A teetotaling Christian (trying to convince of the validity of his lifestyle) once told me that modern winemaking techniques are designed to make the wine more potent, alcohol-wise, than ancient wine, and that the wine that Jesus & Co. drank would have been basically indistinguishable from grape juice due to the very low alcohol content.
I’m not buying it. Has anyone been able to make wine by replicating 1st-century (or earlier) Roman winemaking methods? How was it? What was the alcohol content?
Ditto for 6th century mead: is modern mead stronger or otherwise a different product from ancient mead?
How about ancient ale, ancient beer, etc.? How different are modern alchohol-making methods from their ancient counterparts? Do they produce completely different end products? Do modern methods yield higher alcohol content?
Obviously ancient wine had to have a good bit of alcohol in it, otherwise it would have gone bad. They didn’t have refrigeration, pasteurization, and shelf-stable bottles of juice. Fermentation is a preservation method.
It takes a lot more work to produce wine than to produce grape juice. So why would overworked ancients have done that extra work, unless the wine provided a significantly better ‘kick’ than grape juice? It doesn’t make sense.
And I don’t think winemaking technology has changed significantly since ancient days. The basic process is the same, they just have automation, bottling operations, etc. to produce more volume.
Unless you are using chemicals to stop fermentation, or are fortifying the wine, the limiting factors on alcohol levels in wine are the amount of sugar in the grape juice, and the alcohol tolerance of the yeast. In other words, basic wine making means fermanting until either there is no more sugar left to convert, or until the alcohol content is high enough to kill off the yeast.
I have no actual data for this, but I can well imagine that today’s grapes have been breed and are raise to have more sugar in them. I know that there are yeasts out there that have been breed to a higher alcohol tolerance. But even with those 2 things, my WAG would be that the difference is on the scale of old 10% alcohol vs modern 14% alcohol. (Not real data, just my guess on ranges.)
Modern wine is mostly stronger than it was a few years ago. About 50 years ago it might have averaged around 10% and now it’s more likely 12%.
I don’t know about Jews but Greeks and Romans drank their wine with water mixed in. Drinking unmixed wine was considered boorish and they nicknamed Tiberius Claudius Nero (the Emperor Tiberius) Biberius Caldius Mero meaning something like Drunken unmixed wine boozer.
That suggests to me that it was probably a lot stronger than in modern times. You wouldn’t water a beer strength down. It lasted a long time as well and that usually implies strength. Just before the last century a fungus epidemic wiped most European vine stock out and they were replaced with grafts on resistant Californian stock. The odd thing is that this produced wines with a much shorter life. In the 19th century nobody would think to touch a wine less than five or ten years old. We know that the Romans had some kind of distillation because they also produced fortified wines.
Mead is a different matter because it can be made as a wine or as a beer with enormous differences in strength. Hrothgar probably drank the beer sort because ot only takes a couple of weeks and he wanted quantity, not quality.
It certainly seems an odd interpretation. It implies that guests enjoying getting drunk at weddings is a recent tradition, and that everyone was jazzed when they busted out the quality grape juice instead of mere booze.
What’s more, the steward at the feast commented on how the wine Jesus made was the good stuff, which in context means unusually strong. The usual practice was to serve the good stuff first to get the guests drunk enough that they couldn’t tell the difference, and then to switch over to the cheap swill.
The only argument I think your teetotaling friend could make is that wine was very often diluted. In fact, that seems to be exactly what’s implied by the Biblical passage; the guests praise the high quality of the wine when the expectation is that lower quality or more-diluted wine would normally be served at that point in the event when the guests’ senses are dulled. The Bible talks about being drunk on wine at several points (and, if I remember right, never mentions beer in relation to drunkenness).
If I recall correctly, Roman sources say they often used a dilution of 1 part wine to 5 parts water for everyday purposes.
I don’t know as much about mead, but had a friend from the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) who made his own mead according to methods he felt were authentic. Tasted like a lot of modern mead, but not as sweet and much better.
Beer brewing has changed mostly in relation to flavorants. Hops are the choice today, but medieval brewers typically used other herbs for a similar purpose in terms of making the flavor more complex and balanced. Brewers in the last few hundred years have tended to use special lineages of yeast strains (this is one distinction between lagers and ales), whereas older beers often used whatever wild yeast blew into the mixture. I don’t know of any historical differences in alcohol content, but it’s worth pointing out that the big American “beers” can have as little as 2-3% alcohol, whereas most real beers seem to average more like 4-5%. I suspect that the mass-market beers probably have lower alcohol content than the ancient varieties, but it was also common to water down beer.
There are many references in scriptures in new and old testament about getting drunk, including Lot’s 2 daughters who got their father so drunk they were able to impregnate themselves by him without him knowing.
No, it doesn’t take more work. You crush the grapes, the juice comes out, you pour the juice into barrels/amphorae, and then you wait. The wild yeasts on the skins of the grapes will ferment the sugars in the juice and in a month you’ve got wine.
The only way to prevent grape juice from turning into wine is to pasteurize it, or drink it right away. And since pasteurization was invented by Louis Pasteur and not the ancient Israelites, the grape juice theory is completely and utterly ludicrous.
I had a fundie ask me if Jesus drank wine or grape juice. I knew he had a stock answer standing by. So I answered his question with a question…
It depends. Do you believe Jesus walked the earth before or after 1869?
“The method of pasteurizing grape juice to halt the fermentation has been attributed to an American physician and dentist, Thomas Bramwell Welch in 1869. A strong supporter of the temperance movement, he produced a non-alcoholic wine to be used for church services in his hometown of Vineland, New Jersey.”
That stopped him cold.
And if you read the book “History of the World in 6 Drinks” you’ll see that the earliest wine had an alcohol content and often was safer to drink than the water.
This is correct. It’s harder to preserve grape juice as juice than it is to let it turn into wine (and this would especially have been the case in biblical times, where there were fewer options for preservation than today)
If you press the juice, then do nothing, you get one of the following:
Wine
Vinegar
Some kind of undrinkable rotten filth.
As others have already said, it’s an absurd argument anyway - because many of the passages that mention wine also mention drunkenness.
Disregarding the alcohol content issue, would the wine drank by Caesar/Jesus/Whomever tasted much different from modern wine? My guess is: absolutely; it would be less complex and probably much sweeter.
Why would you necessarily guess sweeter? Is the assumption that they drank it much earlier (before the yeast had a chance to completely ferment all the sugar out)? If it was sweeter, then it’s probably safe to assume the alcohol content was lower, as well.
You’ll run into this a lot with those fundamentalist Christian sects who believe that all consumption of alcohol is sinful. There is no basis whatsoever, scriptural or otherwise, for this belief, and the contemporary literature, including the Bible and other sources contemporary and older, is full of references to drunkeness, indicating that wine did in fact have enough alcohol to get people pretty damn drunk.
I mean, haven’t they heard of Bacchus/Dionysus? Do they really think anyone would have worshipped a god of grape juice?
Most of the wine would have been rough tablewine. Different areas produced different wines, some sweet, some dry. But the wine produced in a particular region would be all very much the same because farmers would all be growing the same varieties in the same climate and using the same techniques. Of course in Hellenic or Roman times anything that could be loaded onto a ship might be traded across the Mediterranean, it might be cheaper to import wine from Spain if it could travel by ship than it would be to import from the next village, if it had to travel by wagon.
Note that modern American ideas of wine as something sophisticated and snooty would be incomprehensible to ancient Mediterranean people. Wine was food, something drunk at every meal except by barbarians who had to make do with crap like beer. Bread and wine were symbolic because they were the literal daily food of the common people.