Consuming Renaissance wines: colour, taste and medical theories

The 16th century saw an enormously increased amount of named wines coming to market. This phenomenon was especially visible in 16th century Rome where this newly developed wealth of different wines sold at different prices and responded to a particularly prosperous and socially varied population. Here wines responded to the demands of the market not only in terms of the prices but also in terms of how appropriate it was thought a given wine was for a given and definable social group. This socially determined differentiation of wine consumption was not fortuitous, by any means. In fact, it was the result of a highly codified system based on what were considered at the time to be objective medical criteria in turn derived from a set of time tried Aristotelian categories. These categories might at first seem to be slavishly adopted, but a closer look reveals them to have been modified and adapted to the social and cultural reality of the period. The resulting classification of wines according to their taste, color and odor allowed, on the one hand, consumers to determine the nature of a wine, on the other hand, it also classified wines according to their supposed appropriateness for different social classes.

Allen Grieco (PhD École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) is Senior Research Associate Emeritus at Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies). Dr. Grieco has published extensively on the cultural history of food in Italy from the 14^th to the 16^th centuries and coedited numerous collective volumes. Co-editor in chief of Food & History, he is also in charge of a book series, Food Culture, Food History (13th-19th centuries), published by Amsterdam University Press.

His book on Food, Social Politics and the Order of the World in Renaissance Italy, published by Villa I Tatti, has just come out in late October (2019).

Image: Jan van Bijlert: Young Man Drinking a Glass of Wine, between 1635 and 1640, Wikimedia Commons.