Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [9]
With sentiments like these, and the ability to craft them into memorable verses, it is perhaps no wonder that he, and others like him, recited them to trusted friends while sipping from goblets of wine. Were they the earliest samizdat?
What was the truth about Cleopatra’s pearl?
IN ORDER TO impress Mark Antony, Cleopatra supposedly dissolved a fabulously valuable pearl in her cup of wine and drank it. Anyone who has tried this will realize that any wine you might be able to stomach would not be acidic enough to destroy a pearl. Pliny, on the other hand, wrote that “the servants placed in front of her only a single vessel containing vinegar, the strong rough quality of which can melt pearls” (IX.58). This is certainly more plausible, for the acetic acid concentration in vinegar might be sufficient to dissolve a pearl, which is mostly calcium carbonate; however, unless it was crushed first, the process would take rather a long time, and Mark Antony might have lost interest and left. Furthermore, the residual acetic acid would have made the drink distinctly unpleasant. Perhaps she looked into his eyes in a sultry manner in order to distract him while she drank the wine and just swallowed the pearl.
What was Falstaff expecting when he called for more sack?
SACK, OR SACKE, or sherris-sack, or a number of other variations, was a very popular drink from the early Tudor period throughout the next century or so, but it bore only a partial resemblance to the sherry of today. The plays of Shakespeare are littered with references to sack, but probably the most famous, as these things go, is Falstaff’s paean in Act IV of Henry IV, Part II. He had been challenged for cowardice by Prince John of Lancaster, a son of Henry IV, because “when everything is ended, then you come”—he had managed to miss participating in the crushing of a rebellion. Falstaff denies to Prince John that he is a coward, but he afterward admits to himself that he might be but for sack:
The … property of your excellent sherris is the warming of the blood; which before, cold and settled, left the liver white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity and cowardice; but the sherris warms it, and makes it course from the inwards to the parts extremes … [S]kill in the weapon is nothing without sack, for that sets it a-work.
But sack did more than make men brave: it also
ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes; which delivered o’er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit.
So sack was a wine which could make the drinker—depending on the point of view of the spectator—garrulous and foolhardy, or witty and brave.
There is general agreement as to its origins as a Mediterranean wine. The English, who had a centuries-long love affair with the wines of Iberia for reasons of taste and politics—centuries of wars with France had rendered access to claret less than straightforward—were the most notable devotees of sack. In due course, they settled on the sack from southwest Spain. The outcome was general agreement that “sherris-sacke”—and later sherry—could only come from Jerez de la Frontera (as did the name), but in Shakespeare’s time and later, sack could also come from the Spanish-dominated Canary Islands. Indeed, in his Dictionary, Samuel Johnson defined sack as “a kind of sweet wine, now brought chiefly from the Canaries,” adding that “the sack of Shakespeare is believed to be what is now called Sherry.”
Sack could be both dry and sweet. Fundamentally, sack was a dry wine, but it could be sweetened by the addition of concentrated juice from a very sweet grape, the Pedro Ximenez (as is the case with sherry today). In Falstaff’s day sack was normally sweet, but often the English—who had a notoriously sweet tooth—themselves added sugar or honey to it. It was white or gold or tawny, but never red. It could be harsh and strong, and this wine was often called the sherry