5: Early Modern Europe 1500–1700

Alcohol, Religion, and Culture

The early modern period, from about 1500 to the eighteenth century, saw alcohol firmly entrenched in the daily diets of European populations but also witnessed immense changes in the types of alcohol available. Distilled spirits, with their much higher alcohol levels, had been made in Europe for medicinal purposes in very small volumes for a century or more, but they became much more widely available and consumed during the 1500s. (This is the subject of Chapter 6.) Brewing, as we have seen, had already undergone major organizational and technological changes: from small to large in scale, and hops were used to make beer that lasted longer and could be shipped to more distant markets. During the 1500s, the issues of conservation also began to bear on wine, which was notoriously unstable. Producers in some regions began to take advantage of the distilled spirits being made in commercial volumes to add brandy as a conservation agent. These “fortified wines,” notably sherry and port, had higher alcohol levels and more lasting power than regular wine, and they quickly found eager consumers in England and other parts of Europe.

But before spirits and fortified wines began to make an impact on European drinking patterns, a religious shift, the Protestant Reformation, had important consequences for the history of alcohol in Europe. Protestantism was a cool-climate religion, more successful in northern Europe than in the south. Generally aligned with the geography of alcohol, it had more traction in beer-drinking (and, later, spirits-consuming) societies than in southern and Mediterranean regions where wine was easily produced and more commonly consumed. This correlation is intriguing, and it has been suggested that in Catholic cultures, wine was heavily symbolic of social unity, so that any threat to wine was seen and was resisted as a danger to the community.¹ Protestants might have been viewed as latter-day barbarians, sweeping into Catholic Europe with a message of moderation in alcohol consumption and critical of contemporary drinking practices. But it seems to be nothing more than coincidental that Protestantism was largely unsuccessful in the wine-producing regions of Europe. For one thing, some of the wine-producing areas of southern France, northern Germany, and Switzerland rallied to the Protestant cause. For another, the decisions as to which faith to follow were far more often made by political leaders (kings, dukes, and others) than by the mass of the population.²

Did the Protestants really pose a threat to wine and other alcoholic beverages? Reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin had myriad objections to the doctrines and practices of the Church of Rome (the Catholic Church), and they accused it of having a lax attitude toward all kinds of immorality. Yet Protestant and Catholic positions on alcohol were essentially the same: everyday consumption was desirable for dietary and health purposes, but drinking beyond those needs—and, of course, drunkenness—was sinful and socially dangerous and should be punished. But if they agreed with Catholics on the basic message, Protestants argued that the Church of Rome had failed to enforce these rules and had turned a blind eye to the heavy drinking that they believed was widespread and the prime cause of the blasphemy and sinful behavior that afflicted the Christian world. They often portrayed Catholic priests and monks as lazy, alcohol-sodden fornicators who were as guilty as the sinful hordes that they were supposed to be models for. In doctrinal terms, then, Protestants were more rigorous toward alcohol consumption, and it is noteworthy that Protestants were far more active than Catholics in the temperance and prohibition movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the 1500s, only a few radical Protestants called for complete abstinence from alcohol—an extraordinary policy to advocate at a time when beer and wine were intrinsic parts of the daily diet for most adults and were considered far healthier alternatives to water. One would-be prohibitionist was the German reformer Sebastian Franck, who condemned alcohol for its contribution to all manner of vice and, believing that humans were too weak to resist it, called for it to be banned altogether. Anyone who drank alcohol, he wrote, should be expelled from the community of believers: “Oh misery! We are not alone drunk from wine, but drunk, drunk with the lying spirit, error and ignorance. . . . For so long as no ban [on alcohol] exists, and is in place, I recognize no Gospel or Christian community to speak of. One must remove the impure from the community of God.”³

In contrast to such ideas, most Protestant leaders attempted the more feasible (but still daunting) task of suppressing excessive drinking, rather than alcohol itself, and various Protestant churches introduced stringent laws against unnecessary drinking. John Calvin, for one, tried to make taverns less attractive as places of sociability by prohibiting some of the practices that brought people together there. His 1547 regulations forbade any person to treat another to a drink, under penalty of a fine of 3 sous. In cases of drunkenness, a first offense carried a fine of 3 sous; a second offense earned a fine of 5 sous; a third offense was punished by a fine of 10 sous and a period of imprisonment.⁴ Nor were these regulations, similar versions of which were applied in a number of Lutheran towns in Germany, mere threats. In the Calvinist community of Emden, in the Netherlands, during the second half of the 1500s, convictions for drunkenness made up a quarter of all breaches of social order. Among those convicted, men outnumbered women by five to one.⁵

Another reformer, Martin Bucer, also adopted rigorous alcohol policies. He believed that Christians should watch what they ate and drank (and what they wore and how they lived generally) to ensure that they behaved in a godly manner. He was opposed to the very existence of public drinking places, and while acknowledging that inns were necessary for travelers, he insisted that innkeepers should be moral, decent people who looked after the spiritual well-being of their guests as well as their physical needs.⁶ Bucer was one of the influential theologians within the ranks of English Puritans, some of whom later settled in America. During the 1500s, English Puritans railed against the evils of excessive drinking and identified the tavern as the main problem. Taverns, they argued, were not only places of sin, immorality, and blasphemy but also sites of crime and social disorder. As one English Puritan colorfully put it in 1631, alehouses were “nests of Satan where the owls of impiety lurk and where all evil is hatched.”⁷

The Protestants’ rigor was directed toward all forms of alcohol, but they might have had a special concern that wine—which, like Catholics, they considered symbolic of Christ’s blood—was not abused. The Protestants stressed the need for Christians to take communion frequently, not merely once a year as many Catholics did. Moreover, they insisted that communicants should receive both bread and wine, rather than only bread, as had been the practice in the Roman church since the twelfth century. Calvin denounced the church for “stealing” communion wine from the people and giving it “as special property to a few shaven and anointed men.”⁸ His personal commitment to wine is demonstrated by his receiving seven barrels of it a year as part of his salary.⁹

Controlling alcohol consumption was no less a challenge in the 1500s than it had been for political and religious authorities in earlier centuries. Sometimes—on days free of work, on feast days, and at celebrations such as marriages—alcohol was consumed mostly for pleasure and conviviality with other members of the community. But beer and wine were consumed every day of the workweek; there was no sense that working and drinking ought to be strictly segregated, even if only to the extent that workers might drink alcohol during breaks and mealtimes. The modern Western model of work discipline—observing fixed hours of work, with breaks at specified times and of closely monitored duration—emerged only in the nineteenth century; early modern workers expected to drink on the job, just as modern workers expect to have access to water as they work.

The drinking patterns of the great mass of people in preindustrial Europe are unknown. Most people lived in the country and worked in family economies, where all members of the family contributed to their collective survival. Just how regularly they drank alcohol, and how much, is not known, as they left few records. We have sporadic and uneven information on the alcohol rations of some workers in the labor market. Sailors on Dutch merchant ships in the 1600s drank 1.6 liters of beer a day in winter and 2 liters a day in summer, although we have to bear in mind that on long voyages beer was consumed only until it spoiled.¹⁰ Fishermen from Brittany and Normandy who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to the Canadian coast to catch cod took about 240 liters of wine or cider for each person.¹¹ But drinking on the job was not limited to those who worked on ships. French domestic servants drank poor quality wine called vin de domestique as part of their keep, while construction workers often received beer or wine (depending on where in Europe they worked) as part of their pay. The diary of an apprentice set out the pattern in an English printer’s shop in the early 1700s: “My companion at the press drank every day a pint [of ale] before breakfast; a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese; a pint between breakfast and dinner; a pint at dinner; a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work.”¹²That amounted to six pints of ale a day.

The most spectacular example of drinking while working was provided by the Republic of Venice, whose naval strength was underpinned by the Arsenal, a massive shipyard that employed more than 2,000 workers.¹³ Like most workers at the time, the Arsenal’s expected to have beer or wine for hydration and nourishment as they labored, but their high status led the authorities to provide them with unusually large volumes of wine of unusually superior quality. Wine was diluted in the ratio of two parts of water to one of wine to make a drink called bevanda, which probably had a final alcohol level of about 4 or 5 percent, similar to that of many modern beers. Wines from northern Italy tended to lack strength and flavor once diluted, and after complaints by workers, the Arsenal’s management turned to the higher-alcohol wines of southern Italy’s warm-climate regions and each year arranged for sizeable volumes to be shipped up the Adriatic coast. The managers of the Arsenal were so sensitive to the requirements of their skilled labor force that they paid almost any price for wine that would meet the workers’ approval.

Once in Venice, the wine was stored in massive 2,000-liter casks, and each day staff would dilute the required volume, generally about 6,000 liters, using fresh water brought specially from the Brenta River rather than the local wells that were sometimes contaminated by salt water. Twelve men then carried the bevanda in buckets to various parts of the sixty-acre Arsenal twice a day so that workers had access to it throughout their shifts. Bevanda was more than a thirst-quencher; it was a stimulant that helped workers get through the long, ten-hour workday—extra rations were made available for workers doing overtime—and if it failed to arrive on time, gang leaders would send workers to fetch it.

Not only did workers get a wine ration as part of their regular benefits, but they also enjoyed additional wine when a ship was completed and launched: about 2 liters of undiluted wine for each worker and apprentice who had been engaged on the ship. Nor was wine confined to the workers. Senior managers at the Arsenal received barrels of wine that were the equivalent of as much as a third of their money wages—another incentive for them to order good-quality wine. The barrels were delivered directly to their houses and, depending on the recipient’s rank, ranged from 450 to 1,800 liters a year. A wine ration also extended to others who worked for the Venetian state. Cattle butchers received wine when they worked in the municipal slaughterhouses, as did the sailors and free oarsmen on Venice’s naval and merchant ships.

But the Arsenal has drawn attention because the thirst of its workers was astonishing. They went through more than half a million liters a year, and wine featured as the second most expensive item in the Arsenal’s annual budget, second only to timber for ships and accounting for much more than was spent on such shipbuilding necessities as tar, canvas, and rope. In time, the Senate of Venice began to show concern at the cost of the Arsenal’s wine, which accounted for 2 percent of the republic’s total annual budget, and ordered an investigation. It found that the volume of wine consumed had increased steadily over time, from an average 3.2 liters per man each day in the period 1615–19 to 5 liters a day in the late 1630s. In the mid-1500s, consumption had been 2.5 liters a day per worker, so per capita consumption had doubled in less than a century.

The authorities seem to have abetted this increase in the mid-1630s by building a wine “fountain,” a structure in an open room where bevanda flowed from three bronze tubes. A French visitor to the Arsenal, Robert de Cotte, described it as “a basin where there are three spigots an inch in diameter: a fountain running continuously, where all the workforce go to take as much wine as they please.”¹⁴ It is estimated that the fountain spewed out 10 liters of liquid a minute, or 6,000 liters during the workday. The point of the fountain is not clear, although there seems to have been some concern for the quality of the bevanda in the vats where it was diluted, as workers put their hands into the liquid while helping themselves to their rations. If hygiene was the rationale for the fountain, it reveals surprising squeamishness for a period not known for hand-washing practices. The fountain would have reduced this sort of contamination, but the continuous flowing of the bevanda cannot have improved its intrinsic quality, as the constant aeration must have oxidized the wine. Robert de Cotte noted that “this wine is not of the best,”¹⁵ but being French, he might well have thought that of all Italian wine.

The Arsenal’s workers were apparently less discriminating, as consumption rose after the fountain was built, but an investigation into the increased consumption ignored the effects of the fountain and suggested other reasons. First, workers were staying at the shipyard during their ninety-minute lunch break and consuming the state’s wine, rather than their own, with their meal. Second, masses of men and women, including friends and relatives of workers, vagrants, and members of various commercial and political delegations that visited the Arsenal, were helping themselves to the wine that was so freely available from the fountain. Yet even though Venice’s government was constantly looking for economies, the wine fountain was retained, perhaps because it was a powerful and conspicuous symbol of the wealth and largesse of the republic.¹⁶ Clearly, if foreigners were as impressed by the fountain as their many references to it suggest, it was rare for workers elsewhere to have apparently unlimited access to wine like this.

As for the general level of alcohol consumption in Europe in the early modern period, we are again faced with uncertainty. The statistics are imprecise, and estimates of per capita consumption do not help us with the all-important variations in consumption by gender, class, and age. The figures from individual towns often range widely, as these annual per capita levels of beer consumption show:

The figure for Antwerp would provide each inhabitant a liter of beer a day, but if we bear in mind that early modern European populations included a high percentage of children and young people, there is a possibility that adult males, the heaviest consumers, had much more (perhaps about 50 percent more) than the average liter. But we should remember that there was no legal minimum drinking age at this time, and that the line between adulthood and childhood was drawn at ages different from today’s. Young people often began working full time in their early teens, and we do not know whether these young workers drank the same amount as workers in their twenties and older.

Ghent’s 202 liters provided little more than half a liter of beer a day, which might have meant that adult males got three-quarters of a liter or more. On the other hand, the inmates of Wismar’s hospital seem to have received 3 liters of beer a day. Other figures of beer consumption include 2 liters a day in a Danish children’s workhouse in 1621 and 4.5 liters a day at Stockholm Castle in 1558, before the rules were revised in 1577 to give nobles 5.2 liters of beer a day and tradesmen and workers 3.9 liters a day.¹⁸

The variations in figures might well reflect variations in practice; there is no need to assume that there was a standard level of alcohol consumption in this period any more than there is today. But it is important to remember that most adults in this period would have needed at least 2 liters of water a day—possibly as much as twice that, given the demands of physical labor—simply for rehydration. A liter or two of beer would have gone so far to meet this requirement, but the rest must have been made up by water in food, water alone, or other alcoholic beverages.

We can only imagine the trepidation with which many poor people must have consumed water, if they were aware (as they must have been) of the dire warnings against it. Although some water (from springs or rain) was considered less harmful than other (such as from rivers and wells), water as a beverage was generally advised against. It was considered especially dangerous in England (and, we should suppose, elsewhere in northern Europe), where (according to prevailing medical opinion) the damp, cold climate demanded that people consume foods and beverages that contributed dryness and warmth. Some of the medical advice recognized, however, that the poor had no option but to drink water.

If the poor could not afford beer, they certainly could not afford wine, which tended to be more expensive, but consumption levels of wine in early modern Europe are no less certain than those of beer. As a beverage of daily consumption, wine was more common in the southern half of Europe where it was made, and again the figures—often based on the volume of wine that was taxed and on estimates of population—vary widely. One compilation proposes these examples of annual wine consumption in selected towns and cities of France:

We might well expect an apothecary and his assistants to drink more wine (and perhaps spirits, too) than the average Parisian, but perhaps not almost five times more (1.9 liters vs. 0.4 liters a day), especially when overall consumption seemed to be higher in the later period. Again, figures of individual and per capita consumption might indicate something, but it is difficult to see what, as there is no concentration within the range of volumes of wine consumed.

An unusual window into elite drinking is offered by the diets of Bishop Hugh Latimer and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer while they were confined in Oxford before being burned (in 1555 and 1556, respectively) as Protestant traitors and heretics. They were served alcohol (either ale or wine or both) at every meal, but Cranmer’s superior rank gave him more of it. On average, the bread and ale Cranmer received at dinner and supper cost a shilling (a considerable sum), while Latimer’s cost a quarter of that. Cranmer also received wine costing 6 pence at the two meals, while Latimer’s cost less than half that sum. And while Cranmer’s alcoholic drinks between meals cost 2 pence, Latimer’s cost only 1. In addition to the clear hierarchy of volume, the sheer scope of expenditure on alcohol was remarkable: bread and ale (they were combined in the budgets, reinforcing the notion that ale was thought of as liquid bread), together with wine, accounted for 29 percent of the total expenditure on their prison diets, which included a wide range of fish, poultry, meat, and other food.²⁰

Overall, it is impossible to describe alcohol consumption rates, and therefore trends, with any confidence. The statistical information is scattered, and even if it is reliable, it does not help us establish anything more than per capita consumption for specific populations, groups, or individuals, which is of limited use. Neither are inferences based on economic and demographic conditions always helpful; commodity prices rose dramatically during the 1500s as population increased and put pressure on resources, and we might expect consumption of beer and wine to have declined. In fact, the production of both seems to have increased steadily, and that indicates increased consumption. Moreover, the wine trade, in particular, became more complex and sophisticated, ensuring reliable and regular movement of wine from the producing to the consuming regions.²¹

But although it is difficult to form a reliable picture of drinking patterns in the early modern period, we are faced with an embarrassment of material telling us what various authorities—mainly medical and religious—thought about alcohol. With the invention of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century, books began to pour off the presses, and one of the most popular genres, at least until the mid-1600s, dealt with diet. Hundreds of books, most written by physicians, dealt with food and drink and their implications for physical and intellectual well-being. According to Ken Albala, a preeminent historian of the literature, “wine is given fanatical treatment, and is often considered a necessary nutrient.”²²

For all that both beer and wine were valued as good and nutritious, familiar warnings against excessive drinking were voiced throughout the early modern period. Too much wine, in particular, was blamed for sending vapors into the head that brutalized the spirit and provoked a desire for sensual pleasure and other passions. Popular proverbs, often vehicles for the expression and reinforcement of community values, conveyed the message of moderation. “Eat bread as long as it lasts, but drink wine moderately,” advised one French saying. “Whoever surrenders to too much wine retains little wisdom,” ran another, while others expressed the common male anxiety about women drinking: “A drunk woman is not the mistress of her body.” But proverbs, like the people who mouthed them, were not hostile toward wine in itself. One sixteenth-century French saying, “Drink wine like a king, water like a bull,” reflected the association between wine and social status, while another was simply negative toward water: “Water makes you cry, wine makes you sing.” Yet another pointed to the sociability of wine-drinking: “Wine without a friend is like life without a witness.”²³

Not only levels of consumption but types of alcohol varied according to class, gender, and age. Throughout northern Europe especially, beer was the least expensive alcohol, and it was consumed at all levels of society, other than by the indigent who could not afford it. Some of the poor might have drunk some beer when it was dispensed on festive occasions and supplemented it with water in order to satisfy their needs. Above that, people drank beer and avoided water whenever possible, and many began to add small volumes of brandy and other spirits to their diet. Those at even higher social levels—the middle and upper classes—drank many types of alcohol. But in the southern, wine-producing regions of Europe, the pattern of drinking seems to have been quite different. Beer was less commonly consumed, as were spirits, and there were variations by class in the wine consumed. Peasants diluted their wine or drank wine by-products, like the pale, thin, low-alcohol beverages obtained by soaking wine residue, mainly grape skins, in water. They supplemented this with water and sometimes milk. In contrast, the better-off drank wine, its quality (and cost) rising with the consumer’s status.

Although there was an established and robust international and long-distance trade in beer by this time, most of the beer consumed in Europe was locally produced. Grain grew almost everywhere, and local beer was less expensive than beer that had been shipped any distance. Wine was another matter, because most of northern Europe (with the exception of the Loire Valley in France and the lower Rhine in Germany) was sparsely planted in vines. The south of Europe provided wine for the north, and in the north lay the large, urban populations of England, the Low Countries, Germany, and the Baltic area, with their prosperous middle classes. During the early modern period, these populations were receptive to innovations in all aspects of material life, including food and drink, and they were effectively responsible for the success of several wine regions and new styles of wine-based beverages. In 1587, William Harrison listed fifty-six kinds of French wine on the London market and another thirty from places like Italy, Greece, Spain, and the Canary Islands, including such obscure styles as “vernage, cute, piment, raspis, muscatel, rumney, bastard, tyre, osey, caprice, clary and malmsey.”²⁴ A selection like this speaks to a consumer market that supported a wide range of products.

One of the success stories in the world of wine in the 1500s was Spain, which in 1519 became (by dynastic marriage) part of the Habsburg Empire. This gave Spain an affiliation with the Netherlands, and before long Antwerp became a major destination for Spanish wine, both for consumption there and for re-export throughout northern Europe and beyond. It was especially popular in Poland from the beginning of the 1600s.²⁵ Given the success of Spanish wine producers in Europe, it is not surprising that they looked upon the kingdom’s new colonies in Central and South America as additional markets and persistently pressed the king to halt wine production on the far side of the Atlantic. This was not to be, as many regions in South America proved to be ideal for viticulture, and wine shipped from Europe to the Americas rarely arrived in good shape. But even without the American market, Spain’s vineyards and wine production grew throughout the sixteenth century, to the point that the authorities became concerned at the loss of arable land to viticulture. In 1597, King Philip II imposed regulations in the interests of ensuring good quality wine for his court and reducing the production of the poor quality wine that was believed to be causing widespread drunkenness among his subjects. Among other things, the rules forbade blending red and white wine and using harmful additives, and they required winemakers in Valladolid (where the royal court was located) to obtain a license.²⁶

Spanish wine—from both the mainland and the Canary Islands—became especially popular in England after the English lost Gascony in 1453 and thus the political link that had given the English easy access to the wines of Bordeaux for three centuries. As exports to England grew, one of the Spanish wines to attract particular attention was sherry (often called “sack” or “sherry-sack” at the time) a fortified wine from the south of Spain. Sherry remained for centuries a quintessentially English (as well as Spanish) drink and entered the cultural lexicon through William Shakespeare, who in Henry IV, Part II had Falstaff credit sack for the virtues of Prince Henry (here called Harry). Sherry, asserts Falstaff, drives out foolishness and dullness and quickens the intellect and the wit. It warms the blood and makes the coward brave. “Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for the cold blood he did naturally inherit from his father he hath like lean, sterile and bare land, manured, husbanded and tilled, with excellent endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile sherries, that he has become very hot and valiant. If I had a thousand sons, the first principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.”²⁷

The English stayed loyal to Spanish wines through the 1600s and beyond. In the 1590s, an average of 640 pipes (barrels) of Canary wine landed in London, but that number rose to more than 5,000 in the 1630s and to 6,500 in the 1690s.²⁸ By 1634 the writer James Howell declared, “I think there’s more Canary brought into England than into all the World besides. When Sacks and Canaries were brought in first among us, they were us’d to be drunk in aqua vitae measures [i.e., small measures for distilled spirits], and ’twas held fit only for those who us’d to carry their leggs in their hands, their eyes upon their noses, and an almanack in their bones; but now they go down everyone’s throat both young and old, like milk.”²⁹ An anonymous poet penned a piece of doggerel in praise of Spanish wine:

All you that troubled are with Melancholly,

The Spaniards have a Juyce will make you jolly;

Good wine, good wine, I say’s the thing,

That can for such distemper comfort bring:

It comforts the heart, and quickens each vein,

If a man be half dead, it will fetch him again.³⁰

Another alcoholic beverage that emerged from the early modern period was sparkling wine. Although now made by various methods, including simply injecting wine with carbon dioxide, sparkling wine originally resulted when wine fermented in a sealed bottle. As grape juice ferments into wine, it produces both alcohol, which is retained, and carbon dioxide, which is allowed to disperse. But if fermentation takes place in a sealed bottle, the carbon dioxide cannot escape; it is dissolved in the liquid and slowly escapes as bubbles of gas when the wine is opened. In the modern “Champagne method,” used widely since the nineteenth century, yeast and sugar are added to base wine, then sealed, causing a second, in-bottle fermentation that produces the potential bubbles.

The origins of sparkling wine are much debated, but a credible argument is made for the role of an English scientist, Christopher Merret, who presented a paper on wine to the Royal Society in London in the 1660s. It included a demonstration that adding sugar to wine in a bottle and then sealing the bottle produced a second fermentation that resulted in bubbles when the wine was opened. Merret’s areas of scientific research and publication included glassmaking (hence a link to bottles) and tree bark (a link to cork). It is possible that Merret’s was a chance finding. Sugar was just becoming popular among wealthy Europeans in the 1600s, and they began to sweeten everything—including coffee, tea, and chocolate, which had not been sweetened where they were originally consumed outside Europe. The English also began to add sugar to wine, as Fynes Moryson observed in 1617: “Gentlemen carouse only with wine, with which many mix sugar. . . . And because the taste of the English is thus delighted with sweetness, the wines in taverns (for I speak not of merchants’ or gentlemen’s cellars) are commonly mixed at the filling thereof, to make them pleasant.”³¹

It is conceivable that, instead of putting a teaspoon of sugar in each glass of wine, as with tea and coffee, some gentlemen added sugar to the bottles they brought home from their wine merchants, then sealed them for drinking later. They might have found, when they opened the bottles, that their wine was dry and bubbly, rather than sweet and still. It is possible then, that early sparkling wines—and perhaps the earliest made by the “Champagne method”—were made not in the mysterious and romantic ambience of a monastery cellar in northern France but accidentally in the cellars of London gentlemen who were simply trying to sugar up their wines to satisfy the taste preferences of the day. The original sparkling wines (including champagne) were probably much sweeter than the dry (brut) style most popular today; “sugar-free” champagne was first made for the English market in the late 1800s.

The person once credited with inventing sparkling wine, the French monk Dom Pierre Pérignon, is surrounded by too many myths to be any longer considered the inventor. The winemaker at the abbey of Hautvilliers, near Epinay, in the 1660s, Dom Pérignon is reputed to have been blind and to have put the bubbles in his wine by accident. Tasting it for the first time, he is said to have cried, “I am drinking the stars!” But this, and most of the Dom Pérignon story, was developed in the early nineteenth century as part of a process of rehabilitating the reputation of the church in France after the French Revolution.³² Other claimants to the title of producing the first sparkling wine are Limoux, in France, and Franciacorta, in Italy, both regions now well known for their sparkling wine. With sparkling wines, as with Bordeaux wines in the thirteenth century and sherry in the sixteenth, the relatively prosperous English market was responsible for the initial success.

Port was another wine whose initial success rested on its popularity among English consumers. Like sherry, port is wine fortified with brandy, with the difference that the brandy is added to the wine during fermentation (rather than after, as with sherry), before all the sugar in the grape juice is converted to alcohol. The addition of brandy raises the alcohol level to a point that kills the yeast, leaving port with elevated alcohol and also sweet because of the residual sugar not converted to alcohol. The port style of wine seems to have been first produced in the 1670s and was probably a variant on what had become a common practice of adding some brandy as a stabilizer and preservative to barrels of wine that were being shipped to England. English wine merchants had looked to Portugal to make up some of the deficit during one of the periodic interruptions in trade with France. Much of the Portuguese wine imported to England came from the Douro Valley (now the sole source of port) and was shipped through the town of Porto. The association gave the wine the name porto, which remains its name in French.

Another wine style that appeared in the sixteenth century also appealed to Europeans’ sweet tooth: Tokaji aszu, a sweet white wine from the Tokaj region of Hungary. Made first around 1570, Tokaji aszu was (and is) made by leaving grapes on the vine after the usual harvest period until they had shriveled (aszu means “dried”); thus they lost water content and increased their sugar ratio. The resulting wine, which often fermented for months, was rich, sweet, and expensive, and it was a hit on many elite markets. In 1562, Pope Pius IV declared that Tokaji aszu was the wine fit for popes, and King Louis XV of France declared it to be “the king of wines and the wine of kings.”³³ Tokaji aszu was widely served in Europe’s royal and imperial courts through the nineteenth century, and such was the concern to protect its quality that a vineyard classification system was in place by 1730. Other regulations, governing the region and production methods (a forerunner of the “appellation” system) were added by the end of the eighteenth century.

As we can see, a number of different styles of wine became fashionable among Europe’s middle and upper classes in this period, particularly in England and to varying extents elsewhere. The English lower classes had their turn with gin in the eighteenth century, but until then, the alcohol component of their diet was consistent: ale and beer, although for two decades, between 1530 and 1552, English beer was a casualty of the Reformation. Although beer (made with hops) had become sufficiently popular in England that beer brewers had achieved guild status, in 1530 King Henry VIII forbade the use of hops in brewing, thus making only ale (made with gruit) legal. This might have reflected Henry’s personal taste, but there was also a religious dimension, in that most of the hops used in English brewing were imported from the Protestant Low Countries. In 1530, Henry had not yet broken with the Church of Rome and had been named Defender of the Faith by the pope. Henry VIII might well have considered beer containing hops as Protestant—an impression reinforced by the fact that Europe’s major beer-producing regions had become Protestant—and this might explain his excommunication of beer from the English community.

Buttressing the ban on beer was an argument that ale was the only brewed beverage that was appropriate for the English. Andrew Boorde, an English physician, wrote in 1542 (during the ban on hopped beer), “Ale is made of malt and water . . . [and] ale for an Englishman is a natural drink. . . . Beer is made of malt, of hops and water. It is a natural drink for a Dutchman. And now in these late days it is much used in England to the detriment of many English men; especially it killeth them the which be troubled with the colic and the stone . . . ; for the drink is a cold drink yet it doth make a man fat, and doth inflate the belly; as it doth appear by the Dutch men’s faces and bellies.”³⁴ Nonetheless, small amounts of hops were cultivated in England at this time, and there was clearly some demand for hopped beer. In 1552, King Edward VI lifted the ban on using hops, and English brewers resumed their production of beer.

Henry VIII, often represented as a hearty drinker in his own right, also had an impact on England’s brewing industry when he eventually broke with the Church of Rome and dissolved England’s religious houses. Monasteries had long been centers of distilling and brewing, and their disappearance left the production of spirits and ale entirely in the hands of individual owners, many of whom were former monks who applied their skills in the secular world. Ale was also made in institutions like the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, each of which had its own brewery. The days of domestic ale production were coming to an end, and brewsters (women brewers) were disappearing even more quickly. Their activities within guilds were restricted and, as of 1521, although a woman was allowed to continue brewing after her brewer husband died, she had to relinquish the right as soon as she remarried.³⁵

As we have seen, the shift from ale to beer had important implications for the brewing industry and for women because the durability of beer made it the choice beverage for export and for important clients such as armies. As early as 1418, Londoners had sent both ale and beer to their army besieging Rouen, but by the early sixteenth century, the English military used beer exclusively. In the first years of Henry VIII’s reign, about 1512–15, an extensive brewery was constructed at Portsmouth for the sole purpose of providing beer for the English fleet.³⁶ The sheer scale of production needed to supply beer to early modern armies and navies and to feed the growing beer trade quickly excluded women from the most profitable sectors of brewing. Women did not have access to the capital needed, and married women were unable to sign contracts in their own right and thus could not form business partnerships. Although many women became active in the small-scale distilling industry that developed throughout northern Europe during the 1500s, they virtually disappeared from the much more extensive brewing industry.

For better-off Europeans, some alcohols were increasingly treated as commodities with cultural value, rather than as material necessities for health and hydration. The wealthy middle and upper classes could quench their thirsts with beer and wine and enjoy spirits for their flavor and impact, but these were often not generic beverages. As we have seen, more than a hundred different wines, identified by place origin or style, were imported into England by the late 1500s, and all beverages underwent this kind of (what is now called) brand differentiation. We can see a transition to it in the description of the beverages ordered for the installation of the archbishop of Canterbury in 1504: 6 pipes (a pipe holds 535 liters) of red wine, 4 pipes of claret, a pipe of choice white wine, a pipe of wine of Osey, a butt (573 liters) of malmsey, 2 tierces of Rhenish wine, 4 tuns (a tun holds 1,146 liters) of London ale, 6 tuns of Kentish ale, and 20 tuns of English beer.³⁷ Some of the descriptions are generic (red wine) or fairly generic (choice white wine), but the remainder are origin-specific. If there were not desirable distinctions, why would the order not be simply for 10 tuns of ale, rather than 6 from Kent and 4 from London? At the same time, they are not yet identified by individual brewer.

By the later 1600s, however, wine began to be identified by producer when Arnaud de Pontac, a noble and president of the Parlement (royal court of law) of Bordeaux and the owner of vineyards around a château called Haut-Brion, began to sell his wine on the wealthy and status-conscious London market. The English diarist Samuel Pepys, as status-conscious as anyone, recorded a visit to the Royal Oak tavern, where he “drank a sort of French wine, called Ho Brian, that had a good and most particular taste I never met with.”³⁸ It is intriguing to imagine what the wine tasted like; for Pepys to have commented on it that way, it must have been very different from the rest of the clarets then available in London.

Englishmen traveling on the Continent started to show critical appreciation of the wines they encountered. John Raymond commented that Albano, near Rome, “deserves seeing, if not for the Antiquity, yet for the good wine; one of the best sorts in Italy.” Richard Lassel’s guide to the streams and fountains of Caparola noted, “Having walked these gardens about, youl [sic] deserve after so much water, a little wine, which will not be wanting to you from the rare cellar lyeing under the great terrasse before the house, and perchance youl think the wineworks here as fine as the waterworks.” Richard Fleckno was complimentary about the wine of Rome, if not its winemakers: “Good meat there is, delicious wine, and excellent fruit. . . . But that is the Climat’s virtue, and none of theirs.”³⁹

Given that beer and ale were shipped and stored in big barrels, individual consumers were not likely to keep a reserve on hand for personal use. But well-off wine-drinkers could avail themselves of developments in glassmaking and purchase wine bottles they could fill at wine merchants and taverns. Samuel Pepys noted his pleasure at going to The Mitre tavern in 1663 to watch as his wine was poured into his newly acquired bottles, each adorned with his personal crest. Pepys was fascinated by wine and wrote of the cellar of Thomas Povey, a London merchant and politician: “Upon several shelves there stood bottles of all sorts of wine, new and old, with labels pasted upon each bottle, and in order and plenty as I never saw books in a bookseller’s shop.” On a return visit, Pepys noted that the cellar included a well to keep the wine cool. Pepys’s own cellar, in contrast, seems to have been a collection of small casks and other vessels, and he did not mention bottles, even though he owned some: “I have two tierces of Claret, two quarter casks of Canary, and a smaller vessel of Sack; a vessel of Tent [Spanish red wine], another of Malaga, and another of white wine, all in my cellar together.” Pepys was very pleased with his collection (the equivalent of more than 750 modern bottles of wine), “which, I believe, none of my friends of my name now alive ever had of his owne at one time.”⁴⁰ The comment suggests not only the novelty of the personal wine cellar but also the sense of status that it conveyed.

As more attention was given to the aesthetic variations in wine (a general appreciation of grape varieties followed later), more attention was paid to its finer therapeutic qualities. There was some discussion of the temperature at which wine should be consumed, in view of the widespread practice of warming it first. According to Bruyerin Champier, physician to Francis I of France, many people warmed their wine by the fire or diluted it with warm water, while others heated up iron blades that they plunged into the wine, and the poor achieved the same effect less elegantly with burning sticks taken straight from the fire. Champier disapproved of all these practices, but he also counseled against drinking wine brought directly from a cool cellar. The temperature of such wine, he wrote, damaged the throat, chest, lungs, stomach, and intestines; corrupted the liver; and brought on incurable diseases and sometimes a rapid death. He advised anyone with a cool cellar to let wine warm up to the ambient temperature before drinking it—an early expression of the notion of serving wine at “room temperature.”⁴¹ A similar discussion took place with respect to beer, although it is more surprising to read of warmed-up beer than wine.

But there was no consensus on warming wine, not least because the consideration was not the sensory experience of wine but the effects of temperature on the body. A few decades after Champier advised against drinking wine cool, another physician, Laurent Jaubert, recommended cooling wine and other drinks, especially for young people with hot blood.⁴² Other physicians appealed to the warmth of wine in humoral terms, as distinct from its temperature measured by a thermometer. The Italian physician Baldassare Pisanelli recommended wine in the diet of old people because “the progressive decline of their natural heat requires a supplementary source of warmth to overcome the coldness that accompanies old age.” On the other hand, Pisanelli continued, children should not drink wine because “it adds to more fire on slender kindling, and it disturbs their minds.” Likewise, young people “have a warm and fervent nature,” so that when they drink wine, they “run the risk of becoming powerfully impassioned in the spirit and in the body furiously excited”—presumably a warning that wine aroused sexual feelings.⁴³ It seems to have been a common view. Cardinal Silvio Antoniano wrote in 1584 that children, especially girls, should have little or no wine and should eat simple foods balanced between wet and dry.⁴⁴ This sort of advice runs against the common assumption, which seems often justified by historical sources, that small volumes of alcohol (beer and wine) were consumed by children and young people on a regular basis. It does raise the question (which Pisanelli and Antoniano did not address) of what children should drink, if not wine.

Some physicians, bringing biological models of the ancient world together with prevailing ideas about class-specific biological characteristics, began to develop notions of certain wines being better suited to certain classes. Olivier de Serres, a soil scientist whose expertise in viticulture did not prevent him from advancing medical views, wrote in 1605 that “good, full-bodied red and black wines” were “appropriate for working people . . . and greatly sought after by them, as much as white and claret wines by people of leisure.” (The distinction between “red and black wines” is probably between medium and very dark red wines.) Jean Liebault, another agronomist but also a physician, explained the reason a few years later: “Red wine nourishes more than white or claret, and is more suitable for those who work hard; because work and vigorous exercise neutralize any of the disadvantages that red wine has.” As for black (very dark) wine, “it is best for vignerons and farmers, because . . . it gives more solid and plentiful nourishment and makes the man stronger in his work.”⁴⁵

Liebault pointed out that dark wines weighed on their consumers and made their blood “thick, melancholic and slow-flowing,” but that this was of no concern for manual workers, because they were known to be crude, earthy, thick, and slow anyway. But the same wine would have terrible effects on nobles, the bourgeois, and the clergy, whose work required them to be lively and spiritual. Such men would suffer obstructions of the liver and spleen, loss of appetite, and rawness in the stomach. Such theories effectively anthropomorphized wines, enabling them to be matched to consumers by the similarity of their supposed physical and personality characteristics.

Such arguments were refinements within the general medical belief that, whatever other properties they possessed, alcoholic beverages—especially wine—were therapeutic. The English physician Andrew Boorde wrote that wine “doth rejoice all the powers of man, and doth nourish them; it doth ingender good blood, it doth nourish the brain and all the body.” Surgeons sold ale to their patients, women drank extra beer to help their milk flow, and 43 of the medicinal recipes in the first English handbook on gynecology contained some form of alcohol.⁴⁶

For medical or more prosaic reasons of hydration and pleasure, wine was clearly becoming central to the diet in many parts of France. Some physicians allowed that peasants, presumably in the north of France, who could not afford wine might drink beer or cider instead, but others argued that beer was too harsh and that a weak solution of wine was far preferable. In the sixteenth century, it was alleged that cider-drinking was responsible for the leprosy that was widespread in Normandy, then known for cider (and later for calvados, an apple-based distilled spirit). Stung by the allegation, Julien le Paulmier, an aptly named Protestant physician (the pronunciation of his name is very close to pommier, the French word for “apple tree”), leaped to defend cider, which he believed had cured him of the heart palpitations he had experienced following the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestants in 1572. Le Paulmier argued that wine was a dangerous drug that should be closely controlled by professionals and not left to patients who did not know which wine to consume, how to dilute it, and how to suit it to the climate, season, or individual needs. Cider, in contrast, was good for the digestion and blood, was warm but moderately so, and generally had all the benefits claimed for wine with none of its disadvantages. In short, wrote le Paulmier, “a man who drinks cider lives longer than a man who drinks wine.”⁴⁷

Le Paulmier’s strictures notwithstanding, wine became ever more indispensable in the care of the ill, and when Louis XIV founded Les Invalides, the famous military hospital, in 1676, he exempted it from paying taxes on the first 55,000 liters of wine it purchased each year for the patients. Such was the hospital’s expenditure on wine (there are echoes here of the Arsenal in Venice) that by 1705, only thirty years later, the exemption was raised fifteenfold, to 800,000 liters a year. Officers convalescing in Les Invalides were given a wine ration of one and a quarter liters a day, served as a quarter-liter in the morning and a half-liter each with lunch and dinner. Noncommissioned officers received a smaller allotment, and all evening servings of wine were doubled on certain feast days. So important was wine that when officers were sent from Les Invalides to a spa for treatment, they took a supply of wine with them in case none was available at their destination. On the other hand, deprivation of the wine ration was a punishment for such offenses as writing obscenities on the hospital walls; throwing refuse, urine, or water out the windows; not respecting the rules of cleanliness; and having a fire or candle lit at night after the beating of the retreat.⁴⁸

Outside the walls of institutions like Les Invalides, people drank in the growing number of public drinking places. Each language had its own words for these places, of course: taverns and inns in England, cabarets and guingettes in France, and Gaststätten in Germany, for example. But there were common categories based on the type or types of alcohol they served (such as alehouses and dramshops in England, serving ale and gin, respectively), whether they also offered meals (taverns), and whether they provided accommodations for travelers in addition to food and drink (inns). Various jurisdictions defined drinking places with some precision and determined what each was permitted to serve its clients. (Here all these categories will be covered by the generic term “public houses.”) Although public houses can be traced back thousands of years, only in the sixteenth century did they become fixtures in both rural and urban communities in Europe and places where ordinary people gathered on a regular basis—a practice quite probably enabled by the Protestant Reformation. Throughout the Middle Ages, the most important center of community life was the church and its immediate vicinity. This was the favored location of meetings, community games, and festivities such as church-ales, occasions when parishes sold donated food and ale to raise funds, often for poor relief. When the Reformers largely restricted the use of the church to sacred purposes—and in many cases tried to suppress activities like dancing, game-playing, and communal drinking—people transferred secular functions to the local alehouse or tavern.⁴⁹

The ubiquity of public houses in England is suggested by the fact that by 1577 there was one alehouse for every 142 inhabitants, and that fifty years later there was one for about every 100.⁵⁰ Alehouses were more densely distributed in cities and large towns than in rural villages, and when we bear in mind that half the English population was under the age of eighteen years, we can see that, overall, English adults were well provided with places to drink alcohol. Within London, there was one public house for every sixteen houses and, in poorer districts, one for every six or seven.⁵¹ The numbers also speak to the decline of domestic brewing, because that ratio of alehouses could have survived only with the regular patronage of a substantial proportion of the adult population. In the English countryside, alehouses provided cheap drink, food, and accommodations for the growing numbers of vagrants and migrant workers, to the extent that they offered an alternative community and family.⁵²

The regulations governing pubic houses varied widely across Europe, but in many Protestant regions the authorities tried to suppress the very activities that drew people to them: social drinking, gaming, and sometimes dancing. In Catholic regions, drinking places were no less regulated in the interests of maintaining public order. In France, a 1677 police order required brandy-sellers to close after 4:00 PM between November 1 and the end of May in order to stop criminals and other undesirables from drinking to the point of intoxication and then going out to cause trouble under cover of the long hours of darkness. Other regulations from this period required tavern owners in Paris to report any disturbances (like brawls) to the police and forbade gambling and serving undesirables such as vagabonds and prostitutes.⁵³

The relationship of public houses to crime is uncertain, even though the contemporary authorities were convinced that public houses were the haunts of criminals. They probably were, as much as they were also gathering places for men not engaged in criminal or immoral activities, but taverns were singled out in the “Proclamation against Debauchery” issued by England’s King Charles II in 1660. Writers of the period made the easy association of drinking with other immoral and criminal activities. One work focused on drunkenness as the reason a deserting soldier had shot one of the soldiers sent to find him: “All that he had to plead for himself was, that he was in Drink when he did it.”⁵⁴ Another wrote that “sloth is linked with drunkenness, drunkenness with fornication and adultery, and adultery with murder.”⁵⁵ A number of murders in Shakespeare’s tragedies are linked to drinking: the killing of Duncan and his grooms in Macbeth and of Desdemona and Roderigo in Othello are examples that the plays’ contemporary audiences might well have understood.⁵⁶

But it is more difficult to establish the link between taverns specifically and crime, although some studies suggest that a quarter of violent crime had some kind of tavern connection.⁵⁷ Certainly, brawls in public houses seem to have been common, and taverns might have provided many opportunities for crimes such as pocket-picking and other forms of theft. In 1674, one woman was convicted of stealing a silver cup from a London alehouse. She had ordered ale and spent some time drinking it, and when the proprietor went to fetch her a chamber pot, the woman left the alehouse, taking the cup with her.⁵⁸

Although the clientele of early modern public houses often included women, women rarely had access to them on terms that were the same as men’s. In Augsburg, Germany, in the 1500s, women could drink in taverns without any problem only if they were married and their husbands were drinking there at the same time.⁵⁹ Other women might enter a tavern temporarily to sell goods, buy wine and beer to take home, or carry out commercial transactions. But these occasions were rare, and for the most part, single and married women risked their reputations when they entered a tavern alone. Called “common” and “dishonorable,” they were suspected of being sexually loose or of being prostitutes—a suspicion that, needless to say, reveals the presumed morals of a tavern’s male clients. Such was the stigma that some married women who came to a tavern to fetch their husbands home would stand at the door and call for them rather than place even a foot inside.

The tavern could also be problematic for men. Intrinsic to the principle of male honor in Augsburg (and throughout Europe) was an ability to consume alcohol and yet maintain a family and household. It is a constant complaint throughout the history of alcohol in Western societies (and very prominent during the temperance period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) that too many men were unable to balance these activities and that, when forced to choose, they opted for more alcohol over their family responsibilities. In doing so, these men contributed to what was perceived as an increase in drunkenness from the mid-sixteenth century on. Perhaps this perception resulted from heightened sensitivity, as Protestant authorities cracked down on drinking because it was the right thing to do, and Catholic authorities did the same as the Counter-Reformation brought in a more rigorous view on morality. In England, drunkenness was made a civil offense (rather than an offense judged by church courts) in 1552, and the following year there was an attempt to limit the number of taverns. In 1583, the English moralist Philip Stubbs wrote evocatively of drunkenness: “I say that it is a horrible vice, and too much used in England. Every county, city, town, village, and other places hath abundance of alehouses, taverns, and inns, which are so fraught with malt-worms, night and day, that you would wonder to see them. You shall have them sitting there at the wine and good-ale all the day long, yea, all the night too, peradventure a whole week together, so long as any money is left; swilling, gulling and carousing from one to another, til never a one can speak a ready word.”⁶⁰ The English church also suppressed church-ales, which were often occasions for collective intoxication.

The perception that drunkenness has never been worse is common to many periods; it is rather like the belief, which can be traced back many centuries, that the family is on the verge of disappearance. They are facets of a generalized culture of nostalgia, which would eventually be challenged by ideologies of progress and improvement. Above the monotony of continual dire warnings of the prevalence of drunkenness, we must look for the important time- and class-specific variations. In the case of early modern Europe, two sources of drunkenness proved distinctive. One, as we have seen, was the spread of public drinking houses, which was seen as giving ever-increasing opportunities for Europeans, men in particular, to drink to excess. The other was the arrival of distilled spirits into mainstream drinking cultures, and that is the subject of the next chapter.