J. A.
LIQUEURS.
I.
Derivation of Term—Eichhoff—Gregory of Tours—Liqueur Wines—Herb Wines—Scot’s Ivanhoe—Hydromel—Murrey—Delille—Montaigne—Monastical Liqueurs—Arnold de Villeneuve—Catherine de Medicis—Elixir Ratafia.
The word liqueur has been traced by Eichhoff to a Sanskrit root, viz., laks or lauc, to see, appear. It is now commonly understood of a drink obtained by distillation, a beverage of which alcohol is the base.
To the ancients liqueurs appear to have been unknown. The art of distillation on which they depend was not apparently discovered till the middle ages. Fermented wines, of which some description will be found in another part of this book, occupied their place at dinner and dessert. Old Falernian when mixed with honey probably bore some near resemblance to what is now understood by liqueur. But this drink was found to have such disastrous effects by way of intoxication that it was forbidden to women to drink of it.
Our ancestors, perhaps in imitation of the ancients, composed a sort of liqueur with the must of wine, in which they had infused berries of the lentiscus, or a portion of its tender wood. The artificial wines made either with this lentiscus, or with other aromatic herbs, called by Gregory of Tours vina odoramentis immixta, were the only approaches to the modern liqueurs, even some time after the discovery of the process of distillation.
Among these liqueur wines must be mentioned that species of cooked wine which was the result of a portion of must reduced to half or a third of its original bulk by boiling. The capitularies of Charlemagne speak of this drink as vinum coctum, and the southern provinces called it Sabe, from the Latin sapa, which with the Romans had the same signification. Both Galen and Hippocrates refer to a Greek composition called Siræum or Hepsema, which, says Pliny, we call sapa. The fashion in which this wine was cooked is shown in the Pitture antiche d’Ercolano, t. I., tab. 35.