Joy of Home Wine Making (3 page)

The Greeks preserved some of their wines by adding acids to them, and coating and sealing the jars with pitch, resins, or even plaster. They added seawater and various other flavorings and preservatives. Retsina is probably left over from those days.

The ancient Greeks were responsible for spreading the art of winemaking around the Mediterranean region. They felt that any group of people who couldn’t make wine were ignorant barbarians. Beer was a drink fit only for foreigners. Many of the beautifully illustrated vases from that period depict satyrs and even the gods themselves making and drinking wine.

There was a god of wine, whose name was Dionysus. He was not one of the “all-gods,” but he was important enough for Euripides, the Greek playwright, to use as a major character in his drama
The Bacchae
.

The wild cult of Bacchus, worshipers of ecstasy, mysticism, wine, and dance, is looked upon today with amusement. At the time it was a disturbing, disruptive force in the lives of the ancient Greeks.

The Romans picked up wine and winemaking from the Greeks, as they did many other things, such as literature and science. Most wine was drunk diluted with water. The stuff was probably pretty sweet with unfermented sugars. Also, a good Roman was supposed to be a sober Roman, for a drunken Roman made a lousy soldier. They had learned that lesson from the Greeks, as well.

A banquet was not a banquet without wine. Nobles all had country estates and vied with each other to produce the perfect vintage. The sunny Mediterranean climate and gentle hills produced abundant crops and predictable results.

Those Romans got around—conquering, pillaging, spreading their culture, and the vine and wine. The Romans even planted vineyards in Great Britain. Such optimists.

In what is now France, the Celts became famous for their barrel-making, a more durable alternative to the fragile amphorae. Viticulture spread through the area via river traffic.

Gradually, grapevines and winemaking spread throughout Northern Africa and Europe. In the far northern parts of Europe, shaggy barbarians were making mead, or honey wine.

By the Middle Ages, wine was everywhere. Wooden barrels had been perfected, ships became bigger, trade routes were more stable, and populations grew. Wine was plentiful and cheap. There
were many regulations about who could grow what kinds of vines, who could make wine and beer, and even who could drink it. Wine and beer were safer to drink than water in most towns. Diluted wine was drunk with meals. People even drank weak beer for breakfast.

The Christian Church had become the major religion in Europe. The church and the state were closely interconnected. No monarch ruled without sanction of the church, which declared the divine right of kings and princes. The church became rich from tithing and pardons. In those days wealth meant land and what you could produce on it. The monasteries owned vast vineyards, from which they made wines that began to take on distinguishing characteristics: rich and red here, heavy and sweet and white there, depending on the grapes of the region and the skill of the winemaker.

Most learning and most skills were centered in the monasteries. Few people could read; even kings were mostly illiterate. Anyone with an inclination to scholarship headed for the stability and peace of the monasteries.

Kings, nobles, and military leaders probably got the best of the wines. They used wine for tribute, bribes, gifts, and general trade. Vineyards were prized possessions, fought over in wars.

People in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance drank their wine young. As valuable as wine was, one can find references to the uneven quality, sediment, and sourness of wine at that time.

It was served in open jugs on the table. Servers flavored and sweetened it with honey, herbs, spices, and fruit juices, as well as various ingredients that were regarded as medicinal or magical. Grated “unicorn” horn was added to wine, pearls were dissolved into it, flecks of silver and gold were mixed into it. Amethysts were added with the belief that they kept one from getting drunk. Jewelers must have been very happy.

People too sick to eat were fed warmed sweetened wine to keep them going and ease their pain. Wine with poppy juice (that is, opium) was about the best painkiller there was.

France, with its temperate climate and limestone soil, became the European center for growing grapes and making wine. The British, especially after the loss of Bordeaux, became the most important importers and traders of wine. And the British, like the Romans, got around.

TECHNOLOGY CHANGES EVERYTHING, HURRAY

In Europe, up until about 1780, wine came from a barrel that was simply tapped until it went bad or got used up. Jugs and earthenware bottles were used to store smaller amounts of wine. It was possible to store wine in a barrel for a long time, but some would evaporate. It tended to age far too quickly unless it was carefully stored in a cool cellar.

The weather in Europe is very changeable, and vintners realized that they could blend an indifferent year’s wine with another, good year’s wine to come up with something that would taste and sell better.

People started getting the idea that many wines tasted MUCH better if they were allowed to hang around for more than a year. Blending of wines produced a much more balanced and more dependably tasty beverage.

The trade in wine from Europe was spreading around the world via ships. A wine from France could appear on the other side of the world in as little as six months from the time the bung was banged home in the barrel.

If you were moderately well off and liked wine, you could have a barrel or two of ordinary wine in the cellar and jugs of more expensive, rare wines for special occasions.

Then in France, someone got the idea of storing wine in glass bottles. Paired with bits of cork from Portugal, a revolution occurred. Barrels were still important, of course, but the glass bottle changed everything, from drinking to shipping. Glass was light and strong compared to pottery. If it was packed well, it could be shipped with relative ease. You could see the wine in the bottle.

In England in the mid-eighteenth century, it was discovered that the superior heat from coal made glass stronger than wood fires did. Someone invented the corkscrew, which meant that a cork could be driven all the way into the bottleneck and the new, stronger bottle could be stored on its side, keeping the cork wet. This avoided shrinkage, and meant the wine would keep even longer.

The monk Dom Perignon invented the champagne method, and champagne as we know it came about. Wines could be bottled on the estate where they were grown, or sold by the barrel and bottled
by the wine merchant on the other end. Wine merchants could store especially good vintages for many years and sell them at a higher profit.

The first bottle of Chateau Lafite was laid down in 1781. It was wonderful. It was the fruit of technology.

In the mid-nineteenth century another innovation came along: a nasty little louse by the name of Phylloxera. Originally from North America, this creature attacked the vineyards of Europe. Almost 6.2 million acres were destroyed. It looked like the end of the glory of European wines. However, it was discovered that North American native grapes had developed a resistance to the disease spread by Phylloxera. Eventually, the disease was controlled by using North American native grapes as rootstock, even in the great vineyards of Bordeaux.

BUT WHAT ABOUT FRUIT WINES?

Ah. Well. During Roman, medieval, and Renaissance times there were wines made of things other than grapes. There are records of grape wines being “adulterated” with other fruits.

Granulated sugar as we know it didn’t really exist. Sugarcane existed only in exotic climes. Sugar beets had not been bred. Sweetening was accomplished with honey, sweet fruits, and barley malt. Most fruit wines had to be made using honey, malt, or dates to supply the food for the yeast.

Bees were very important in those days, as you can imagine. A beekeeper was sometimes thought of as holy. Or crazy.

Fruit wines were really fruit meads. There aren’t a lot of details about what plain folks ate, drank, or even did in those days, but I suspect that, along with the beer, cider, and perry, a certain amount of honey fruit wines were made and enjoyed while the wealthier swilled grape wine.

With the advent of colonialism, sugar became more widely available, though it was very expensive. Sugarcane must be grown in a warm climate. It takes a lot of work to grow the cane, harvest it, and refine the juice into sugar. With the help of slaves, sorry to say, this was done on a large scale.

Then Napoleon needed cheap food for his troops. In the early nineteenth century, the sugar beet was bred. And for the Western world many changes came about, including a gradual end to slav
ery. The sugar made from sugar beets was cheap enough so nearly anyone could afford it instead of the expensive cane sugar. It was cheap enough to be used to make wine.

Meanwhile, industrialism was getting a foothold. People lived in the towns and cities.

All along, fruit wines were being made. Not just by unregenerate peasants, either.
Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management
, first published in installments from 1859 to 1861, contained several recipes for fruit and flower wines made with sugar and lemons and what was probably bread yeast. They were clearly intended for household use. The method described was a trifle brief, but cleanliness was urged in the making of the wine. The wine was not aged very long, probably because it wouldn’t keep very long.

Here’s one from my files:

BLACKBERRY WINE

Bruise the berries well with the hands. To one gallon of fruit, add one-half gallon of water and let stand overnight. Strain and measure, and to each gallon of juice add two and one-half pounds of sugar. Put in cask and let ferment. Tack thin muslin over top, and when fermentation stops, pour into kegs or jugs
.

And another:

SMALL WHITE MEAD

Take three gallons of spring water, make it hot, and dissolve in it three quarts of honey, and one pound loaf sugar. Let it boil about one-half hour, and skim it as long as any scum arises. Then pour it out into a tub, and squeeze in the juice of four lemons, put in the rinds but of two. Add twenty cloves, two races of ginger, one top of sweet briar, and one top of rosemary. Let it stand in a tub till it is but blood-warm; then make a brown toast, and spread it with two or three spoonfuls of ale yeast. Put it into a vessel fit for it, let it stand four or five days, then bottle it out
.