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Chaucer mentions other wines, including the aromatic and flavored. One was Ypocras or Hippocras, drunk as an after-dinner digestif or served with cakes as a late-night collation. This was made with either red or white wine, although red was usually preferred, as its greater robustness was thought to aid digestion. According to The Customs of London (1811), you should take a quart of red wine, an ounce of cinnamon, a half ounce of ginger, a quarter of an ounce of white pepper, and half a pound of sugar, bruise the spices, and put the sugar, spices, and wine into a woolen cloth made for it. You then let it hang over a vessel until the wine has run through. Other recipes call for bringing the wine to a boil with the spices and honey (rather than sugar, which was relatively rare and expensive), straining it through a muslin bag, bottling it, and leaving it to mature for a month. The name came from Hippocrates’s sleeve, which this bag was thought to resemble. Hippocras was clearly a type of mulled wine, and its popularity continued well into the seventeenth century, when Pepys enjoyed it. It evolved into hot punch, the eighteenth-century favorite in both Britain and the colonies.

Another heated and flavored wine that makes an appearance was clarree, which apparently took its name from vinum claratum, or clarified wine. The base here was sweet white wine, which was first boiled with honey, and to which were added cinnamon, cardamom, white pepper, and ginger; as with Hippocras, clarree was then strained and left to mature.

One wine mentioned by Chaucer, Vernage, was not a concoction as were the others. Rather, it was a wine of great luxury from Italy, and was made from the gentle pressing of dried bunches of grapes—in effect, from raisins. It was very sweet and relatively high in alcohol. By the early fifteenth century, however, it had practically ceased to be imported into England, although, according to one writer, it had a beautiful red color and aroma, it was not too sweet, and it had an exquisite taste. But it was too expensive to be widely available in public inns: only three out of some four hundred in London served it, and these were undoubtedly inns patronized by the Quality.

There are at least two possibilities for the indeterminate nature of the wines in Canterbury Tales. First of all, specific types of wine were usually irrelevant to the stories, and Chaucer himself reportedly did not care overmuch for wine. But the other was that having much detail as such was unusual, although the purchaser presumably did know the country of origin of the wine he bought. (But what was the Pardoner’s “white wyn of Lepe,” which was a “wyn of Spaigne”?) When you purchased wine, you usually depended on the merchant, ordering from him, say, five casks of wine from Gascony or a butt of malmsey or two casks of Rhenish. The merchant would then supply it, but it is doubtful whether a list of estates and appropriate tasting notes were included with the delivery.

What was the ambrosia of the gods?

THIS IS A question that’s bound to come up sooner or later, often (in our experience) triggered by something special from Château d’Yquem or a particularly fine Tokaji, maybe a Banyuls or a glass of Klein Constantia. Whatever, the thing that sets them off—“Ah, the ambrosia of the gods!”—is usually something sweet and white.

Sometimes they may say nectar instead of ambrosia, but the truth is, it makes little difference: the words seem originally to have been used interchangeably, though ambrosia has some seniority in the matter. Subsequently, nectar seems to have become the drink of the gods, and ambrosia their food, but that’s more from custom than precision—precision being unattainable because it’s unlikely that there are any gods on Mount Olympus, and if there were, we wouldn’t know what they drank.

The word ambrosia, in this context, may be one of those fascinating coincidences that give rise to false but enduring associations.