Note: I began my research for this article assuming that I could distill the relevant details into an explanation of a thousand words or less; finding that impossible, I’ve decided to break it into a series of three articles. This one focuses mainly on a historical overview, with notes on how fantasy fiction writers might use the information to develop their fictional worlds more thoroughly. Following articles will go into more detail on specific issues. –Leona
In America, we take for granted that a nearby store will offer glossy, gleaming shelves holding glass and metal containers of ruby, emerald, and sapphire; they come slim and sleek or chunky and oddly shaped, with colorful or demure labels, all glistening under fluorescent lights, many conveniently refrigerated. I am, of course, referring to alcoholic beverages. And it’s very easy to take a great deal for granted when writing a scene involving alcohol, but as with any other subject, generic assumptions are generally wrong.
For example, a sailor swaggering into a generic tavern and ordering a glass of rum seems perfectly reasonable. However, in our real world, rum was only developed fairly recently (seventeenth century); it did not exist during the Middle Ages or in medieval times. Even more important, rum is based on sugar cane syrup. If there aren’t any sugar cane plantations in your fictional world, there isn’t any rum. And if there are sugar cane plantations in a low-technology world, there probably ought to be slaves to run them; otherwise the price of rum will be so high as to make exporting it impractical, and it would only be a local drink, not one bought hundreds of miles away on another continent by a rough sailor.
And speaking of sailors, assuming that your world is advanced enough to have rum and unethical enough to have slaves, almost anything liquid imported from overseas was expensive enough to make further transport overland even more impractical (it’s a matter of load weight and limited space), so a generic tavern set in the middle of a continent, far from any ocean, wouldn’t stock rum–or, probably, most imported drinks–either.
What would a generic Middle Ages tavern stock, then? Probably ale (not lager!) and wine, but they won’t much resemble what modern shoppers can buy at the local Seven-Eleven at one in the morning. Beer began its journey thousands of years ago to arrive at today’s sleek, dark bottles by way of a bowl of fermented gruel. It must have taken great courage to drink the frothy mess, and probably a few serious hunger pangs as well. It probably wasn’t the first intoxicant discovered; on hot days, water with honey ferments readily into mead, and fruit juice into wine. But beer, as humanity slowly settled down and began cultivating crops, was easier to both reproduce and to store than any other option; when harvesting grain, some could be held aside and stored until needed.
From gruel it developed into gritty: early beer drinkers literally used long straws to avoid the chaff and debris floating atop the beer. At last someone came up with the bright idea of straining the beer, vastly improving its popularity; early Egyptian records list multiple different beers with names such as “the joy-bringer” and “the beautiful and good”.
Beer didn’t just make people feel good; it was one of the causal factors in the shift from nomadic to agricultural life. Grain takes time to grow, and beer takes time to ferment; once the grain is cut and stored, and the beer is bubbling in the vat, wandering off to a new location and leaving it all behind isn’t particularly smart–so if the culture of a story is primarily nomadic, they won’t have ale or wine unless they buy it from more settled cultures. Nomads may have fermented milk stored in sacks made from a sheep, goat, or cow stomach, but any drink they create is something they can pick up and carry with them when they move to a new location.
Beer and wine also served for a long time as a currency. Keeping track of how much beer and bread workers received in return for their labor led to the development of writing; yet another feather in alcohol’s metaphorical cap.
Of course, all this is long before the Middle Ages; I’ve started out back in the multiple-thousand B.C.E. range to get a feel for where everything began. Closer to the zero-point of our modern calender, wine had made a significant appearance on the scene: a popular Persian myth regarding wine involves a distraught young harem girl who seized upon a jar of “rotted” grapes as a poison with which to end her misery; instead she passed out and woke up happy and refreshed. (Not likely, as anyone who has ever suffered through a wine hangover can tell you; but it makes for a good apocryphal story all the same.) This also went through a refining process as people discovered the concept of filtering.
Beer and wine both spoiled quickly, especially in hot climates; hops, which act as a preservative, may have been used by the early Mesopotamians, but the developing European beer industry did not really begin using hops in beer until around the 1400s. A mixture of spices called grut, which included leaves of bog myrtle or sweet gale, was more commonly used as a preservative instead. To preserve wine, a candle whose wick or body was primarily sulfur was burned in the empty barrel prior to the wine being decanted into it; before sulfur, resin or pitch were used, which must have given wine a really odd flavor.
In a fictional medieval world, then, beer and wine should commonly be sour and quick to spoil (corks were also invented much closer to modern times), and flavored with a wide range of ingredients; even used as a base to deliver unpleasant-tasting medicinal herbs.
Why did people drink beer and wine, if they tasted so nasty? Because it was safer than drinking water. Beer also helped with nutrition; the first beers weren’t as high in alcohol as our modern versions, but they did retain a lot more yeast in the liquid, which added protein and vitamins to the drinker’s diet, resulting in healthier people overall. Wine was a status symbol; much more expensive to produce than beer, what it tasted like didn’t matter as much as the fact that one could afford to serve it in the first place. Beer has always been the beverage of the “common folk”, wine the preference of higher social classes, because of the ease of growing barley, oats, wheat, rye, or corn for beer versus the challenges of growing grapes for wine.
Both beer and wine, in our world, were heavily developed and refined by monasteries. Much of the steady increase in quality over the centuries can be laid directly at their doors. A fictional culture without monasteries needs an alternate group dedicated to creating the highest quality out of simple ingredients, unless the writer wants his or her characters to eternally suffer in sour misery under inferior beverages.
By the time the Middle Ages rolled around, beer and wine were major economic items for many countries. Many monasteries supported themselves by producing and selling their own wine and beer; land was claimed for vineyards more often than for food crops in many areas. A bad war or weather change that wiped out a slew of vineyards could destroy the economy of that area for years; one city actually surrendered to invaders to protect their harvest (to find out which city and what war, check out “The Story of Wine,” by Hugh Johnson).
Wine and beer have had a tremendous impact on humanity throughout history. Treating them as a respected and vital ingredient in a fictional world’s development adds depth and believability to that world, and can easily provide multiple story lines as well: that city which surrendered rather than lose its crop of wine grapes might secretly plan to rebel and crush the invaders from within. Fictional monasteries could set up a Monk’s Beer-Tasting Day to determine the best brewers in the land; what if someone gets poisoned at such an event? An innovative alchemist might discover distilled liquors centuries before our world did; what impact would the introduction of hard liquor have on a fictional medieval world?
The possibilities are endless, and I hope I’ve gotten you excited about trying out some new notions in your world-building sessions. The next segment of this article will more closely examine the economic history of alcohol and how to use that to bolster development of your fictional world.
Some suggested resources for further reading on this topic in the meanwhile:
“The Story of Wine–New Illustrated Edition”, Hugh Johnson (Mitchell Beazley/Octopus Publishing Group, 2004)
“A History of the World in 6 Glasses”, by Tom Standage (Walker & Company, 2005)
“Life in a Medieval Castle”, Joseph and Frances Gies (Harper & Row, 1974)
“Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, Vol. 1: Acceptance to Food Politics”, Scribner Library of Daily Life, Solomon H. Katz and Willaim Woys Weaver, Eds. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003)
No comments:
Post a Comment