Wine or Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Wine: The 8,000-Year-Old Story of the Wine Trade

Author: Thomas Pellechia

The grape pre-dates humans, so it's hard to know who discovered wine. However, archeological and other discoveries have made it easier to find this out since wine was used to meet spiritual needs. At least, this is the story that is usually told. But when civilization began about 8,000 years ago it didn't take long for wine to move from an instrument of spirituality to a dominant economic power; all it took was the development of trade. Thereafter, the life and death of certain cultures often depended upon the fortunes of wine trading. Wine may have even sparked the earliest wars. Presenting its history from a commercial perspective, Wine reveals how the historically powerful wine trade has been a catalyst in many important developments throughout the ages such as sea mercantilism, early glass blowing, cooperage and cork production, trade fairs and festivals, advertising and promotion, the survival of civilization during the so-called Dark Ages, war financing, placating or pacifying troops, tranquilizing marauders, politics, literature and more.

Publishers Weekly

In the long list of books about wine, few have focused exclusively on the story of its trade-the business of getting the fermented product from vineyard to consumer. Pellechia (Garlic, Wine and Olive Oil), a New York City wine merchant and former vintner, seeks to address the subject with his ambitious historical survey. The oldest archeological evidence of wine making dates to about 6000 B.C., from a site in what is now the country of Georgia. Wine was traded in Hammurabi's Mesopotamia and in pharaonic Egypt, and its production expanded exponentially in tandem with the Greco-Roman empires. After the fall of Rome, the Christian church sanctioned wine making and its trade, and with the coming of the Renaissance and the early modern period, the business progressed in step with other improvements in transportation, politics and commerce. Pellechia has done his research, packing a lot into a short book about a large subject, and while his exposition and style are workmanlike, his effort and enthusiasm come through. The story comes to fuller life the closer it gets to the present day; maps and parenthetical observations offer additional touches of color. (Aug.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Pellechia has written about food and wine for 20 years; he is the author of numerous articles as well as the book Garlic, Wine and Olive Oil: Historical Anecdotes and Recipes. The author is also an experienced winemaker, educator, and seller. Pellechia lends his extensive knowledge to this well-researched book about the wine trade, which uniquely deviates from similar titles focusing on food pairings and consumer education. It is also global in coverage, charting the wine trade from ancient Mesopotamia to the current U.S. market. As a popular and respected expert on the subject, Pellechia offers a mixture of historical, geographical, and economic analysis. His love for the topic is evident in his depth of coverage and engaging tone. Readers with less interest in wine may find Pellechia's presentation of the geopolitical events surrounding the topic satisfying; for the causal reader, though, there may be more information than desired. Recommended for special libraries and public libraries with strong cookery collections.-Meagan Storey, Virginia Wesleyan Coll., Norfolk Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Author: Richard W Unger

The beer of today -- brewed from malted grain and hops, manufactured by large and often multinational corporations, frequently associated with young adults, sports, and drunkenness -- is largely the result of scientific and industrial developments of the nineteenth century. Modern beer, however, has little in common with the drink that carried that name through the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. Looking at a time when beer was often a nutritional necessity, was sometimes used as medicine, could be flavored with everything from the bark of fir trees to thyme and fresh eggs, and was consumed by men, women, and children alike, Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance presents an extraordinarily detailed history of the business, art, and governance of brewing.

Table of Contents:

1	Introduction : understanding the history of brewing	1
2	Early medieval brewing	15
3	Urbanization and the rise of commercial brewing	37
4	Hopped beer, hanse towns, and the origins of the trade in beer	53
5	The spread of hopped beer brewing : the northern low countries	74
6	The spread of hopped beer brewing : the southern low countries, England, and Scandinavia	89
7	The mature industry : levels of production	107
8	The mature industry : levels of consumption	126
9	The mature industry : technology	143
10	The mature industry : capital investment and innovation	166
11	Types of beer and their international exchange	184
12	Taxes and protection	195
13	Guilds, brewery workers, and work in breweries	207
14	Epilogue : the decline of brewing	231
App	On classification and measurement	247