Greetings to the list. Why, in Georgics 1.295, is the peasant woman boiling the must?
Thomas's note ad loc. leaves me entirely mystified: "The boiling down of must was a means of bypassing fermentation." How on earth can you make wine without fermentation? If you boil down the must you'll simply end with concentrated grape juice. Is it possible that Virgil is referring to a practice, still followed in some places, of making a very low-grade wine ("piquette") by adding water to the already pressed lees? Does this involve boiling the whole mess rather than simply pouring boiling water over it, which is excluded by Virgil's vivid line 296? The idea of boiling the must prior to fermentation in order to kill infections hardly belongs to the pre-Pasteur age. Or could they have hit on this idea by pure trial and error? Can any vintners enlighten me? John ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub