How I uncovered a potential ancient Rome wine scam

Comments

• lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I don’t think they replaced the sun-dried raisins with honey, otherwise the honey taste would be a bit too strong, too obvious. Instead my guess is that they used it as an additive in the final product, if the resulting passum was too dry. So it’s a bit of a post-production additive.

  I’m saying this because

  1. As the text mentions, there’s a shortcut for making passum - to boil the must instead*. If the issue was space, time, or labour they’d likely do it instead of relying on yet another parallel culture.
  2. Grape sugar content might vary quite a bit from one harvest to another. And yet it you’re doing large scale production you want some consistency.

  *you can do this at home with some grape juice. Even the unfermented version is delicious, it becomes syrupy. It goes great on vanilla ice cream by the way.

  source
• cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Ea-nāṣir the Roman version

  source

  • verity_kindle@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Indeed,lest we forget

    source