Drink (15 page)

Arnald experimented with the Islamic science of distillation in the course of his alchemical work, and his pupil Raymund Lull, Franciscan monk, alchemist, and missionary, was the first European to write about spirits. He reckoned them to be a “Marvelous medicament,” better even than wine, because, in his opinion, they were an entirely different fluid. Distillation did not so much separate as transform, and the substance it produced was “an emanation of the divinity, an element newly revealed to man, but hid from antiquity, because the human race was then too young to need this beverage [which is] destined to revive the energies of modern decrepitude.” The element in question was the fabled
quintessence
—the fifth essence—the substance from which all heavenly bodies were believed to have been made, a sample of which Lull thought he had captured in his retort. His enthusiasm was shared by other early European distillers. Thaddeus of Florence (1223-1303) wrote a landmark tract on the matter whose title, “De Virtute
aquae vitae
, quae etiam dicitur
aqua ardens
” (“On the virtues of the water of life, which is also called firewater”), gave the new and elevating beverage the names by which it became known throughout Europe.

The first part of the continent in which distillation flourished was Germany, then comprised of dozens of petty kingdoms. In the fifteenth century, apothecaries in a number of these states started to sell spirits to the public by the shot, as a health tonic. They retailed them as
brandy,
which derives from the German
Gebrant wein
, or “burned wine,” an allusion to the distillation process. As demand for their product grew, and the mythical element became an everyday beverage, it acquired a reputation for being dangerous if consumed in excess. A Nuremburg doctor, writing in 1493, advised would-be brandy drinkers that they had to treat the new fluid with caution: “In view of the fact that everyone at present has got into the habit of drinking aqua vitae it is necessary to remember the quantity that one can permit oneself to drink, and learn to drink according to one’s capacities; if one wishes to behave like a gentleman.” Clearly, this diplomatic warning was not enough, for in 1496 restrictions were placed on the retail and consumption of spirits in Nuremberg. They could not be sold on Sundays or feast days, and spirits bought on weekdays might be drunk only at home. Similar limitations were introduced in Munich a few years later.

Despite such warnings and restrictions, the popularity of spirits continued to grow. Their case was championed in print by Hieronymous Braunschweig, an Alsatian army doctor and author of the illustrated
Big Book of Distillation
(1512). The
Big Book
was aimed at the home distiller and lavished praises on “the mistress of all medicines.” It claimed curative powers for aqua vitae to rival those attributed by Arnald of Villanova to wine: “It eases diseases coming of cold. It comfortsthe heart. It heals all old and new sores on the head. It causes a good color in a person . . . it eases the pain in the teeth and causes sweet breath . . . it heals the short-winded. It causes good digestion and appetite . . . and takes away belching. It eases the yellow jaundice, the dropsy, the gout, the pain in the breasts when they be swollen, and heals all diseases in the bladder. . . . It heals the bites of a mad dog.” Last, but not least: “It gives also courage in a young person and causes him to have a good memory.”

Most fifteenth-century German spirits were distilled from wine, of which the region now produced a considerable surplus. The Cistercian monasteries along the Rhine, and a number of aristocratic vintners, had discovered the Riesling grape was the perfect match for the terrain and climate and had planted it in abundance. The original Cistercian settlement in the region at Eberbach by now had over three hundred hectares of vineyards and was the largest single producer of wine in late medieval Europe. In celebration of this status, its monks constructed a giant wine barrel, or tun, in 1500, which had a capacity of about seventy thousand liters. The tun was described as the eighth wonder of the world by the poet Vincentius Obsopaeus, who salivated in his verses over the ocean of fine wine that it contained.

German, or Rhenish wine as it was known at the time, was sold all over Europe. It was typically light in color and weak in strength, and commanded a slight premium in price to the wines of Bordeaux in England. It was, however, far from being the most expensive wine in circulation, which distinction was reserved for vintages from the southern and eastern Mediterranean. The late medieval period witnessed a tremendous expansion in commerce, which was pioneered by the rising Italian city-states of Venice and Genoa. The Venetian trading empire extended from Christian Constantinople and various Saracen nations in the east, to Southampton and Antwerp in the west. It specialized in high-value goods—silks and spices from the Orient and powerful wines from the Levant, whose grapes had been allowed to dry a little in the sun after their harvest, thus concentrating their sugars and increasing their alcoholic potential. The principal Venetian brand was known in England as
Malmsey,
after the Byzantine town of Monemvasia in the Peloponnese. The Genoese focused on Chian wines, from the eponymous Greek Island, which they had captured from the Saracens in 1261. They also sourced wine from Catalonia, Valencia, and Málaga in Spain as these were successively reconquered for Christianity.

The Italian city-states explored as well as traded. Not only did they turn north into the Atlantic when they left the Mediterranean, toward Portugal, France, and the British Isles, they also ventured south into what, for fourteenth-century Europeans, were unknown waters. By 1339, the Genoese had reached the Canary Islands, which were populated by a people called the Guanches, of uncertain origin and stone age technology, who resisted initial attempts to settle but who were subdued by imported Normans from 1402 onward. The surviving Guanches were sold into slavery and their lands were planted with vines. The Madeira Archipelago was first visited in the same year that the Canaries were put on the map. It was “rediscovered” in 1419 by a Portuguese expedition sent by Prince Henry the Navigator and settled in 1425. Unlike the Canaries, Madeira was uninhabited and agriculture rather than slave taking was the priority of its immigrants. Within a decade it was exporting sugar and producing wine. The Azores were next to appear on nautical charts. They had first been spotted in 1427, visited in the 1430s, and had been settled by the 1450s. They were planted with vines from Crete, and soon produced a strong sweet wine similar to that which had made the Mediterranean island famous in classical times.

These early Atlantic ventures were of little initial importance in comparison to trade in the Mediterranean. However, in 1453, Constantinople, the ancient capital of the eastern Roman Empire and the last bulwark of Christianity in the region, fell to Islam. The loss of Constantinople had serious repercussions for commerce, as it had been the terminus for European trade with Asia and China. As a consequence, European eyes turned toward the Atlantic. Might it be possible to reach Asia by sea, by traveling south around Africa and thence east across the Indian Ocean? If so, the new island colonies would be important staging posts. The possibility fascinated Henry of Portugal. Between the discovery of the Azores and his death in 1460, he had sent fleets as far down the west coast of Africa as Sierre Leone. The Portuguese push south was continued by his successors, and in January 1488 Captain Bartolomeo Dias rounded Cape Horn and sailed into the Indian Ocean. These voyages brought the Europeans into direct contact with a number of African cultures for the first time. At each step south down the coast, the Portuguese had established trading stations. The Africans had ivory, gold, slaves, and palm oil to offer, and by a process of trial and error the Portuguese discovered which goods of their own were appealing to their counterparts. In the case of the Wolofs, who occupied what is now Senegal, the best articles of trade were wine, weapons, and horses. The Wolofs were a sophisticated culture, nominally Muslim, who maintained links with other members of their faith through a trans-Saharan land trade route, but who had chosen to disregard the Koranic ban on drinking. They had a number of native beverages, including palm wine and millet beer, and these two drinks were found to be common throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, at every point of the continent where the Portuguese landed, they found alcohol to be present and to have been integrated into the customs and rituals of the peoples with whom they made contact.

In addition to seeking a route to Asia by sailing around Africa, Europeans also contemplated the possibility of reaching it by traveling west. Although no one thought the world was flat, they disagreed as to just how big and round it was. In 1492, the Spanish king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, financed a fleet of three ships under a Genoese sea captain, Christopher Columbus, which sailed from Seville to the Canary Islands, and thence across the Atlantic to the Americas. Within fifty years of this voyage, the Spanish had established an American empire that stretched from Florida to southern Chile. The empire was created by conquest of two great civilizations, the Aztecs and the Incas, and the piecemeal annexation of the territories of various smaller cultures. During the same decades the Portuguese succeeded in their ambition of reaching Asia via Africa, established a colony in Brazil, and sponsored, under Ferdinand Magellan, the first expedition in history to sail around the world. Both Spain and her neighboring power provisioned their fleets with bounteous stocks of wine, sourced from Andalusía, or their respective Atlantic Island colonies. Wine was a significant part of the cost of fitting out an expedition. Magellan spent more on sherry than on armaments; indeed his wine rations cost nearly twice as much as his flagship, the
San Antonio
. In consequence, the Spanish and the Portuguese paid careful attention to the presence or absence of alcoholic drinks in the places where they traded or conquered, to their potential for vineyards, and to the drinking habits of the natives.

The Spanish found not one but a multitude of drinking cultures in their American possessions. These were concentrated in Middle or
Meso
america, between Mexico and Panama, and were as diverse among themselves as they were different from Spanish custom. Mesoamerican civilizations were perhaps the most ingenious in history in identifying potential sources of alcohol. They fermented cacti and their fruits, maize and its stalks, the sap of a good two-dozen species of agave, honey, sasparilla, the seed pods of the mesquite tree, hog plums, and the fruit and bark of various other trees. The ubiquity of alcohol was remarked upon by the conquistadores, who observed that in their new dominions “up to now no tribe has been found which is content to drink only water.”

Among the novel types of fermentables observed by the Spaniards in Mesoamerica, four in particular stood out: the fruits, or
tunas,
of cacti; maize; tree bark; and
pulque
. The manufacture of alcoholic beverages from cacti proved widespread among hunter-gatherer tribes. Typically, the tribe in question would move to an area where cacti were in fruit and spend all their time brewing and drinking until the season was over. The Chichimeca of central Mexico, for instance, would work in short cycles, preparing then consuming “tuna wine”: “every third day, the women make the wine and the men drink so much that they lose their senses.” According to Spanish accounts, the Chichimeca were highly volatile when intoxicated, so that the women would hide their menfolk’s bows and arrows lest they kill each other. Moreover, in order not to be surprised by their enemies when under the influence, the Chichimeca “never all [got] drunk at the same time” and appointed drink monitors, whose duty was to stay sober and keep a good lookout.

A more important source of fermentable material was maize, the principal cereal crop of the Americas, which hitherto had been unknown to Europeans. This was used to produce
tesguino
—maize beer. Tesguino was made by masticating corn kernels and boiling these for a prolonged period to produce a syrup, which was rediluted, then fermented for three to five days. The Spanish called it
vino de maíz
—maize wine—and noted the enthusiasm with which it was consumed by their new subjects: “They have solemn festivals of drunkenness for which the whole pueblo congregates.” Tesguino was the drink of choice in central and western Mexico.

To the south, in the Yucatán Peninsula, the principal alcoholic drink of the once-great Mayas was
balche
—mead fermented with the bark of the balche tree. The resulting concoction has been described as “milky white, sour to the smell, and at first very disagreeable to the taste.” Despite its unpleasant flavor, the Maya consumed balche in volume at their frequent “fiestas, dances, and weddings,” where they would “dance after drinking repeatedly from small jars and in a short time become intoxicated and act as if they were crazy and childish.”

Whereas many of the native types of alcoholic drink fell out of use after the Spanish conquest, one in particular remained common and grew in popularity. This was
pulque,
the fermented sap of the
maguey,
the Spanish generic name for a the agave plant. Like the poetical mead of the Anglo-Saxons, pulque had a special cachet, especially among the Aztecs, whom the Spanish had displaced as lords of Mexico. According to Aztec theology, pulque was blessed with a mother goddess, and a band of immortal guardians—the
Centzontotochtli
—the Four Hundred Moon Rabbit Gods of Pulque. Their number, and their place of residence, were both symbolic of fertility, and their principal sphere of influence, beyond the supervision of the manufacture of pulque, was breeding. The connection between the moon, the rabbits, fertility, and pulque was enhanced by the milky color of the fluid, which was liberally employed at planting and harvest festivals.

The manufacturing process of pulque was complex and required the death of the plant. Magueys mature when they are five to seven years old, whereupon the center, which resembles a giant artichoke, begins to swell prior to sending out a
quiote
—a single flower stalk. The quiote bud is cut out and a cavity scraped clean in the center of the plant, which fills with sap, called
aguamiel
—honeywater. The aguamiel is extracted two or three times a day—a large plant can yield seven liters per day, until it dies, and it may survive in this wounded state for up to six months, bleeding out a total of perhaps a thousand liters. This was an aesthetically pleasing process for the Aztecs—reminiscent of their usual method of human sacrifice—cutting out the victim’s heart and draining the cavity of blood.