The history of middle-class wine drinking

History Extra

Should politicians tell people what and how much to drink? Recent government decisions to try and impose a minimum price for alcohol sales in England and Wales have taken the campaign against what is seen as excessive consumption into intriguing new territory. (Scotland and Northern Ireland have been having their own debates about how far the law can intervene). The focus now is not only on places where people go out to drink but also on domestic consumption. And middle-class consumption of wine is receiving much more attention too.

Ironically it has been attempts to increase rather than decrease wine consumption in Britain that have figured more prominently in the past – at least since the 19th century. Prior to that, wine, as the imported tipple of the mainly well-to-do, had seen some regulation and had at times been caught up in trade disputes, especially with France. Increased duties were imposed on imported French wine to try and harm French commerce. Spanish and Portuguese wines, by contrast, were generally favoured as these countries were more consistently allies of Britain.

But by the mid-19th century, British champions of free trade challenged such use of tariffs as diplomatic weapons. Good trade relations – sealed amicably, no doubt, over bottles of good vintage – helped prevent future wars, it was argued.

James Nicholls of Bath Spa University, a specialist on the history of alcohol consumption, hails the 1860 Treaty of Commerce – in which import duties were reduced on all wine – as a turning point. William Gladstone, the treaty’s chief architect, spoke openly of what he hoped would be a change in British drinking habits – away from an obsession with beer – so that wine would no longer be a “rich man’s luxury”.

At the same time he was sensitive to the fears of Victorian temperance campaigners that cheaper wine would encourage drunkenness. More wine drinking was meant to civilise British drinkers, claimed Gladstone. His measures were intended for the “promotion of temperance and sobriety as opposed to drunken and demoralised habits”. Other changes – forerunners of the modern ‘off licence’ system – allowed grocers and restaurateurs, rather than just pubs, to sell alcohol. They were intended to weaken the “unnatural divorce between eating and drinking”.

 Behind all this lay cultural assumptions about alcohol consumption that always lurk in these debates. We have tended, says James Nicholls, to “imbue different drinks with different ethical values”. Whereas some have been linked to the bad habits of the lower orders – think of Hogarth’s image of social catastrophe in Gin Lane, or modern debates about lager louts – wine was never associated with boorish drunkenness in this way.

Though there was an initial increase in wine drinking (what’s been called ‘the era of cheap Gladstone claret’), British café society, combining wine-drinking with eating, never took off as Gladstone might have hoped. It was only in the 1960s that there was, as Nicholls puts it, a “greater democratisation of wine drinking”. More wines became available from around the world, and supermarkets added competition. As a result, wine sales have steadily increased, while beer consumption has declined.

So Gladstone might have been pleased by today’s spread of wine into British drinking culture. It is no longer the reserve of the rich. But he would have worried about the evidence that consumption – for some individuals – is rising rapidly. Health professionals, today’s equivalent of 19th‑century temperance campaigners, no longer seem to share the old assumption that wine-drinking is inherently less harmful than other kinds of alcohol.

Extra But reversing this trend will not be easy. Policing what goes on in pubs has been far easier than controlling what people do in their own homes. The long contest between political and moral control and Britain’s ‘drinking culture’ is entering a fascinating new phase.

Chris Bowlby is a presenter on BBC radio, specialising in history

This series is produced with History & Policy.

Drinking in the Past: Centuries Old Evidence for Consumption of Corn Beer Found in Mexico

Ancient Origin

By analyzing calculus on the teeth of the remains of people who died in an influential Mexican city hundreds of years ago, researchers are getting clues about their diet. One finding was that the people drank corn beer.
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The ruins of the city of Casas Grandes are in Chihuahua State about 80 miles (130 kilometers) from the New Mexico border. The city, which numbered about 3,000 people at its peak in the 1300s, is also known as Paquimé. The Casas Grandes culture stretched across several river valleys in northern Mexico.
The town was probably a hub of culture and trade between central Mexico and the Southwestern United States.

Map showing the location of the Casas Grandes culture. (Beloit College map)

The stuff trapped in the teeth as tartar, which fossilizes to become calculus, is probably from the last few weeks of their lives, says an article in Western Digs.
“The results of this study offer some of the first hard evidence for the production of corn beer, consumption of corn smut, and food processing methods,” lead researcher Daniel King, a graduate student in anthropology at Brigham Young University, told Western Digs. “It is a step forward in understanding Casas Grandes human-plant interactions, especially diet.”

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Anne Katzenberg of the University of Calgary is analyzing the remains of people excavated at Casas Grandes in the 1950s and ‘60s. Some of the bodies were buried, others dismembered and put in urns, and others were just exposed to the elements.
King and his team are doing the teeth analysis of 110 people buried in and around Casas Grandes between 700 and 1450 AD.

Part of the Paquimé (Casas Grandes) site, Mexico. (HJPD/CC BY SA 3.0)

Of the samples, teeth from 63 bodies provided microscopic traces, the most common of which were starch granules, corn mostly. They also found tiny mineral fragments from squash and grasses.
About 10 percent of the bodies had corn smut traces. Corn smut is a nutritious fungus that grows on corn. Even today it is a delicacy called by its Aztec name huitlacoche.

Granules of corn found in the tooth calculus of people buried at Casas Grandes show signs of swelling and fragmentation that are typical of fermentation, researchers say. (King et al.)

“Given the nature of calculus, any microremains recovered are going to be from the last days or weeks of the person’s life, maybe a month or two, but not longer,” King said. “So reconstructing diet, in the long term sense, doesn’t work with calculus. However, identifying specific foodstuffs — like corn beer, fish, chile, et cetera — is useful, as many of them can’t be seen in the results of other studies.”

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King told Western Digs that the most interesting aspect of the tooth analysis was the presence of corn alcohol. Three people’s teeth showed maize remains that apparently had been fermented. The swollen, fragmented grain particles apparently resulted from the brewing of chicha, which has been made in Central and South American for about 5,000 years.

Chicha de jora. Huancayo, Perú. (Public Domain)

But this may be the first evidence of corn beer that far north, King said. The corn fragments date to the period of 1200 to 1450. And the researchers don’t know when it may have been introduced from more southerly communities in Peru or Mesoamerica.
A Beloit College website says the Casas Grandes culture, which extends from Sonora to Chihuahua up into present-day New Mexico, was more closely related to Mesoamerican cultures to the south than to the Hohokam or Mogollon peoples to the north.

A Casas Grandes culture figurine. (Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts)

Like people to the south, the Casas Grandes people had platform mounds and ball courts, apparently used in rituals. They lived along river drainages and had irrigation systems. Paquimé was a major center of trade, through which macaws, pottery, shells, and copper were shipped from Central America into Arizona and New Mexico.
The people had shallow pit houses arranged around a large community house. The homes were made of jacal, a wattle-and-daub type of construction. As time went on, a plaza design became more prevalent, and, Beloit College says that people probably lived in the houses with common ancestors. Later they developed poured adobe walls.

A partially reconstructed residential building in Paquimé, Chihuahua, Mexico. (HJPD/ CC BY 3.0)

Featured Image: Examples of variegated maize ears (Sam Fentress/ CC BY SA 2.0) and a figurine from the Casas Grandes culture c. 1200 - 1450. (Public Domain)
By Mark Miller

How to Recreate a Sloppy Ancient Greek Drinking Game

by Megan Gannon
Live Science

A man plays kottabos in the artwork on this terracotta kylix, housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The cup is attributed to the Kleophrades Painter and dates back to about 500 B.C. Credit: Creative Commons, Marie-Lan Nguyen (2011)

NEW ORLEANS — More than 2,000 years before the invention of beer pong, the ancient Greeks had a game called kottabos to pass the time at their drinking parties.
At Greek symposia, elite men, young and old, reclined on cushioned couches that lined the walls of the andron, the men's quarters of a household. They had lively conversations and recited poetry. They were entertained by dancers, flute girls and courtesans. They got drunk on wine, and in the name of competition, they hurled their dregs at a target in the center of the room to win prizes like eggs, pastries and sexual favors. Slaves cleaned up the mess.
"Trying to describe this ancient Greek drinking game, kottabos, to my students was always a little bit difficult because we do have these illustrations of it, but they only show one part of the game — where individuals are about to flick some dregs at a target," said Heather Sharpe, an assistant professor of art history at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. [11 Interesting Facts About Hangovers]

"I thought it would be really great if we could actually try to do it ourselves," said Sharpe.
So, with a 3D-printed drinking cup, some diluted grape juice and a handful of willing students, Sharpe did just that. She found out that it wasn't impossible to get the hang of kottabos, but the game did require a skilled overhand toss. She presented her findings this past weekend (Jan. 8 to 11) here at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America.
Raise your glass
Ancient texts and works of art indicate that there were two ways to play kottabos. In one variation, the goal was to knock down a disc that was carefully balanced atop a tall metal stand in the middle of the room. In the other variation, there was no metal stand; rather, the goal was to sink small dishes floating in a larger bowl of water. In both versions, participants attempted to hit their target with the leftover wine at the bottom of their kylix, the ancient equivalent of a Solo cup.
The red-and-black kylixes had two looped handles and a shallow but wide body — a shape that perhaps was not the most practical for drinking but lent itself to playful decoration.
Big eyes were sometimes painted on the underside on kylixes so that the drinker would look like he was wearing a mask when he took a hefty sip. And the relatively flat, circular inside of the cup, called the tondo, often carried droll or dirty pictures that would be slowly revealed as the wine disappeared. The tondo of one kylix at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston bears the image of a man wiping his bottom. Another drinking cup at the same museum shows a man penetrating a woman from behind with the caption "Hold still."
Other paintings on kylixes were quite self-referential, with scenes of revelers playing kottabos. Based on those ancient illustrations, Sharpe had assumed that to play the game, you would swirl the dregs in the kylix and flick them at the target, almost as if you were doing a forehand throw with a Frisbee. But her experiment showed that that was not the most winning technique. [Coolest Archaeological Discoveries of 2014]
Re-enacting a symposium
Sharpe collaborated with Andrew Snyder, a ceramics professor at West Chester University. He initially made three replica kylixes out of clay, but Sharpe was worried about breaking them during the game. Snyder had just acquired a 3D printer (a MakerBot Replicator 2), so they made a lighter, more durable, plastic kylix at a slightly smaller scale.

Heather Sharpe and her 3D-printed kylix.
Credit: Megan Gannon/Live Science

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The team made mock-up kottabos targets to play both variations of the game. For their andron, Sharpe and her colleagues used one of the art department's drawing rooms (which had a linoleum floor for easy cleanup), and they grabbed a couple padded benches to serve as their couches. Instead of wine, they used watered-down grape juice.
To achieve the best results in kottabos, the participants had to loop a finger through one handle of the kylix and toss the juice overhand, as if they were pitching a baseball. Sharpe said that playing the game proved to be challenging, but she was amazed that some of her students started to hit the target within 10 to 15 minutes.
"It took a fair amount of control to actually direct the wine dregs, and interestingly enough, some of the women were the first to get it," Sharpe told Live Science. "In some respects, they relied a little bit more on finesse, whereas some of the guys were trying to throw it too hard."
Elite Greek women wouldn't have taken part in symposia, but there are some indications that the courtesans, called hetairai, would have played kottabos with the men.
"Another thing we quickly realized is, it must have gotten pretty messy," Sharpe said. "By the end of our experiment we had diluted grape juice all over the floor. In a typical symposium setting, in an andron, you would have had couches arranged on almost all four sides of the room, and if you missed the target, you were likely to splatter your fellow symposiast across the way. You'd imagine that, by the end of the symposium, you'd be drenched in wine, and your fellow symposiasts would be drenched in wine, too."
Sharpe would eventually like to attempt to play kottabos with real wine, to fully understand how the game would devolve as the participants got tipsy.
"It would be fun to actually experiment with wine drinking," Sharpe said. "Of course, this was a university event, so we couldn't exactly do it on campus. But really, to get the full experiment, it would be interesting to try it after having a kylix of wine, or after having two kylixes of wine."