On Apr 3, 3:44*pm, "James Silverton" >
wrote:
> *DaleW *wrote *on Sat, 3 Apr 2010 13:08:49 -0700 (PDT):
>
> > On Apr 2, 11:51 pm, Young Martle > wrote:
> >> If there was a Last Supper, what would the wine have been
> >> like?
>
> >> I apologize if this gets asked every year at this time. :-)
> >No real idea. My guess is that it is likely to have been offdry and
> >low alcohol, as I assume it was going off native yeasts, without temp
> >control, etc.
>
> Even high class Roman wines could not have been matured very well before
> the invention of the cork and I doubt that the seder wine for a not very
> wealthy bunch of Palestinians would have been very great.
>
> I'm no expert on wine history but I do wonder how Roman wines really
> tasted, even the Falernian they raved about. I'm told Roman taste in
> wine was not very sophisticated and they liked to mix it with honey and
> other things. Of course, they originally worried about drunkenness and
> would dilute it with water. Didn't Cicero sneer that Cataline was very
> self-indulgent in drinking wine mixed with less than 50% water?


Wine was well established in many regions of the world at that time,
and made in a few countries such as China from at least a few thousand
years BC. It sometimes was made from grapes and sometimes with other
fruit or other foods that could be fermented. Some liquid wine from
China that is several thousand years old has been found sealed in
bronze containers. It likely would be dangerous to taste wine sealed
in many bronzes this long, and the taste likely would now be awful.
The Greeks and Romans often sealed some of their better wines in
amphoras, and some still containing wine have been found in ancient
ships sunk at sea. Even until recently, and perhaps even now, a few
wines were sealed and aged in amphoras in Crete, among other places.
Sometimes the amphora was stored underground. For short term storage,
a layer of olive oil on top of the wine sometimes was used to help
protect the wine from oxygen in the air. The Egyptians often sealed
containers of wine in the tomb, but so far as I know, these containers
were all found dry. Thus at the BCE-AD transition, likely many types
of wines would be possible. Some might be made from grapes and some
from other fruits including dates. Some might contain added spices and
herbs. Some might be very sweet because they were fermented from
concentrated grape juice obtained by boiling off part of the water
from the grape juice. Some likely contained honey, added before or
after the wine was fermented. It has been speculated that the Romans
may have made a late harvest sweet wine in the manner that Yquem and
others are made today. The Romans sometimes heat treated amphoras of
their favorite wines and aged them for very many years - an early
version of Madeira? My guess is that ordinary people of the region
would drink the current vintage of one on the less expensive wines of
the region. They might add spices or herbs, honey, and some water if
the wine did not taste very good. However a king in the region might
drink something much better such as a wine mentioned in the Richard
Strauss opera Salome that is based on Oscar Wilde's Salome. Herod
asked Salome to drink with him a costly wine which Caesar himself had
sent to Herod.