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> Wine was a little syrupy and could have a high alcohol content compared with vintages today. This is tangential but is there any evidence for this claim? It’
by dpark 7y ago
> Wine was a little syrupy and could have a high alcohol content compared with vintages today.
This is tangential but is there any evidence for this claim? It’s my understanding that yeast simply will not grow beyond about 14-15% alcohol, no matter how much sugar you feed them, and this is what puts a cap on the alcohol content of “current vintages”.
I’ve always heard that older wines (and other fermentables) were lower alcohol and that even 14% is only feasible due to modern yeast strains.
- bumby 7y agoI believe part of the problem is that there were many variants that were all translated to the same English word "wine", at least from Biblical history. [0] My understanding was that these could have an equally varying range in alcohol content even though they all received the same translation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_in_the_Bible#Hebrew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_in_the_Bible#Hebrew
- dpark 7y agoBut if you can’t ferment past 15% at the absolute most and you cannot distill, then there might have been different alcohol levels in different “wines”, but none would actually be significantly (if at all) stronger than typical modern wines.
- bumby 7y agoI don't believe everything was strictly wine in the modern sense. Some were just "strong" or "intoxicating" drinks that were referred to as "wine" from a clunky translation
- dpark 7y agoUnless they were distilling alcohol it doesn’t really matter because they weren’t getting above about 15% for any “strong” drinks. Your Wikipedia link quotes a book stating that there is no evidence that alcohol was distilled in the ancient world. I don’t know how accurate that is, though.
- bumby 7y agoEarliest references I could find date back to brandy distillation around 1000, which is still a long time after Alexander the Great