SC - Period distilling info

[Mark.S Harris]

I ran across an interesting chapter on period distillation of wine. If the
author's hypothesises are correct, then the distillation of wine can be
traced back to classical times and not just the 12C AD.

This chapter is "Water of Life: its Beginnings and Early History" on page
142 in "Liquid Nourishment" of the Food and Society series, edited by
C. Anne Wilson. This chapter is also by C. Anne Wilson. Edinburgh University
Press, 1993. ISBN 0 7486 0424 3.

She details how the distilled wines date from the Gnostic Christians who
used it
in a religious ceremony, a baptisim of fire. This distilled wine having
a percentage of alcohol of 35 percent could be doused on a converts head
and ignited without burning the convert. From them it was spread through
Europe by the Cathars. When the Cathars were killed off by the Catholic
church the recipes fell into the hands of the monks. The church and the
Monastary leaders denounced the creation of alcohol and tried to stamp it
out. However, after realizing that if the spirits were distilled using
the better methods of distilling it would be too flammable to be used in the
heretical baptisim of the head and allowed to be made.

While she makes some hypothesises that seem a bit of a jump, her theories
do explain some things in my opinion. I would encourage those studying
period distilling to take a look at this article.

Lord Stefan li Rous
stefan at texas.net

PS: Could someone forward this to the distilling list. I'm not on there but
I think this might be of interest to some there if it is not already common
knowledge.
============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================