Fake wine? Nothing new
Everybody’s shocked, shocked about what Rudi Kurwanian did, but faking wine is nothing new. Below is an extract from Cato the Elder (234 BC-149 BC), a Roman statesman, on how to fake Coan wine—a wine that should have been made from grapes grown on the island of Kos, but that, as Cato points out, can be fabricated using cheap Italian grapes. The addition of all the salt water was because Coan wine apparently was salty, perhaps like Manzanilla sherry.
“If you wish to make Coan wine (Cato says), take water from the deep sea on a calm and windless day, seventy days before the vintage, from a place where no fresh water can reach. When you have drawn it from the sea, pour it into a vat. Do not fill the vat, but leave an empty space of five amphorae [about 30 gallons]. Cover up the vat, but leave a space for the sea water to breathe. After thirty days, rack it off cleanly into another vat, leaving its sediment. After another twenty days, rack it again and leave it till the vintage.
“Leave the grapes from which you intend to make your Coan wine on the vines, and let them be thoroughly cooked and ripened. When it has rained and dried up again, pick them and expose them to the sun for two or three days out of doors if there is no rain, or if there is rain set them out on hurdles under cover, and pick off any moldy berries. Then pour ten amphorae of your sea water into a fifty-amphorae cask. Then remove the berries from the stalks and press them down into the cask with your hand until it is full, so that they may soak up the sea water. When you have filled the cask, close it, leaving a small space for the air to pass. After three days, take the grapes out of the cask, press them and store the wine in good, clean, dry casks.
“That it may have a good bouquet, do as follows: Take a pitched potsherd and put on it a glowing live coal, perfume it with various scents to be found at the perfumery, put it in a cask and cover it up, so that the fragrance may not escape before you put it in the wine. Do this the day before you rack your wine into the cask. Transfer your wine from the press to the cask as quickly as possible and leave it for fifteen days with a cover, leaving an air space, and then seal it up. Forty days later you will bottle it in amphorae, adding to each amphora a forty-eighth part of must boiled down to one half. Do not fill the amphora above the point where the handles start. Put your amphorae out in the sun in a place where there is no grass, cover them so that no moisture can get in, and do not leave them in the sun more than four days. Then remove them to the cellar.”
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So you see, counterfeiting wine is just about as old as wine itself.
By the way, speaking of the Ancients, when they described their wine, in their treatises and poems, they didn’t use the kind of language we do today, which is of comparatively recent derivation. (I mean the analogies to fruits and flowers, and talk of acidity and tannins and oak.) Our winespeak would have puzzled them, perhaps even appalled them, as hopelessly mean and barbarian. They saw wine as a gift of the gods, and when they wrote of it, they tried to grasp—sometimes with success—its essential mystery as well as its divine properties. They did not attempt to describe what wine tasted like (as we do) so much as what drinking it felt like (as we do not). Here, for example, is Bacchylides, a Greek poet who lived around the time of Socrates and Alexander the Great, on a certain wine:
“Sweet compulsion flowing from the wine warms the heart, and hope of Love returned, all mingled with the gifts of Dionysus darts through the brain, sending the thoughts of men to heights supreme. Straightway it overthrows the battlements of cities, and every man dreams that he is heir to a throne. With gold, yea, and ivory, his house is gleaming, and wheat-laden ships bring him from Egypt over the flashing sea, wealth beyond count. Thus does the drinker’s heart leap with fancies.”
Are we better off with “notes of blackberries and cherries”? Not really. But we’re stuck with it, for the time being.
STEVE! this is a remarkable contribution to wine literature, if not literature itself. Besides revealing that manipulating wine is nothing new, it tells us they had sorting tables , destemming, pressing, s form of cold soaking, no racking or pumping over. Natural wine! The purple prose is also traditional. Is there any ancient sommelier lit?
Dear Sir Redmond Barry:
Are you turning in your Australian grave over the news?
~~ Bob