Drinking In Your World:
Avoiding Alcohol Abuse For Writers (Continued)
Of course, all this is long before the Middle Ages; I've started out back in the multiple-thousand B.C.E. range to get a feel for where everything began. Closer to the zero-point of our modern calender, wine had made a significant appearance on the scene: a popular Persian myth regarding wine involves a distraught young harem girl who seized upon a jar of "rotted" grapes as a poison with which to end her misery; instead she passed out and woke up happy and refreshed. (Not likely, as anyone who has ever suffered through a wine hangover can tell you; but it makes for a good apocryphal story all the same.) This also went through a refining process as people discovered the concept of filtering.
Beer and wine both spoiled quickly, especially in hot climates; hops, which act as a preservative, may have been used by the early Mesopotamians, but the developing European beer industry did not really begin using hops in beer until around the 1400s. A mixture of spices called grut, which included leaves of bog myrtle or sweet gale, was more commonly used as a preservative instead. To preserve wine, a candle whose wick or body was primarily sulfur was burned in the empty barrel prior to the wine being decanted into it; before sulfur, resin or pitch were used, which must have given wine a really odd flavor.
In a fictional medieval world, then, beer and wine should commonly be sour and quick to spoil (corks were also invented much closer to modern times), and flavored with a wide range of ingredients; even used as a base to deliver unpleasant-tasting medicinal herbs.
Why did people drink beer and wine, if they tasted so nasty? Because it was safer than drinking water. Beer also helped with nutrition; the first beers weren't as high in alcohol as our modern versions, but they did retain a lot more yeast in the liquid, which added protein and vitamins to the drinker's diet, resulting in healthier people overall. Wine was a status symbol; much more expensive to produce than beer, what it tasted like didn't matter as much as the fact that one could afford to serve it in the first place. Beer has always been the beverage of the "common folk", wine the preference of higher social classes, because of the ease of growing barley, oats, wheat, rye, or corn for beer versus the challenges of growing grapes for wine.
Both beer and wine, in our world, were heavily developed and refined by monasteries. Much of the steady increase in quality over the centuries can be laid directly at their doors. A fictional culture without monasteries needs an alternate group dedicated to creating the highest quality out of simple ingredients, unless the writer wants his or her characters to eternally suffer in sour misery under inferior beverages.
By the time the Middle Ages rolled around, beer and wine were major economic items for many countries. Many monasteries supported themselves by producing and selling their own wine and beer; land was claimed for vineyards more often than for food crops in many areas. A bad war or weather change that wiped out a slew of vineyards could destroy the economy of that area for years; one city actually surrendered to invaders to protect their harvest (to find out which city and what war, check out "The Story of Wine," by Hugh Johnson).
Wine and beer have had a tremendous impact on humanity throughout history. Treating them as a respected and vital ingredient in a fictional world's development adds depth and believability to that world, and can easily provide multiple story lines as well: that city which surrendered rather than lose its crop of wine grapes might secretly plan to rebel and crush the invaders from within. Fictional monasteries could set up a Monk's Beer-Tasting Day to determine the best brewers in the land; what if someone gets poisoned at such an event? An innovative alchemist might discover distilled liquors centuries before our world did; what impact would the introduction of hard liquor have on a fictional medieval world?
The possibilities are endless, and I hope I've gotten you excited about trying out some new notions in your world-building sessions. The next segment of this article will more closely examine the economic history of alcohol and how to use that to bolster development of your fictional world.
Some suggested resources for further reading on this topic in the meanwhile:
"The Story of Wine--New Illustrated Edition", Hugh Johnson (Mitchell Beazley/Octopus Publishing Group, 2004)
"A History of the World in 6 Glasses", by Tom Standage (Walker & Company, 2005)
"Life in a Medieval Castle", Joseph and Frances Gies (Harper & Row, 1974)
"Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, Vol. 1: Acceptance to Food Politics", Scribner Library of Daily Life, Solomon H. Katz and Willaim Woys Weaver, Eds. (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003)
Back to the beginning . . . .
Avoiding Alcohol Abuse For Writers (Continued)
Of course, all this is long before the Middle Ages; I've started out back in the multiple-thousand B.C.E. range to get a feel for where everything began. Closer to the zero-point of our modern calender, wine had made a significant appearance on the scene: a popular Persian myth regarding wine involves a distraught young harem girl who seized upon a jar of "rotted" grapes as a poison with which to end her misery; instead she passed out and woke up happy and refreshed. (Not likely, as anyone who has ever suffered through a wine hangover can tell you; but it makes for a good apocryphal story all the same.) This also went through a refining process as people discovered the concept of filtering.
Beer and wine both spoiled quickly, especially in hot climates; hops, which act as a preservative, may have been used by the early Mesopotamians, but the developing European beer industry did not really begin using hops in beer until around the 1400s. A mixture of spices called grut, which included leaves of bog myrtle or sweet gale, was more commonly used as a preservative instead. To preserve wine, a candle whose wick or body was primarily sulfur was burned in the empty barrel prior to the wine being decanted into it; before sulfur, resin or pitch were used, which must have given wine a really odd flavor.
In a fictional medieval world, then, beer and wine should commonly be sour and quick to spoil (corks were also invented much closer to modern times), and flavored with a wide range of ingredients; even used as a base to deliver unpleasant-tasting medicinal herbs.
Why did people drink beer and wine, if they tasted so nasty? Because it was safer than drinking water. Beer also helped with nutrition; the first beers weren't as high in alcohol as our modern versions, but they did retain a lot more yeast in the liquid, which added protein and vitamins to the drinker's diet, resulting in healthier people overall. Wine was a status symbol; much more expensive to produce than beer, what it tasted like didn't matter as much as the fact that one could afford to serve it in the first place. Beer has always been the beverage of the "common folk", wine the preference of higher social classes, because of the ease of growing barley, oats, wheat, rye, or corn for beer versus the challenges of growing grapes for wine.
Both beer and wine, in our world, were heavily developed and refined by monasteries. Much of the steady increase in quality over the centuries can be laid directly at their doors. A fictional culture without monasteries needs an alternate group dedicated to creating the highest quality out of simple ingredients, unless the writer wants his or her characters to eternally suffer in sour misery under inferior beverages.
By the time the Middle Ages rolled around, beer and wine were major economic items for many countries. Many monasteries supported themselves by producing and selling their own wine and beer; land was claimed for vineyards more often than for food crops in many areas. A bad war or weather change that wiped out a slew of vineyards could destroy the economy of that area for years; one city actually surrendered to invaders to protect their harvest (to find out which city and what war, check out "The Story of Wine," by Hugh Johnson).
Wine and beer have had a tremendous impact on humanity throughout history. Treating them as a respected and vital ingredient in a fictional world's development adds depth and believability to that world, and can easily provide multiple story lines as well: that city which surrendered rather than lose its crop of wine grapes might secretly plan to rebel and crush the invaders from within. Fictional monasteries could set up a Monk's Beer-Tasting Day to determine the best brewers in the land; what if someone gets poisoned at such an event? An innovative alchemist might discover distilled liquors centuries before our world did; what impact would the introduction of hard liquor have on a fictional medieval world?
The possibilities are endless, and I hope I've gotten you excited about trying out some new notions in your world-building sessions. The next segment of this article will more closely examine the economic history of alcohol and how to use that to bolster development of your fictional world.
Some suggested resources for further reading on this topic in the meanwhile:
"The Story of Wine--New Illustrated Edition", Hugh Johnson (Mitchell Beazley/Octopus Publishing Group, 2004)
"A History of the World in 6 Glasses", by Tom Standage (Walker & Company, 2005)
"Life in a Medieval Castle", Joseph and Frances Gies (Harper & Row, 1974)
"Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, Vol. 1: Acceptance to Food Politics", Scribner Library of Daily Life, Solomon H. Katz and Willaim Woys Weaver, Eds. (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003)
Back to the beginning . . . .
copyright 2009 Leona Wisoker
Leona may be contacted by email at the following address:
leona at leonawisoker dot com (no spaces, of course)
leona at leonawisoker dot com (no spaces, of course)
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