A History of the World in 6 Glasses

by Tom Standage

  Wine also provides the greatest scope for connoisseurship and social differentiation. Appreciation of wines from different places began with the Greeks, and the link between the type of wine and the social status of the drinker was strengthened by the Romans. The symposion and convivium live on in the modern suburban dinner party, where wine fuels an almost ritual discussion of certain topics (politics, business, career advancement, house prices) in a slightly formal atmosphere with particular rules about the order in which food is consumed, the placement of cutlery, and so on. The host is responsible for the choice of wine, and the selection is expected to reflect the importance of the occasion and the social standing of both the host and his guests. It is a scene that a time-traveling Roman would recognize at once.

  SPIRITS in the

  COLONIAL PERIOD

  5

  High Spirits, High Seas

  One can distill wine using a water-bath, and it comes out like rosewater in color.

  —Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Sabbah al-Kindi, Arab scientist and philosopher (c. 801-73 CE), in The Book of the Chemistry of Perfume and Distillations

  A Gift from the Arabs

  AT THE CLOSE of the first millennium AD, the greatest and most cultured city in western Europe was not Rome, Paris, or London. It was Cordoba, the capital of Arab Andalusia, in what is now southern Spain. There were parks, palaces, paved roads, oil lamps to light the streets, seven hundred mosques, three hundred public baths, and extensive drainage and sewage systems. Perhaps most impressive of all was the public library, completed around 970 CE and containing nearly half a million books—more books than any other European library, or indeed most European countries. And it was merely the largest of seventy libraries in the city. No wonder Hroswitha, a tenth-century German chronicler, described Cordoba as "the jewel of the world."

  Cordoba was only one of the great centers of learning within the Arab world, a vast dominion that stretched at its height from the Pyrenees in France to the Pamir Mountains in central Asia, and as far south as the Indus Valley in India. At a time when the wisdom of the Greeks had been lost in most of Europe, Arab scholars in Cordoba, Damascus, and Baghdad were building on knowledge from Greek, Indian, and Persian sources to make further advances in such fields as astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy. They developed the astrolabe, algebra, and the modern numeral system, pioneered the use of herbs as anesthetics, and devised new navigational techniques based on the magnetic compass (an introduction from China), trigonometry, and nautical maps. Among their many achievements, they also refined and popularized a technique that gave rise to a new range of drinks: distillation.

  This process, which involves vaporizing and then recondens-ing a liquid in order to separate and purify its constituent parts, has ancient origins. Simple distillation equipment dating back to the fourth millennium BCE has been found in northern Mesopotamia, where, judging from later cuneiform inscriptions, it was used to make perfumes. The Greeks and Romans were also familiar with the technique; Aristotle, for example, noted that the vapor condensed from boiling salt water was not salty. But it was only later, starting in the Arab world, that distillation was routinely applied to wine, notably by the eighth-century Arab scholar Jabir ibn Hayyan, who is remembered as one of the fathers of chemistry. He devised an improved form of distillation apparatus, or still, with which he and other Arab al chemists distilled wine and other substances for use in their experiments.

  Distilling wine makes it much stronger, because the boiling point of alcohol (seventy-eight degrees centigrade) is lower than that of water (one hundred degrees centigrade). As the wine is slowly heated, vapor begins to rise from its surface long before the liquid starts to boil. Due to alcohol's lower boiling point, this vapor contains proportionately more alcohol and less water than the original liquid. Drawing off and condensing this alcohol-rich vapor produces a liquid with a far higher alcohol content than wine, though it is far from being pure alcohol, since some water and other impurities evaporate even at temperatures below one hundred degrees. However, the alcohol content can be increased by repeated redistillation, also known as rectification.

  Knowledge of distillation was one of many aspects of the ancient wisdom that was preserved and extended by Arab scholars and, having been translated from Arabic into Latin, helped to rekindle the spirit of learning in western Europe. The word alembic, which refers to a type of still, encapsulates this combination of ancient knowledge and Arab innovation. It is derived from the Arabic al-ambiq, descended in turn from the Greek word ambix, which refers to the specially shaped vase used in distillation. Similarly, the modern word alcohol illuminates the origins of distilled alcoholic drinks in the laboratories of Arab alchemists. It is descended from al-koh'l, the name given to the black powder of purified antimony, which was used as a cosmetic, to paint or stain the eyelids. The term was used more generally by alchemists to refer to other highly purified substances, including liquids, so that distilled wine later came to be known in English as "alcohol of wine."

  Distillation equipment in a medieval laboratory. The production of spirits began as an obscure alchemical technique known only to a select few.

  From their obscure origins in alchemical laboratories, the new drinks made possible by distillation became dominant during the Age of Exploration, as seafaring European explorers established colonies and then empires around the world. Distilled drinks provided a durable and compact form of alcohol for transport on board ship and found a range of other uses. These drinks became economic goods of such significance that their taxation and control became matters of great political importance and helped to determine the course of history. The abstemious Arab scholars who first distilled wine regarded the result as alchemical ingredients or a medicine, rather than an everyday drink. Only when knowledge of distillation spread into Christian Europe did distilled spirits become more widely consumed.

  A Miracle Cure?

  On a winter night in 1386 the royal doctors were summoned to the bedchamber of Charles II of Navarre, the ruler of a small kingdom in what is now northern Spain. The king was known as "Charles the Bad," a nickname he earned early in his reign when he suppressed a revolt with particular cruelty and ferocity. His favorite pastime was plotting against his father-in-law, the king of France. Now, after a night of debauchery, Charles had been struck down by fever and paralysis. His doctors decided to administer a medicine reputed to have miraculous healing powers, and made using an almost magical process: the distillation of wine.

  One of the first Europeans to experiment with this novel process was the twelfth-century Italian alchemist Michael Saler-nus, who learned of it from Arab texts. "A mixture of pure and very strong wine with three parts salt, distilled in the usual vessel, produces a liquid which will flame up when set on fire," he wrote. Evidently, this process was known only to a select few at the time, since Salernus wrote several of the key words of this sentence (including wine and salt) in secret code. Since distilled wine could be set on fire, it was called aqua ardens, which means "burning water."

  Of course, burning also described the unpleasant sensation produced in the throat after swallowing distilled wine. Yet those who tried drinking small quantities of aqua ardens found that this initial discomfort, sometimes disguised using herbs, was far outweighed by the sensation of invigoration and well-being that swiftly followed. Wine was widely used as a medicine, so it seemed only logical that concentrated and purified wine should have even greater healing powers. By the late thirteenth century, as universities and medical schools were flowering throughout Europe, distilled wine was being acclaimed in Latin medical treatises as a miraculous new medicine, aqua vitae, or "water of life."

  One firm believer in the therapeutic power of distilled wine was Arnald of Villanova, a professor at the French medical school of Montpellier, who produced instructions for distilling wine around 1300. "The true water of life will come over in precious drops, which, being rectified by three or four successive distillations, wi
ll afford the wonderful quintessence of wine," he wrote. "We call it aqua vitae, and this name is remarkably suitable, since it is really a water of immortality. It prolongs life, clears away ill-humors, revives the heart, and maintains youth."

  Aqua vitae seemed supernatural, and in a sense it was, for distilled wine has a far higher alcohol content than any drink that can be produced by natural fermentation. Even the hardiest yeasts cannot tolerate an alcohol content greater than about 15 percent, which places a natural limit on the strength of fermented alcoholic drinks. Distillation allowed alchemists to circumvent this limit, which had prevailed since the discovery of fermentation thousands of years earlier. Arnald's pupil, Raymond Lully, declared aqua vitae "an element newly revealed to men but hid from antiquity, because the human race was then too young to need this beverage destined to revive the energies of modern decrepitude." Both men lived to be well over seventy, an unusually advanced age for the time, which may have been taken as evidence for aqua vitae's life-prolonging power.

  This wonderful new medicine could either be administered as a drink or applied externally to the affected part of the body. Aqua vitae's proponents believed it could preserve youth; improve memory; treat diseases of the brain, nerves, and joints; revive the heart; calm toothache; cure blindness, speech defects, and paralysis; and even protect against the plague. It was, in short, regarded as a panacea, which was why Charles the Bad's doctors decided to administer it to their patient. Working by candlelight, they enveloped the king in sheets soaked with aqua vitae, hoping that contact with the magical fluid would cure his paralysis. But the treatment went disastrously wrong: The sheets were accidentally ignited by a careless servant's candle, and the king instantly went up in flames. His subjects are said to have regarded his fiery and agonizing death as a divine judgment, for one of the king's final acts had been to order a dramatic increase in taxation.

  Over the course of the fifteenth century, aqua vitae began to change from a medicinal drink into a recreational one as knowledge of distillation spread. This process was helped by a new invention, the printing press, developed by Johannes Gutenberg during the 1430s. (It was new to Europeans, at least, though the same idea had occurred to the Chinese some centuries earlier.) The first printed book about distillation was written by Michael Puff von Schrick, an Austrian doctor, and published in Augsburg in 1478. It was so popular that fourteen editions of the book had appeared by 1500. Among the claims made by von Schrick were that drinking half a spoon of aqua vitae every morning could ward off illness, and that pouring a little aqua vitae into the mouth of a dying person would give him or her the strength to speak one last time.

  But for most people, aqua vitae's appeal came not from its supposed medicinal benefits but from its power to intoxicate people quickly and easily. Distilled drinks proved particularly popular in the cooler climes of northern Europe, where wine was scarce and expensive. By distilling beer, it was possible to make powerful alcholic drinks with local ingredients for the first time. The Gaelic for aqua vitae, uisge beatha, is the origin of the modern word whiskey. This new drink quickly became part of the Irish lifestyle. One chronicler recorded the death in 1405 of Richard MacRagh-naill, the son of an Irish chieftain, who died "after drinking water of life to excess; and it was water of death to Richard."

  Elsewhere in Europe, aqua vitae was called "burnt wine," rendered in German as Branntwein and in English as brandywine, or simply brandy. People began distilling wine in their own homes and offering it for sale on feast days, a practice that was widespread and troublesome enough that it was explicitly banned in the German city of Nuremberg in 1496. A local doctor observed: "In view of the fact that everyone at present has got into the habit of drinking aqua vitae it is necessary to remember the quantity that one can permit oneself to drink, and learn to drink it according to one's capacities, if one wishes to behave like a gentleman."

  Spirits, Sugar, and Slaves

  The emergence of these new distilled drinks occurred just as European explorers were first opening up the world's sea routes, reaching around the southern tip of Africa to the east, and crossing the Atlantic to establish the first links with the New World in the west. The process began with the exploration by Portuguese explorers of the west coast of Africa, and the discovery and colonization of the nearby Atlantic islands, the first stepping stones on the way to the Americas. These expeditions were organized and funded by Prince Henrique of Portugal, also known as Prince Henry the Navigator. Despite his name, Prince Henry himself remained in Portugal for most of his life. He went abroad just three times, and even then only as far as North Africa, on three military excursions that respectively made, destroyed, and restored his reputation as a commander. But from his base in Sagres he masterminded an ambitious program of Portuguese naval exploration. Prince Henry funded expeditions and collated the resulting reports, observations, and maps. He also encouraged his captains to embrace advances in navigation such as the magnetic compass, along with trigonometry and the astrolabe, an invention which had, like distillation, been introduced by Arabs into western Europe. The chief motive of the Portuguese, Spanish, and other explorers of the time was to find an alternative route to the East Indies, in order to circumvent the Arab monopoly on the spice trade. Ironically, their eventual success was due in part to the use of technology provided by the Arabs.

  The Atlantic islands of Madeira, the Azores, and the Canaries proved to be ideal places to produce sugar, another Arab introduction. But growing sugarcane required enormous amounts of water and manpower. The Arabs had amassed a range of irrigation techniques and labor-saving devices during their westward expansion, including the water screw, the Persian innovation of underground aqueducts, and water-powered mills to process sugarcane. Even so, sugar production under the Arabs relied on slaves, mostly brought in from East Africa. The Europeans captured many of the Arab sugar plantations during the religious wars of the Crusades but lacked experience in growing sugar and needed even more manpower to maintain production. During the 1440s the Portuguese began to ship black slaves from their trading posts on the west coast of Africa. At first these slaves were kidnapped, but the Portuguese soon agreed to buy slaves, in return for European goods, from African traders.

  Mass slavery had been unseen in Europe since Roman times, in part for religious reasons, for doctrine forbade the enslavement of one Christian by another. Such theological objections to the new slave trade were overlooked or sidestepped using a number of dubious arguments. At first, it was suggested that by buying slaves and converting them to Christianity, Europeans were rescuing them from the false doctrine of Islam. But then another argument emerged: Black Africans, argued some theologians, did not qualify as fully human, could not, therefore, become Christians, and could be enslaved. They were, according to another theory, "children of Ham," so their enslavement was sanctioned by the Bible. This insidious logic was not widely accepted, at least at first. But the remoteness of the Atlantic islands meant the use of slave labor could be kept conveniently out of sight. By 1500 the introduction of slaves had turned Madeira into the largest exporter of sugar in the world, with several mills and two thousand slaves.

  The use of slaves in sugar production expanded dramatically after the European discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus in 1492. He had been looking for a westerly passage to the East Indies but instead found the islands of the Caribbean. There was no gold, spices, or silk to take back to his royal patrons in Spain, but Columbus confidently declared the islands ideal for growing sugar, a business he knew well. On his second voyage to the New World in 1493 he took sugarcane from the Canary Islands. Production was soon under way on the Spanish islands of the Caribbean and on the South American mainland, in what is now Brazil, under the Portuguese. Attempts to enslave the indigenous people failed, as they inexorably succumbed to Old-World diseases, so the colonists began importing slaves directly from Africa instead. Over the course of four centuries, around eleven million slaves were transported from Africa t
o the New World, though this figure understates the full scale of the suffering, because as many as half the slaves captured in the African interior died on the way to the coast. Distilled drinks played a central role in this evil trade, which intensified as the British, French, and Dutch established sugar plantations in the Caribbean during the seventeenth century.

  The African slavers who supplied the Europeans with slaves accepted a range of products in exchange, including textiles, shells, metal bowls, jugs, and sheets of copper. But most sought-after by far were strong alcoholic drinks. The Africans in different regions already drank alcoholic drinks such as palm wine, mead, and various varieties of beer, all of which dated back to antiquity. But alcohol imported from Europe was, in the words of one trader, "everywhere called for," even in Muslim parts of Africa. In the early days of the slave trade, when it was dominated by Portugal, African slavers acquired a taste for strong Portuguese wines. In 1510 the Portuguese traveler Valentim Fer-nandes wrote that the Wolofs, a people from the Senegal region, "are drunkards who derive great pleasure from our wine."

  Wine was a convenient form of currency, but European slave traders quickly realized that brandy was even better. It allowed more alcohol to be packed into a smaller space inside the cramped hold of a ship, and its higher alcohol content acted as a preservative, making it less likely than wine to spoil while in transit. Africans valued distilled spirits because they were far more concentrated, or "hot," than their own grain-based beers and palm wines. Drinking imported alcohol became a mark of distinction among African slavers. Textiles were often the most valuable component of the packages of goods exchanged for slaves, but alcohol, and brandy in particular, was the most prestigious.