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Throughout the history of herbal medicine-making, wine was commonly employed as a menstruum to coax into solution the virtues of several plants, and the preparations formed were called vinous tinctures or medicated wines. In the U.S. and Britain, the wines most often used for menstrua were the official wine sherry, together with port, madeira, teneriffe, and claret.

Our ancestors found certain advantages in the use of wine as a pharmaceutical menstruum: it dissolves substances normally considered insoluble in water, and, to a large extent, resists their tendency to spontaneous change. At the same time, wine is less a stimulant than rectified or proof spirit, both from its smaller proportion of alcohol and from the modified state in which the alcohol exists in wine’s composition.

Medicated wines are one of the oldest class of Galenic preparations. They are hydro-alcoholic solutions made from various plants and employing white (sherry) or red (port) wine as the principal solvent or menstruum. In 1906, the official U.S. Pharmacopoeia VIII recognized red wine, white wine, and 8 medicated wines. In 1916, the National Formulary IV included formulas for 15 wines, all of which were made with sherry, but none have been official in later editions.

Herbal or medicinal wines are tinctures in which the menstruum is wine. The solvent power of wines on herb material depends primarily on the water and alcohol they contain. The acid that wine usually contains serves in some instances to increase its solvent power. The absence of uniformity in the proportion of alcohol to water in commercial wines renders the preparations made with them of unequal strength. The availability of other preparations such as tinctures and fluid extracts, which can render a more standardized strength (at a precision which can seldom be attained when wine is used), and the legal restrictions affecting the use of wines during the period of national prohibition, accounted for the decline in popularity of medicinal wines and their eventual deletion from official compendia. However, in spite of the heightened degree of pharmaceutical precision attainable from mixtures of grain alcohol and water, and the applauded preservative action of these high-alcohol content extracts, to me they are somehow less consonant with the human body than medicinal wines, and for my nature they often vibrate a bit too … medical. Herbal wines come across more as flavorsome foods and genial tonics. In contrast to the use of grain alcohol extracts, the employment of which often stems from a rather solemn, clinical, and renovating perspective, herbal wines seem to have a more festive relationship with the human mind and body. In my experience, the spirit of imbibing an herbal wine lends itself more to the mental and spiritual celebration of health and wellness.

As discussed later in the vinegar monologue (Chapter Fifteen), hyper-extractants and perpetual-preservatives served the medical/pharmaceutical establishments well in the manufacturing and marketing of their uniform strength, high potency, heroic products, but we lay herbalists need not rely so heavily on these qualities as we create a home pharmacy of herbal tonics. Because we have made ourselves more independent and can recreate our herbal preparations annually if we wish, they don’t have to last “forever” on a shelf. And our handmade meds need not always present a precise strength or be pharmacologically mega-potent to touch our health. In addition to their abundant herbal actions, they provide other components in their overall tonifying therapeutic effect not found in the use of commercial products. Inherent in their handmade character are the seasonal joys we experience by nature of going outdoors into the wilds, along a pathway, and into the garden, seeking, visiting, and harvesting moderate amounts of our herbal allies and creating our own premium products. The handmade nature of our herbal preparations supplies us a considerably broader spectrum