Stuart Walton on the many ways humanity has tried to take the intoxicating power out of wine, attempts that long predate the latest health-driven fashion for no-alcohol and low-alcohol wine.
The current predilection for no-alcohol and low-alcohol wine among the abstemious has generated a little debate about what counts as wine. If it hasn’t undergone the befouling process of fermentation, many feel, it isn’t really wine, only a latter-day descendant of Dr Welch’s Unfermented Wine. This proprietary product was formulated by a Methodist dentist, Thomas Bramwell Welch, in 1869, using the newly discovered pasteurization process that obstructed yeast from consuming sugars. It was what we also call grape juice.
Grape juice that has been fermented to create a wine taste, and then had the alcohol removed, is nearer to the antecedent product in spirit, but has the dispiriting air of building something up, only to knock it down again, like sandcastles on the beach.
The principal motive for the widespread practice of watering wine before serving it, known trans-culturally in antiquity, was the avoidance, or at the very least the deferral, of intoxication. Drinking wine undiluted was a sheer sign of barbarity, even if the culture of self-discipline was more honored in the breach by certain of the Greek symposiasts. In some traditions and contexts, however, avoiding inebriation, even while partaking devoutly of the gift of wine, was a spiritual imperative.
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Early no-alcohol and low-alcohol wine
An early recourse to purify wine was to cook it until most or all of the alcohol was driven off. From the earliest Muslim period, not only fermented drinks, but even simple pressed grape juice, was forbidden, although at least until the reign of ‘Umar II (r.717-720), cooked wine, or tilā, was doled out to the fighting forces of the Umayyad caliphate. Cooking is only a very approximate method for rendering wine alcoholically inert, and there are quite likely to have been rations from time to time that were, accidentally, a little more cheering than usual.
Under the dynasty of the Almohad caliphs in Berber North Africa during the 12th and 13th centuries, a recipe was perfected for a version of wine known as anzir. It consisted of boiling sweet grape juice over a fire until it was reduced by about a third, leaving behind a concentrated syrup that was too thick with sugars to ferment. This was allowed to cool, and was mixed with equal quantities of water when ready for drinking. Since it did not make the drinker drunk, it was considered permissible by the devout. Its name is thought to be etymologically derived from the word for light rain, anzar, evoking the fetching suggestion that the drinker was gently sprinkled with it.
The bitter irony was that the elite, in the inner sanctum of their pavilions, drank actual wine (known as rubb) and plenty of it. In the walls of old Marrakech, there is a 12th-century double-arched gateway, the Bab al-Rubb, where traders from the countryside were permitted to enter the city precincts and sell their intoxicating wares. Somebody must have been drinking it.
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Thick enough to spread
Strategies for avoiding alcohol permeated beyond the Arab societies of the Muslim world. French historian François Clément reports that, in 17th-century Shiraz in Persia, the abstinent consumed a product that consisted of concentrated grape syrup that could be mixed with water to make a wine-effect beverage for the table. Undiluted, it was thick enough to be spread on breakfast bread when there was no butter.
The other infallible method for dealcoholizing wine in bygone centuries was acetification, its transformation into vinegar. In the Byzantine empire, a concoction known as oxycrat was widely consumed as a tonic cordial, for its nourishing and antiseptic properties. It was wine vinegar, its sourness offset with aromatizing spices or honey, taken diluted. Typically, it was made with the wine of the previous year’s vintage, gone to vinegar in the jars, its manufacture probably a cultural inheritance from Roman posca, the inexpensive handy tincture of legionaries, laborers, and the poor. A sponge soaked in it was offered to the dying Christ, not in derision as is sometimes thought, but for the hydration it gave to soldiers on the march.
Many were the ways in which defusing the potency of wine could be, almost fortuitously, made to fail. Perhaps not quite enough water went into it, or the boiling had fallen short of what was needed to distil it out fully. At the outer edge of pious hope, you could just limit yourself to taking the odd sip very occasionally over the course of an evening, a technique unwittingly developed by the future St Monica, mother of Augustine. Given the job when young of bringing wine up from the cellar for the family table, she took to helping herself to the odd scoop as she did so. The sottish notoriety she gained by it turned her into a lifelong teetotaller, the long years of her abstinence perhaps affording her the chance to reflect that, while she was defiling her soul, she had hardly noticed how enjoyable it was.
