Egyptian & Greco-Roman methods of storing wine
The Romans, who like the Greeks and Egyptians, stored
and carried their wine in earthenware amphorae (fig. 227)
were startled by this ingenious innovation. Hyams believes
that this invention of storing wine in huge containers
formed by a multitude of separate pieces was dependent on
the more temperate climate prevalent in the lower Alps,
where barrels could more easily be kept in good condition
than in the hot and dry climate of the mediterranean
countries.[218]
Unlike the more breakable and considerably
smaller amphora used in the classical world (as an official
capacity measure the amphora was the equivalent of 25.5
liters) the wooden barrel was capable of storing wine in
larger quantities, and at considerably lower cost. Its primary
contribution to western life, however, appears to have lain
not so much in this as in the fact that it enabled man to
develop superior vintages by offering more favorable conditions
for the aging of wines. Edward Hyams purports this
fact to constitute the great difference between the wines of
antiquity (made from sweet grapes and stored in heavily
pitched containers offering poor conditions for maturing)
and the wine of modern times (made from smaller and
more acid grapes and susceptible to oxygenization under
the influence of air filtering through the pores of the
wood).[219]
From a reading of Hyam's interesting study one may
gather the impression that the ancients drank only young
wines. This is clearly not the case, as a perusal of Billiard's
exemplary and carefully documented study on wine and
vines in the ancient world will show. Pliny (Hist. Nat.,
XXIII, 22, 3) makes it a point to emphasize that a good
wine should neither be too young nor too old. Galen (De
antidotis, I, 3) and Athenaeus (Deipn., I, 26, b) write that
the wine of Alba reaches its maturity after fifteen years;
the wines of Tibur, Pompeii and Labicum after ten years.
Greek wines are said to decline after six or seven years
(Pliny, Hist. Nat., XIV, 10, 2; Athenaeus, Deipn., I, 26, b).
The wine of Falerno, bitter when young, became drinkable
after ten years, and after fifteen or twenty years acquired
the exquisite refinement that made it an incomparable
liqueur (Pliny, Hist. Nat., XXIII, 20, 2). It could attain
thirty or forty years (Petronius, Trim., XXXIV), but
having reached that age, it began to turn (Cicero, Brutus,
83).[220]
If there was a difference, then, it could not have
been in the possession or want of knowledge about the
virtues of aging but in the more favorable conditions
offered for this process by the new material used for the
containers in which wine was matured.
The ancients when faced with the problem of storing
wine in bulk, did so by putting it into large earthenware
vessels (dolia, Old Latin: calpares) which were covered by
a convex lid (operculum) sealed to the body of the vessel by
a heavy layer of pitch. These vessels were buried to the
rim in a deep layer of sand (fig. 228). Some of the larger
dolia were so high that a fully grown man could stand erect
inside without being visible. The specimen shown (fig. 227)
has a height of 6 feet 3 inches (1.90 m.), a circumference of
14 feet 8 inches (4.45 m.) and a storage capacity of 211 U.S.
gallons (800 liters). There is no need to emphasize that
these large earthenware containers must have been frightfully
expensive, since their manufacture was dependent on
firing ovens of unusual dimensions; and that to transport
them, even over small distances, posed delicate problems,
both in view of their weight and their susceptibility to
breakage. It is also quite obvious that there was a non-transgressible
upper limit for the size of an earthenware
container that had to be fired in a single piece.
