Ancient wine was very high in alcol: reality or myth?

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I think your reasoning is sound.

"Ancient" is a very broad term, and I feel pretty safe in saying the wine will have been of various strengths. But, yes, people often seem to think that the wine was strong. A contemporary wrote about a wine being strong enough to catch fire, and the amount needed to get drunk was also discussed. But we will never get alcohol statistics from what remains of historical records.

The alcohol content of wine is dependant on the percent of fermentable sugar in the grape, nothing else. Any wine with more than about 13-13.5% alcohol has been fortified in some way.

Current wines are higher in alcohol than wines 30 years ago, by 1-1.5%. I think that's secondary to global warning.

Kent

"Kent" wrote ..........

Hmmm - a couple rather simplistic generalisations???

Could not sugar "not from within the grape" but added prior to fermentation (chaptalisation) affect eventual alcohol levels?

And if fermentation was halted (by dropping the temperature of the must) so that the final product indeed had significant levels of residual sugar and lower alcohol levels, would not the more correct statement be "The alcohol content of wine is dependant on the percent of fermented sugar"?????????

Again, an erroneous statement - some grape varieties (Zinfandel to name one) will reach alcohol levels way in excess of 13.5% (16% is not unheard of) without being fortified???

More probably riper grapes through differing viticultural techniques.

I have seen 16 in Bandol no problem

Agreed, plus the old race to have the highest octane. Anyhow in Provence if you get a wine under 14 you are either cheating or making crap wine. Even more so in Cali.

Cooler climates... ?

As others have explained, 'tain't so simple, Kent. The amount of alcohol you get out depends also on the strain of yeast you use. While

14% ABV is pretty much the limit for your average s. cerevisiae, strains have been isolated that can ferment as high as 17% (and many of those are marketed to winemakers in CA who want to ferment high sugar musts to dryness). In regions like the South of France, wines were exceeding 14% even back in the mid-20th Century.

Mark Lipton

Very interesting! I don't believe there is a wine yeast that can produce more than 16-18% alcohol. Even if the ancient Greeks and Romans had such yeasts they would have to wait for the first millennium alchemists who invented distillation to achieve higher alcohol concentrations. Was the inventor not one Miriam of Alexandria whose name is preserved in the French name for a water bath: "Bain Marie"?

The classical Greeks and Romans tended to dilute their wines with water and probably drank them at beer levels: 4-6%. It might also have been an attempt to reduce the excessive sugar and other contaminants like pine resin even if the Greeks today like Retsina. Wine does not seem to have been drunk neat in classical times. Cicero goes on at length about the iniquity of Cataline diluting his wine to something like 2:1 unlike civilized people who used 1:2.

Il 17/05/2011 22:21, cwdjrxyz ha scritto:

Very true. In these guys had an alcohol-meter it would be so easy ;)

I've read about the discovery of distillation in arab countries around VII century, the same century of Mohammed. Then it got to Europe many centuries after, like 15th or 16th century. Then, when we europesna started mastering distillation techniques, we never stopped, LOL

Exactly.

"everyday" is the word here. It looks like the romans used to have 2 kinds of wine: the aged wines (in amphoras) and the fresh wines (straigth from the fermentation vat, maybe after some time has passed).

This is totally new to me. How were these wines aged? Taling about containers, as you may think too.

This makes sense, and a lot of it.

I don't know when the production of tokaji essencia started, maybe some centuries later? Anyway, I love tokaji essencia

Il 19/05/2011 08:59, cwdjrxyz ha scritto:

Neat! Iced water goes on top of alcohol so that you can take away the iced part thus reducing the water parecentage, thus increasing the alcohol percentage? That sounds easy and sound.

Somehow, I don't think that was a technique much used in Egypt!