasant company is a violation of all possible decency. If you are a true ancient Roman, then be patient and do not show it. As if in a famous song: burst, but keep the style.
How did they drink? Exactly - they drank, exactly - how, and not what. Wine, water, the difference is negligible. Water was tinted with wine, wine was diluted with water. All this moisture was assimilated while the endless meal dragged on, and then categorically demanded an exit. To this day, historians of antiquity have not figured out why to tempt the body in such a way, and you can’t ask the ancient Romans themselves. Yes, they would not understand if they were addressed with such a question, as they would not understand modern man who sees no use in drinking diluted wine and running water.
Is there a definition of “watery” in the dictionary for nothing, which means bad, liquid, diluted, meaningless, depending on the context. And water, by today's standards, the better, the less additives it contains. drinking water specially cleaned, filtered. Or they try to take from such deep wells, where the most unbridled fantasy is not able to penetrate, where microbes and impurities are already.
It would seem, what is easier. Lie as long as you can while the endless dinner drags on, take a sip of mineral water, carbonated or still, as you like, raise a bowl of pure wine, one, two, three. If you get drunk - it’s not scary, you won’t fall, because you’ve been lying for a long time. Feel sick - so the ancient Romans specifically took measures to make them feel sick without directly crawling away from the table, because you can eat more on an empty stomach. The latter, again, is surprising for modern man. Eating a lot has a certain meaning, but having eaten a lot, getting rid of food is incomprehensible to the mind. Just as it is not clear: if you want to drink, why drink "balalaika", as they say, because you drink to get drunk. When there is no full-fledged booze, you can use mash, “pharmacy”, that is, tinctures made with alcohol, and alcohol-containing liquids, and finally, triple cologne, shoe polish solution. But having wine, sometimes very good, pouring water into it - isn't that barbaric? The ancient Romans, however, believed that it was barbaric to drink wine undiluted and in large quantities. The offended barbarians beat them for that until the loss of antiquity. And rightly so.
It even makes no sense that the taste of wine, which is going to be diluted after, has long been complicated, refined, diversified. For example, they added rose petals, violet petals, put myrtle leaves and aloe leaves. They also used laurel leaves, nard, myrrh, wormwood. If it happened in summer, the wine was cooled, if in winter, it was heated in special vessels.
It must be admitted that the refined, utterly pampered ancient Romans loved drinks and very dubious additives. These are passum, wine made from raisins, sapa and defrutum, special decoctions of grapes obtained by evaporation, they were used, among other things, as preservatives and additives for wine, laura, a drink made from grape pomace mixed with water. How did this swill differ from “fruit and berry” wines or from Moldavian-made chatter? Especially, taking into account that the Moldovans are the descendants of these very ancient Romans. True, they were very wrong and exiled to an eternal settlement in the boundless Moldavian steppes, where there is enough space for everyone, even Ovid Nazon. By the way, one can assume that the recipes for Moldovan port wine and various fortified wines were inherited by the locals. If the guess is correct, these, so to speak, drinks should be included in the list of world cultural heritage and served at the solemn meetings of UNESCO, so as not to be too smart.
Of the other drinks revered by the ancient Romans, it is worth mentioning the mulsum, a dark red drink with the addition of honey. The wine was supplemented with honey, spices were added, then, poured into ceramic vessels, left to ferment for several weeks (an easier method involved boiling a mixture of wine and honey). Special appetizers (promulsis) were served with the mulsum, which is reflected in their name. They also drank mulsum to stimulate appetite, as an aperitif. It was believed that the drink is useful.
And if it comes to the word, then we will mention the proportion in which the ancients bred wine. The proportions are as follows: two cups of wine for three cups of water (the result is sleep and avoidance of worries, pacification of passion), a cup of wine for two cups of water (excitation and intoxication within the normal range), a cup of wine for three cups of water (neither intoxication, nor special taste). Such proportions are compared with musical proportions: fifth, octave, fourth. This information was taken from Plutarch, who was not only the author of Comparative Biographies and many other works, but also a Greek, and an ancient one at that. Therefore, he knew what he was talking about. And therefore it is even more strange that some ancient Romans, who drank wine, contrary to tradition, without diluting it, said that this is how the enlightened Greeks drink wine. If this were true, then the ancient Greeks would not have turned into modern Greeks.
The recipe for mulled wine (conditum tinctum), the favorite drink of legionnaires, has already been given. But the drink posca (posca) was only mentioned. Meanwhile, this drink was extremely popular. Roman legionnaires and members of the lower classes drank it every day. And because it was easy to prepare, and because the ingredients were cheap. Wine vinegar, or wine that turns into vinegar, was diluted with water, then aromatic herbs were added. There are many references to the addition of raw eggs as well. The drink perfectly quenched thirst, and if the taste of water left much to be desired, then acid and aromatic additives could correct the situation. It was believed that due to vitamin C, posca serves as a prophylaxis against scurvy. The acidic environment also destroyed bacteria.
As usual, the most popular and everyday things, because of their “common knowledge”, disappear into the distance of history more easily than rarities and uniques. Why write down what everyone knows? So, only mentions remained about this drink, and its recipe can be restored very approximately. According to the expert, this or a similar drink will turn out if you take half a glass of honey for one and a half glasses of wine vinegar, add a tablespoon of coriander seeds, after grinding them, and four glasses of water. Water with vinegar and coriander is boiled and cooled slightly, after which honey is added. The completely cooled drink is filtered. Drink, again, diluting to taste with water.
Summing up, let's say that if bread and wine, according to the authors of late antiquity, were the two main foodstuffs for the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, from our point of view, these ancients treated wine wastefully - spoiling with additives, diluting and summing up. Had they treated differently, perhaps they would have existed to this day. At least in alcoholic form.
The mosaic from the Bardo Museum (Tunisia) depicts a goblet and a container of wine.
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I cannot fail to point out some inaccuracies in the colleague's answer voiced here, and also not to voice some necessary additions. The Greeks and Romans drank wine diluted with water. Here it is worth bearing in mind that the taste of wine was very different from what we have today, and I have already had the opportunity to answer on this topic. I note again: in the sources you can see that the recipe for making wine sometimes involves adding the most unexpected ingredients to it, including salt (or something salty, apparently, as a preservative). This was important from the point of view of storage and trade, since the wine had to be well preserved during transportation. It is no coincidence that when serving, the wine was not only diluted, but often sweetened (with honey); spices were often added to it. So I would still argue about the taste. Drinking undiluted wine was considered a sign of bad taste: it is no coincidence that in the poem cited by a colleague, Catullus points to the custom of drinking in the Scythian way. In ancient times, there was a belief that only barbarians (= including Scythians) drink wine in this way. In this regard, it is worth recalling the story of how the Spartan king Cleomenes, allegedly having learned from the Scythians to drink undiluted wine, fell into madness, which led him to death (in Herodotus: Hist., VI, 84). This Spartan legend should be understood in the context of the special understanding of wine in Greek culture: being a gift from Dionysus, wine had a magical and ceremonial significance. It had to be used according to the rules. In Rome, as it seems, wine was not given such a deeply mystical character, but the cultural tradition still remained. References in Roman literature to pure, undiluted wine are usually contextual. So, Suetonius, reporting on the drunkenness of Tiberius, points to his humorous nicknames, among which one testifies to the use of supposedly pure wine. As for the poem of Catullus, it should also be taken in the context of the passionate and ardent nature of the poet himself.
On the use of wine among the Greeks: Lissarrag F. Wine in the stream of images. Aesthetics of the ancient Greek feast. M., New Literary Review, 2008. At one time I wrote a review of this book.
So they didn’t drink, or did they drink, but with condemnation?) So Seneca writes “so it is in us, when wine ferments, everything hidden in the depth rises and is brought out; that, loaded beyond measure with undiluted wine, people cannot keep food or secrets in themselves, and lay out everything - both their own and someone else's. Although this happens often, but no less often, we discuss the most pressing matters with those for whom we know addiction to drinking.
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We can't say for sure whether we drank or didn't drink. These are not our neighbors, these are people who lived 2000 years ago. All that we have is written sources that reveal the features of the life of some people or groups. There are separate references to the use of undiluted wine in them, which should be explained separately. I personally believe that the use of undiluted wine took place, but extremely rarely: the main trend was still in mixing wine with water. It is difficult to give specific examples of the use of pure wine (i.e., not in a humorous or too general sense), since the very often the mention of undiluted wine was a kind of phraseological unit (cf. our expression “fill your eyes” in the sense of getting drunk, which cannot be interpreted literally).
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