Would wine from back in ancient times and civilizations have been dogshit compared to a basic marketable wine produced by modern viniculture?
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Is it hard to actually have low sugar dry wine?
wrote last edited by [email protected]No. Lots of sweet wines are fermented until dry. Then they add potassium metabisulfite to kill the yeast, then "back sweeten" the wine by adding sugar once the yeast is dead.
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What would have been a liberal estimate of the possible alcohol ABA or %? How much sugar would have been in it/L?
Even wine for Kings?
Toldinstone (classical history youtuber) has a great video on ancient Roman wine that talks about this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4rhT7EkTgu0
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No. Lots of sweet wines are fermented until dry. Then they add potassium metabisulfite to kill the yeast, then "back sweeten" the wine by adding sugar once the yeast is dead.
Such a waste of perfectly good wine
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What would have been a liberal estimate of the possible alcohol ABA or %? How much sugar would have been in it/L?
Even wine for Kings?
I don't know if I'd say "bad" but certainly different.
Today we have catalogs of different strains of yeast one can order to ferment beverages. Prior to that, people would just be leaving the liquid open to the air to pick up wild yeasts. Whether that led to something good or bad was a bit up to chance.
Same with the resulting ABV. Different yeasts will thrive to different alcohol levels. My first experiment making wine was with bread yeast I had on hand. It worked, and the wine was a hit with all who sampled it, but it was lower in alcohol and higher in residual sugar because that yeast has been cultivated for bread, not alcohol. The same starting juice with a modern dry red wine yeast results in just that.
Also some wines like sherry are made by doing things like heat cycling and introducing oxygen that are "bad" for typical wines.
During different periods, sweet wine was in fashion, so we can't really use that as a basis of quality, it's just the choice of the winemaker.
Wine was also made out of a wider variety of ingredients than with most commercial stuff today, so there are probably awesome herbal infused drinks lost to time or things that are still just regional items that most of us have never heard of.
As a big part of culture, our beverages will continue to evolve, and while some may prefer more of what we consider classic wines now may not hold true in the future. What we have today is just built in centuries of experimentation, which for me, is the fun and rewarding part of brewing.
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What would have been a liberal estimate of the possible alcohol ABA or %? How much sugar would have been in it/L?
Even wine for Kings?
Fun fact: Jacques Cousteau and his team once discovered a shipwreck with some intact jugs of 2000-year-old Roman wine. For whatever reason, they broke one open and drank some of it. They said it wasn't all that tasty at that point.
Except, after they had their party and were working on recovering the rest of the wreck, they realized that the intact one they'd found right at the beginning was the only one that had been intact. Literally the singular one. They searched extensively to try to find another, and couldn't.
Oops.
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I don't know if I'd say "bad" but certainly different.
Today we have catalogs of different strains of yeast one can order to ferment beverages. Prior to that, people would just be leaving the liquid open to the air to pick up wild yeasts. Whether that led to something good or bad was a bit up to chance.
Same with the resulting ABV. Different yeasts will thrive to different alcohol levels. My first experiment making wine was with bread yeast I had on hand. It worked, and the wine was a hit with all who sampled it, but it was lower in alcohol and higher in residual sugar because that yeast has been cultivated for bread, not alcohol. The same starting juice with a modern dry red wine yeast results in just that.
Also some wines like sherry are made by doing things like heat cycling and introducing oxygen that are "bad" for typical wines.
During different periods, sweet wine was in fashion, so we can't really use that as a basis of quality, it's just the choice of the winemaker.
Wine was also made out of a wider variety of ingredients than with most commercial stuff today, so there are probably awesome herbal infused drinks lost to time or things that are still just regional items that most of us have never heard of.
As a big part of culture, our beverages will continue to evolve, and while some may prefer more of what we consider classic wines now may not hold true in the future. What we have today is just built in centuries of experimentation, which for me, is the fun and rewarding part of brewing.
You can buy wild-fermented wines today as well, although you'll usually have to go to a fairly good specialist shop for it in my experience. They've got a very distinct but interesting and pleasant sourness, much like sourdough bread. I imagine that all of the other changes and improvements in processes and ingredients still means it's very different to ancient wine, but it's potentially a good way to get an idea for what that aspect of it can do
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What would have been a liberal estimate of the possible alcohol ABA or %? How much sugar would have been in it/L?
Even wine for Kings?
I worked with a guy who graduated with a history degree. l remember talking about wine and what it might have been like before modern times.
His main point was that people in ancient times would think we're lush fools. Nobody would drink pure wine. It would have been watered down. Also the majority of modern wine is aged in oak barrels that usually get used for bourbon before being used for wine. so ancient people wouldn't recognize the modern wine
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What would have been a liberal estimate of the possible alcohol ABA or %? How much sugar would have been in it/L?
Even wine for Kings?
wrote last edited by [email protected]My neighbour buys grapes, presses them (not trampling), and puts them into demijohns with an airlock. He adds nothing. It ferments using yeast on the grapes over several months. Over the course of a year, he decants from one demijohn to the next, which clarifies yeast, then he bottles and lets it rest some more. It’s in a cool part of the house, about 14-18C.
It’s very tasty wine, but doesn’t have any oak overtones or adjuncts (whether lead or vanillin or whatever else is added), it’s not blended, and it’s moderate abv (around 10%).
This process requires very little in terms of specific materials other than the glass instead of clay. Clay vessels, being porous, would alter the flavour and would harbour yeasties and other microorganisms. But even accounting for that, I don’t think there’s any basis to say ancient wine would be dogshit. It may be different, accounting for taste, but not bad. (Consider the popularity of sour beers (kettle sours or otherwise) and hazy beers. Both of those were considered highly undesirable properties of beer for most of the 20th century - so tastes change. )
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What would have been a liberal estimate of the possible alcohol ABA or %? How much sugar would have been in it/L?
Even wine for Kings?
The 1287 Chateau de'Champignon has a lot of flavor, you can really taste the feet.
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How so? The ancients literally added lead sugar to wine because they wanted it sweeter.
If anything, I’d suspect modern winemaking techniques make it easier to produce dry wines that are palatable.
We consume more sugar daily than they did.
I think we require more sugar to obtain the same perceived level of sweetness, but that's just a theory.
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My neighbour buys grapes, presses them (not trampling), and puts them into demijohns with an airlock. He adds nothing. It ferments using yeast on the grapes over several months. Over the course of a year, he decants from one demijohn to the next, which clarifies yeast, then he bottles and lets it rest some more. It’s in a cool part of the house, about 14-18C.
It’s very tasty wine, but doesn’t have any oak overtones or adjuncts (whether lead or vanillin or whatever else is added), it’s not blended, and it’s moderate abv (around 10%).
This process requires very little in terms of specific materials other than the glass instead of clay. Clay vessels, being porous, would alter the flavour and would harbour yeasties and other microorganisms. But even accounting for that, I don’t think there’s any basis to say ancient wine would be dogshit. It may be different, accounting for taste, but not bad. (Consider the popularity of sour beers (kettle sours or otherwise) and hazy beers. Both of those were considered highly undesirable properties of beer for most of the 20th century - so tastes change. )
Clay vessels, being porous, would alter the flavour and would harbour yeasties and other microorganisms.
There's a winery in Sonoma called the "Jacuzzi Family Vineyards" (yes, that Jacuzzi) that does fermenting in amphora jars for their Clarum. It is just about my favorite wine. Very light and minerally, perfect for a hot day. At $50/btl, its not cheap. But I like to set aside a bottle or two for special events.
If ancient wine is anything like that, they've got nothing to complain about.
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Such a waste of perfectly good wine
Back sweetening doesn't have to be to make it super sweet. Sometimes wine will ferment very dry and is beyond as dry as what you wanted. Other than adding straight sugar, more unfermented juice can also be added to enhance the flavor to either just make it sweeter or to add some of the non-fermented flavor back in that is lost. You can also have wine that produced a higher ABV than was desired, and adding water or juice can dilute it down.
Blending and balancing wine is really the hard part of making wine, especially if you're after a consistent product. Different pieces of fruit have different sugar levels and different yeast does more or less than you intend it to do, so the good wine makers can nudge that end product into what they actually wanted without ruining it.
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Back sweetening doesn't have to be to make it super sweet. Sometimes wine will ferment very dry and is beyond as dry as what you wanted. Other than adding straight sugar, more unfermented juice can also be added to enhance the flavor to either just make it sweeter or to add some of the non-fermented flavor back in that is lost. You can also have wine that produced a higher ABV than was desired, and adding water or juice can dilute it down.
Blending and balancing wine is really the hard part of making wine, especially if you're after a consistent product. Different pieces of fruit have different sugar levels and different yeast does more or less than you intend it to do, so the good wine makers can nudge that end product into what they actually wanted without ruining it.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I wonder if Tropicana was based on this with their "flavor paks"
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I've had some wild beers, but I don't know if I've had wild wine. Sourdough is a good comparison, because those are the same wild yeasts you'd get for brewing that you'd get if you made your own starter.
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I wonder if Tropicana was based on this with their "flavor paks"
That sounds like the same principle to me. They need it to taste fresh and orangey and just like last year's Tropicana even if it was the best or worst year ever for growing oranges or customers are gonna be upset. Can't buy from one farm this year and need to buy from one in a totally different place where the oranges might be another variety or just have a different flavor from different soil? Give it a nudge back toward that brand flavor profile. That consistency is what people like about name brands especially.
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What would have been a liberal estimate of the possible alcohol ABA or %? How much sugar would have been in it/L?
Even wine for Kings?
Dogshit? No. Different? Definitely. The wild yeasts on the skin weren't cultivated for alcohol tolerance, so ancient wines would tend to have a lower ABV. They might have some sourness from bacteria found on the skin along with the yeast. Whether or not they'd be sweet or dry would depend on the yeasts and the grapes themselves. There would be a lot of variability from year to year. The Romans, for one, preferred sweeter wines and would add grape syrup, defrutum, made from boiling down grape juice, if the wine was dry. Other cultures might do something similar or just grin and bear it. There was a lot of variety across time and place.
It should be noted that the Romans would sometimes use lead vessels for making defrutum. This would add lead acetate to the syrup, which has a sweet taste, and make it even sweeter.
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What would have been a liberal estimate of the possible alcohol ABA or %? How much sugar would have been in it/L?
Even wine for Kings?
I think I heard once that Romans mixed wine with salted water. So taht could be a bit of an aquired taste. Or a banger alcoholic soy sauce…
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What would have been a liberal estimate of the possible alcohol ABA or %? How much sugar would have been in it/L?
Even wine for Kings?
I know there was a more common everyday wine with pretty low alcohol content and not much to any sweetness. Alcohol was a good way to ensure clean drinking water and naturally keeps out a lot of bad bacteria. That’s why drinking wine is way more common in the Bible AFAIK
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What would have been a liberal estimate of the possible alcohol ABA or %? How much sugar would have been in it/L?
Even wine for Kings?
I've made wine (and a lot of beer). It's not hard, and people have been doing it for ages, but creating a good, consistent product does rely on chemistry/biology knowledge that they wouldn't have had back then.
I suspect that a lot of the mystique around wine (like the idea that terroir is magic) is just down to the fact that a few hundred years ago, most wine/beer was trash, and the only stuff we'd consider "good" by modern standards is just down to luck that a batch didn't get infected with the wrong yeast/bacteria, or exposed to too much oxygen, or a style that is meant to be drunk young (vinho verde) or oxidized (sherry).
There's probably good reason that much of the wine that was aged/transported long distance a couple hundred years ago was fortified (Madeira, Port, sherry, vermouth, etc.).
Millenia of selective breeding have changed grapes, too. Without knowing for certain, my guess would be that on average, the sugar concentration in the raw grape juice would be roughly the same as now, but relying on wild yeasts or polycultures would not ferment as completely, so the final product would have lower ABV and higher sugar.
In beer, the actual grain and malting technology has greatly changed over time. 150 years ago, German immigrants to America couldn't brew the lighter styles they were used to because American grain was much higher in protein so they had to dilute it with corn/rice. Older grain had a higher propensity for certain defects, too. Basically you had more inconsistency back in the day, and also just some things that were different.
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I worked with a guy who graduated with a history degree. l remember talking about wine and what it might have been like before modern times.
His main point was that people in ancient times would think we're lush fools. Nobody would drink pure wine. It would have been watered down. Also the majority of modern wine is aged in oak barrels that usually get used for bourbon before being used for wine. so ancient people wouldn't recognize the modern wine
That's not true. The majority of wine is aged in standard oak barrels. Bourbon barrel-aged wine is a modern gimmick which is not at all common in the classic wine growing regions.
