It's All About the Benjamins

Jump to Comments Did you know that there are people out there who don’t believe that people drank alcohol in classical antiquity? Did you know that these people probably call antiquity “Bible Times” but never distinguish between classical antiquity of and the Late Bronze Age, which are so totally like 800 years apart? And plus in the Late Bronze Age they only had a little bit of iron, which must have been a pain in the butt when you were a bronze-age military going up against an early iron-age culture that also had a guy that was really a lot taller than you were? Oh and also did you know that these people are uniformly uniformed?*

WELL NOW YOU KNOW DEAR READERS.

So what is wine anyway? I’m a big fan of chianti, almost as much as San Pellegrino (1 2 3 4 5 6 7), so I know a little bit about how it’s made**. See, the really cool thing about grapes is that they in a symbiotic relationship with yeast; the yeast grows on the grapeskins and then, when one mashes up the ripened grapes to get the juice out, the yeast comes along for the ride and helps preserve the juice: by turning it into wine!

You see, grape juice as we know it didn’t exist until somebody invented it – I’m serious – until the 1860s. That fresh-squeezed stuff from the recently-picked grapes isn’t grape juice even though I called it that, it’s more like a grape cider, since it’s got a bunch of mush and grape solids in it. But anyway, you take this freshly-pressed grape mash and put it in a container, and, in about a week, you get primary fermented wine! So what the little yeasties do is take the sugar from the unfiltered, unpasteurized grape juice-and-bits and convert some of it into ethanol and carbon dioxide, which acts as a preservative, killing off bacteria (but not the little yeasties). In classical antiquity, an easy way to make a sealed container that could handle the expansion from the creation of a bunch of CO₂ (and concomittantly enthanol, hereafter known as “booze”) was a bag made out of animal skin. And then, after the primary fermentation is done, one filters the wine, pours off all the carbon dioxide (otherwise known as fizz) and puts it into another sealed container where it undergoes some secondary fermentation to bring the alcohol level up to about 12%. These days this is usually done in an oak barrel or maybe in the glass wine bottle, once again in those heady Bible Times they used the ol’ animal skins. In fact, they used the old ol’ animal skins because secondary fermentation doesn’t make a lot of fizz (red wine doesn’t have a head like beer does, or champagne – which is a complicated production) and thus wouldn’t pop an old, hardened wineskin that had already been stretched out once already. Because you know, unlike today the ancients just didn’t waste packaging when they were done with it, they, uh, recycled! For example, here’s a quotation from a source written down during the Classical Roman period:

And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, “The old is good.”

Man those crazy Greeks and Romans and their enjoyment of well-fermented vintage wines and drinking different kinds of wine and saying things like “the old is good”! Man I wonder who was the writer of this mysterious quotation Ben Lamb just put in there, maybe it was like Virgil or Cicero or some crap, or maybe Martial since he was always writing about scandalous activities.

Oh but hark, what heading from yonder leather-bound volume breaks? ‘Tis the fifth chapter of Luke, and Jesus Christ the speaker. You know, that guy whose first miraculous sign was making a bunch of booze at a wedding? Yeah, him. Well, my stomach hurts and I just had another winter nosebleed so I’m going to follow the advice of a wacky ex-Pharisee and get off the Internet for a while.
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*Well at least, the people who doubt the consumption of alcohol; though I guess the bronze-age militaries facing iron-age militaries were uniformly informed of, uh, ironmaking.

**PS Czech this photodump for some serious old school shots of Ivo.