SC - When did they start aging wine?

[Norman White]

Jin Liu Ch'ang here:

David/Cariadoc asked in a post on June 29th about the history of aging wine.  It took me awhile to remember to pull out the copy of William Turner's 1568 book, "A Book of Wines".  Apparently most people in England at that time drank freshly fermented wine which he called (and is still called) must.  He felt this was wrong and gave reasons against it.  He quoted Galen who called all wine not five years old new wine, wine 5-10 years old middle aged
and wine over ten years old as old aged.  He also says that Aloisuis Mundella felt that new wine/middle aged wine boundary should be six years old.  He also went into the varieties of wine available in England at that time mostly naming them by where they were imported from and by their color, age, taste and smell.  As a physician/herbalist, he also delineated wines by their dry/moist and cold/hot characteristics.  An old wine was hotter than a
new wine and yellow and red wines were hotter than white wines.  The dryness was accorded to the degree of heat.  In his opinion, young people being naturally hot should not drink wine as all wines are hot to some degree.  

As you can tell, he was very opinionated about wines and from his description, it appears that wine aging and the wine trade were well established in his time period.

Norman White
a.k.a. Jin Liu Ch'ang
gn-white at tamu.edu


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