Stuart Walton looks back on the moments in history when it might have been appropriate or even necessary to have a glass or two of breakfast wine.
According to present medical orthodoxy, starting the day with wine is seen as the red-flag indicator of a dysfunctional relationship with alcohol, and not without due reason. The hair of the dog is the silliest way to treat a hangover, but equally, those who feel, as US President Harry Truman did, that a breakfast draught is a good way to get into gear for the day, are convincing themselves that nothing much matters beyond their own state of consciousness.
If there is such a thing as the improper use of wine, it arises when the drink is divorced from any appreciation of its nutritional value. We might therefore look a little more kindly on those who started the day with wine in different times to ours. In Pharaonic antiquity, Cleopatra is said to have eaten wine-soaked barley bread at the start of the day. If so, it was a habit she most likely learned from the Hellenistic period that came to an end with her reign, when Egypt was annexed into the Roman Empire. Known as akratismos in Greek, this was less a delicacy in its own right than a means of softening tough-textured, coarse-grained bread that, as often as not, was not particularly fresh either. Not only did wine make dry bread more palatable, it added essential nutrients.
Roman breakfast wine
By the time of Rome’s ascendancy, when virtually the whole continental empire ran on wine, it was consumed as an accompanying drink at ientaculum, the day’s first meal, taken at sunrise. Not only the bread, but the wine itself might well be sub-prime, which is why the centuries-long tradition of adding sweetening and gentling elements to it came into being.
Related
Mulsum, commonly drunk first thing, was an infusion of honey and spices—typically cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves—in wine. Each household likely had its own formula, but Pliny’s recipe for mulsum, collected in the Roman cookery anthology of Apicius, calls for boiled honey to be added to old wine, in which guise it is beginning to acquire a certain connoisseurial status. It became widely used as the aperitif before a lavish meal, but could also serve as an appetizer for the day ahead.
Drinking alcohol for preference was an inevitable recourse throughout the medieval eras, when water was typically so full of impurities that it could easily sicken you, and the caffeine beverages were yet to appear on European shores. If beer was more typically a breakfast fortifier among the poorer sectors of society, for the well-to-do, wine was the perennial status marker. Like beer, it had significant nutrient value.
It could also instil morale amid desperate exigency, as is revealed in Adam Zientek’s A Thirst for Wine and War (2024), which tells the story of the brutally instrumental use to which French authorities put wine and rough spirit among their combatants in the Great War. As hostilities curdled towards the Armistice of 1918, the ration was doled out ever earlier in the day, not so much in the interest of stiffening soldiers’ sinews as fogging their brains against the horror.
Content from our partners
In latter times, breakfast wine was to become the apparent prerogative of national leaders, in perilous and pacific times alike. The Iron Chancellor of 19th-century Germany, Otto von Bismarck, drank wine with his every meal, including breakfast, his preference being for red Bordeaux, which he considered to be a natural humoral bulwark against the northern German chill.
A tumbler of Sherry
Great Britain’s precarious progress through the Second World War was famously steered by a man who cheerfully drank around the clock. Churchill’s day would begin with the “tumbler of Sherry” that he expected to see in his bedroom upon waking. This was the breakfast aperitif, taken before a hearty repast of sausages, bacon, and eggs served in bed, often accompanied, perhaps surprisingly in the context of the times, by hock, the generic British term for German white wine. Once the naval blockade of German ports was in operation, the stocks of breakfast hock in the government cellars at Lancaster House would have matured agreeably as they dwindled.
These days, breakfast wine has withered to the birthday glass of Mimosa on the bed tray, or the buckets of Prosecco that accompany a bride’s cosmetic preparations on her nuptial day. In other words, there has to be reckless festivity in the air to license it. I once split a half of Champagne with a travelling companion on our last morning in Venice, served with the scrambled eggs and white rolls by a waiter who didn’t bat a noticeable eyelid. I have never enjoyed Pol Roger less. The instant fuddle was a ghastly preamble to the airport dash. It was not the least reason I could never have piloted my nation through a war.
