JOHN MARTIN'S TALES

When I was growing up in the 1960s, Christmas dinner at our place wasn’t complete without a bottle of Palfrey Pearl.

If you’ve never encountered Palfrey Pearl, imagine someone looked at a perfectly good grape and thought, “Let’s see how much sugar we can add before somebody notices.”

I was about eight years old when I had my first taste.

It was sweet. It was sickly. And I concluded it was one of the worst inventions in human history.

Looking back, I may not have been the world’s most qualified wine critic.

For the next fifty years I gave Christmas wine a fairly wide berth. Cough.

Then I travelled to Europe to share a white Christmas with family.

There I finally sampled mulled wine for the first time.

Between you and me, I wasn’t that impressed.

But when it’s snowing outside and you’re freezing, you’ll happily lower your standards. I certainly did.

Which got me wondering…

Who was the first person to look at a perfectly respectable bottle of wine and think, “You know what this needs? Pepper.”

To borrow from Life of Brian:

“What have the Romans ever done for us?”

You probably know the scene. Reg leads the People’s Front of Judea in a furious rant against the Roman occupation before finally conceding:

“All right… but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health… what have the Romans ever done for us?”

It’s here I want to put my hand up.

“Well… they also gave us mulled wine.”

Probably.

The earliest known recipe appears in the Roman cookbook Apicius, dating from the fourth or fifth century. Called Conditum Paradoxum, it mixed wine with honey, pepper, saffron, dates and other spices.

At some point, though, beer drinkers must have thought, “Why should wine drinkers have all the warm, spicy fun?”.

And if you thought red-hot pokers belonged only to the Spanish Inquisition, think again.

In the Middle Ages, English drinkers sometimes heated mulled ale by plunging a red-hot iron poker straight from the fireplace into the drink.

The poker heated the ale instantly, created dramatic fizzing and foaming, and slightly caramelised the sugars.

If the drink also contained spirits and eggs, it was often called a flip.

Mulled ale was commonly flavoured with nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger and cloves, sometimes sweetened with honey or sugar, and occasionally served with roasted apples.

Warm spiced ale even appears in Shakespeare. References to wassail bowls are scattered throughout his plays.

So the next time someone tells you craft beer is a modern invention, remind them our ancestors were dropping red-hot irons and fruit into their beer centuries before anyone thought of putting passionfruit into an IPA.