Falernum,[XXVIII_96] the Albanum,[XXVIII_97] and the Mamertinum.[XXVIII_98] After these, a number of other excellent wines occupied a very distinguished place in a long nomenclature to be found in Pliny[XXVIII_99] and Athenæus.[XXVIII_100]
The ancients professed to have a very particular veneration for wines of a renowned growth, which had ripened slowly in amphoræ. Some gastronomic archæologists produced, on their tables certain wines which had so far dried up in leather bottles, that they were taken out in lumps;[XXVIII_101] others, placed in the chimney corner, became in time as hard as salt.[XXVIII_102] Petronius speaks of a wine of a hundred leaves.[XXVIII_103] Pliny says that guests were served with wine more than two hundred years old: it was as thick as honey.[XXVIII_104] This wine was thinned with warm water, and passed through the straining bag (saccatio vinorum).[XXVIII_105]
This predilection for good old wine was common to the Greeks;[XXVIII_106] the Romans—who liked it for the bitterness it had contracted by age;[XXVIII_107] and the Egyptians, who, notwithstanding their time-honoured love of beer, were not unjust towards the beverage with which their Osiris found it so delightful to intoxicate himself.[XXVIII_108]
Athenæus sets no bounds to his praise of old wine. He says it is excellent for the health; it is the best thing to dissolve the food; it strengthens; it assists the circulation of the blood, and assures a peaceful sleep.[XXVIII_109] Who, then, would be ungrateful enough to refuse to drink?
The topers of antiquity did not disdain white wine, but they seem to have viewed it as of secondary importance. It digests easily, says the writer just cited, but it is weak, and has but little body.[XXVIII_110] Red wine, on the contrary, is full of strength and energy, and it is the first that the inhabitants of Chios learned to make,[XXVIII_111] when Œnopion, the son of Bacchus, had planted the vine in their country.[XXVIII_112]
However, there was no lack of amateurs of white wine, and, like ourselves, the ancients doubtless preferred it when they eat snails, oysters, or any of those shell fish with which the Lucrine lake abounded. They even took it into their heads (how ingenious is gluttony!) to change red wine sometimes into white. To do this it was only necessary to put three whites of egg, or some bean flour, into a flagon, and shake it a long time. The same result was obtained with ashes from the white vine.[XXVIII_113] Now, is Apicius jesting with us a little when he gives this recipe; or was it a legerdemain trick to amuse the guests at the end of a repast, when too frequent libations had rendered them incapable of distinguishing clearly one colour from another?
The Greeks endeavoured to preclude the disastrous effects of intoxication by putting sea-water into the wine; a mixture which they also thought had the effect of assisting digestion. One measure of water was enough for fifty measures of wine.[XXVIII_114] And, again, the merchants of that nation took so much interest in the health of foreign consumers that they never shipped the wines of the Archipelago for Rome or elsewhere without diluting them in this manner. Such, for example, was the course followed in concocting that celebrated wine of Chios, which Cato imitated so as to deceive the best judges.[XXVIII_115] That honest geoponic has transmitted us his secret. Fifty-six pints of old sea-water are thrown into a pipe of sweet wine made with grapes dried in the sun; or two-thirds of a bushel of salt are put into a rush basket, and suspended in the middle of the pipe, where it is left to melt.[XXVIII_116]
This very simple process metamorphoses the most indifferent liquor into that delightful nectar which gave renown and fortune to the isle of Cos.
The saline wine of the Greeks (vinum tethalassomenon) was nothing else.[XXVIII_117] Their thalassites wine, so much in demand in Italy on account of its apparent age, owed its reputation to the fact of its having been plunged for some time in the sea.[XXVIII_118] This little trading knavery was a tolerably innocent means of increasing the profits of the speculator, who hastened the maturity of his wines without employing any of those deleterious ingredients which illicit traders have introduced at a later period. When the wine had remained a sufficient time in the sea to give it age, it was drawn off into goatskin bottles, well coated with pitch, and, in this manner it supported the longest sea voyages.[XXVIII_119]
The following are the made wines most in vogue in olden times.