Some ancient wine lore from Dioscurides
In his book «De materia medica» (V 6,4) Dioscurides, a Greek doctor in the Roman army and the father of pharmacology, provides some valuable information about what we call sweet wines: «Wine made from sun-dried grapes, or grapes that have been scorched on the vine and rubbed, becomes sweet, and is called Cretan or protropos or Pramnian, and if the pulp is scorched, it is called siraios or epsima.» What he says about sweet wine being made from grapes that were either spread out in the sun or scorched on the vines confirms everything written so far in this column about traditional methods still in use on Cyprus, Santorini, Samos and elsewhere. He also notes that those grapes were rubbed because, as we have seen, it wasn’t easy to trample grapes that had been dried out. But Dioscurides also mentions another technique. Instead of condensing the grape juice by leaving grapes in the sun to remove some of the water, people trampled the fresh grapes and condensed the juice over a naked flame. They called the product of this process epsima in Asia Minor, the homeland of Galen and Dioscurides, while speakers of Attic Greek called it siraion, and contemporary Greeks call petmezi from the Turkish pekmez. The Romans made concentrated pulp, calling it defrutum, carenum and sapa, according to the degree of condensation, but not all Latin writers on agriculture agreed on the connection between the name and the degree of condensation. In «De Re Rustica,» Columella describes precisely how it was heated without being burnt, because if it was burnt the wine would be bitter. The boiled must was allowed to ferment. The thicker the must became, the sweeter and lower in alcohol was the wine made from it. But these products were usually added to must from fresh grapes to make it stronger, because the grapes were weak or they came from vines grown in damp soil or they had been harvested after rain. Dioscurides gives another valuable piece of information, revealing that a trade practice which, unfortunately, is still extant, has been employed since antiquity. When the wine from a vine-growing area becomes well known, there are many who wish to give their own wine (from another area) its geographical appellation. Strict EU legislation now prevents such theft of geographical labels that indicate the provenance of genuine products among member states. But the laws do not apply to the newer vine-growing countries. The same disorder reigned in earlier eras. Dioscurides is clear: Sweet wine made from sun-dried grapes was called Cretan, protropos or Pramnios. Why? Athenaeus has preserved the information that Mytilenians called sweet wine prodromon and others called it protropon. This was the renowned wine of Lesvos, which was made from the juice that oozed from sun-dried grapes before they were trampled, just like the wine of Hesiod described in an earlier article. In Roman times Pramnios was also famed in the Roman era. As Pliny writes: «It was produced in the Smyrna area near the temple of Cybele,» which is on the Erythraia peninsula opposite Chios. Many people mistake this Pramnian wine with the classical Pramnian wine that resembled the Homeric wine of the same name. But the latter was made from black grapes and was neither sweet nor thick but bitter, harsh and high in alcohol (Eparchides and Aristophanes in Athenaeus). By contrast, the Pramnian wine of Roman times was sweet, made from sun-dried grapes of the Psitha variety, and was also called white Pramnis (Scholia in «Alexipharmaca:» pithis (181), Pramnian (163) in Otto Schneider, Nicandrea: «Theriaca et Alexipharmaca,» Teubner, Leipzig, 1856.) Cretan passum was not so well known in the first century AD as many wines from sun-dried grapes were called Cretan wine, no matter where they were produced. It is thus a serious error to write that the Pramnian wine referred to in Homer was Cretan. Quite simply, the Pramnios produced in Erythraia, the protropos of Lesvos, and Cretan passum were all so well known during the first century AD that various sweet wines, regardless of their place of origin, were marketed under the names of those three famous wines of their era. All sweet wines Nowadays in such cases we say that the geographical label no longer indicates place of origin but simply the variety and a particular type of wine. This has given rise to semi-generic denominations in new wine-growing countries, and such products as Californian «port» or «champagne.» In the United States, 14 of the best-known geographical denominations have been classified as semi-generic. The same thing happened in Roman times, when the trade in Cretan passum flourished. Cretan wine came to mean not only genuine passum from Crete but any sweet wine, regardless of its place of origin, which was made from sun-dried grapes. According to current legislation, this would mean that the geographical denomination «Cretan» had become semi-generic. Five-century gap Antigone Marangou’s study of amphoras found in Gortyna, «Le vin at les amphores de Crete» (EFA, Athens, 1995), has shown that Cretan wine was held in high regard until the fourth century AD, and was certainly produced up to the seventh century. No information is available for the following five centuries, but from the 12th century onward, another sweet wine dominated. It was the Byzantine wine from Monemvasia, known in the West as Malvasia, after the Venetian name for that port. Once the Venetians took over Crete and established themselves, they intensified viticulture, first planting grafts from Monemvasia-Malvasia. They traded the old Cretan passum wines under fashionable new name of Malvasia. The Genoese did the same on Chios and many other Aegean islands. And so by the Middle Ages the geographical denomination of Malvasia had already become a semi-generic denomination, as the denomination Cretan had in the Roman era.
