Renaissance Wine

Compared to our European ancestors, we’re drinking some pretty nice wine.

In yet another very interesting podcast, Napa Valley Wine Radio’s Nancy Hawks Miller interviewed Diane De Filipi, owner of “Let’s Go Cook Italian”, about wine and food of the Renaissance.

The wine of the 1400’s seems to have been universally bad enough that it was a common practice to add cinnamon and honey to provide some flavor.

While the grapes may have been potentially very good, faulty long-term storage made wines worse rather than better.

Since the wine couldn’t age, the smoothest, least tannic new wine that first flowed out of the fermentation vats (“free run”) was what our wealthiest ancestors drank.

The poor drank the left-over wine that was pressed from the fermented skins, while the poorest soaked those skins in water to get a tiny bit of alcohol.

Sulfur additions were just starting to be allowed in Germany to protect the wine from bad microorganisms. And the first “Ports” were being made by adding extra alcohol simply to kill off more bad bacteria and yeast so the wine could be exported.

Quality improved tremendously once wine was stored in early versions of the glass bottles we now take for granted.