Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!wuarchive!psuvax1!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: mls@cbnewsm.ATT.COM (mike.siemon) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Wine... Message-ID: Date: 4 Mar 90 01:39:36 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 122 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu Stephen Timm is suffering from some misconceptions about wine in the ancient (or modern) world. He writes: > when wine is praised as that "which gladdeneth both God and man" > the word for unfermented grape juice is used. I'm afraid that counts as assuming what you want to prove, not a tactic that recommends itself when the matter is in dispute. Stephen cites Samuele Bacchiocchi, a 7th Day Adventist writer whom I have encountered before in sabbatarian controversy. Dr. Bacchiocchi is honest -- but totally unable to weigh his data independently of doctrine. I fear that will be the case here, too; but I will see if I can dig this book up and scan through it. There is at any rate *some* misinformation in the three points Stephen goes on to use to buttress his argument: > (a) Grapes were in season at various times during the year, and the > juice could be prepared fresh as needed (and often was) This is simply wrong. Grapes will have matured a bit differently in the different climates of the Near East, but in any given climate the ripening will be subject to only "microclimatic" variation of days or weeks at most. > (b) Sources indicate that the freshly-squeezed must was often boiled > down and stored for months at a time without fermentation This is at least theoretically possible -- raise the sugar content high enough and you get a syrup inhospitable to yeast. I assume Bacchiocchi found some obscure mentions of this. For this to be relevant to the issue, there would have to be documentary or archaeological evidence that such a technique was in *common* practice in ancient Palestine. Here is where I *would* like to see the references. But *please* note that unless this syrup is treated as a reserve for dilution immediately before serving it will, on dilution again, become an attractive medium for yeast growth and fermentation -- so don't keep it around for more than a day or so or you'll have wine. For all I know, the ancients liked yeasty "new" wine so much that they kept syrup around all year in order to make up a batch of week-old wine on command. Note that modern grape growers freeze a portion of their crop to sell to amateur wine-makers (the one batch of wine I've made was done from frozen grapes; grape syrup would have been a practical way of doing the same thing in the ancient world. New wine bubbling with the CO2 evolved by the yeast would have been an ancient "bubbly" and quite possibly a highly desirable drink and the subject of verbal differentiation from older -- and more alcoholic -- still wine. Mature wine was commonly diluted in ancient practice, maybe to get it down to the alcohol content of beer or of incompletely fermented "new" wine. Consider the "yuppies" of David's or Solomon's courts! Yeasts are omnipresent in human environments (note that even in our very scrubbed and antiseptic America, yeast infections are very common ailments). A bread making culture (like Palestine) *certainly* had yeast everywhere in sufficient quantity and of a variety adapted to anaerobic fermentation of sugar to alcohol and carbon dioxide. If you press grapes today and let them sit, they will start fermenting into wine within a day or two. Wine makers (and beer makers and bread makers ...) use packaged yeasts for a couple of reasons a. predictablility of results; this is the main point. b. dominating the cultures with a specially desired strain that is adapted to the purpose (wine makers like to use yeasts that come from Bordeaux or Burgundy, for some odd reason :-)), has some highly specific "taste" as side effect from the basic reaction. > Grape juice could also be and was preserved by sealing with various > sealants or by immersion in underground springs. No. Yeast produce alcohol from sugar (in grape juice) by anaerobic reactions. Sealing grape juice will *not* prevent it from turning into wine; sealing is a treatment for preserving *already fermented wine* from turning into vinegar (which *is* an aerobic reaction). As long as yeasts are present -- and they *wil* be, they form the "bloom" on the skins of the grapes -- the juice WILL ferment to wine within a few days. This will be very frothy and yeasty and undrinkable wine by our standards, but grape juice without modern preserva- tives WILL have an appreciable alcohol content within 24 hours of its pressing. Sealing unfermented grape juice is a prescription for an explosion. Boiling the "must" (the pressed grapes, usually with skins) can drive off any alcohol and kill the yeast and concentrate the sugar to the point that a syrup is produced. As I said above, this is a matter on which I'd like to see sources. (Further oenological note; once the alcohol reaches a certain percentage, it becomes toxic to the yeasts and they die off and drop to the bottom of the fermentation vat. This is partly dependent on the strain of yeast, but with modern wine yeasts it is at about 12% alcohol by volume. Given modern tastes for dry wine, wine makers harvest their grapes so that they have just enough sugar (about 24%) to leave little or no residual sugar after this point at which the fermentation ends. If you want know more about wine, THE book to read is Amerine and Johnson _Wine, an Introduction_, U. of California Press. That title may be a bit off; in any case this is a classic book out of the eonological program at Cal. Davis.) > (c) The same difficulties which plagued grape juice storage would also > plague the storage of wine. In fact, it was not until the 1800s that > Pasteur did his study on why some grape juice underwent alcoholic > fermentation and other juice underwent the undesirable lactic acid > fermentation. Don't let the oenophiles hear you calling the malo-lactic fermentation undesirable! More seriously, you simply do not have the facts straight on what Pasteur did for the French wine industry (and why Pasteurization was developed -- hint: it had nothing to do with milk!) The problems of wine storage are in fact totally different from those of grape juice storage. Pasteurization kills organisms (bacteria, I think, but I could be misremem- bering this) that turn alcohol into vinegar. (There is another, inorganic "oxidation" reaction that can spoil wine as well.) I think it is a desperate mistake to attempt to "preserve" the Bible from the impurities of alcohol. It is a dangerous drug, and the Bible is quite ambivalent about it, for when used sparingly and spiritually it is indeed a joy to God and humanity. But as with all of creation, we can all too easily look upong the "good" and by our own greed destroy it and turn it to evil. It is the human failing that must be our spiritual focus, not a misguided attempt to project all the problem onto a simple chemical. -- Michael L. Siemon I was ready to be sought by those m.siemon@ATT.COM who did not ask for me; ...!att!sfbat!mls I was ready to be found by those standard disclaimer who did not seek me. -- Isaiah 65:1