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Comment by homeonthemtn | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure this is the right interpretation...

The implication here is that honey is a cheap additive used to mimic the effects of a long process. However honey isn't a trivial component to produce

I suspect they added in honey as a source of sugar for fermentation. Honey is a pretty common component of making fermented drinks (mead being a well known one). So this sounds like a natural coupling to me.

It's tough to tell without someone making a couple test batches for us to get tanked on

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If they were interested in increasing sweetness, they likely would have been adding the honey after fermentation, not before. But either way, I suspect the supposition at the end of the article is the correct one, whether they were getting the sweetness from raisins or honey, the consumers wouldn't have cared. I went down an exploration of trying to approximate Roman wine a little while ago, and what I discovered reading a bunch about it (and subsequently creating and tasting the best replica I could), Roman wines were by and large some really nasty swill. They didn't fully understand how fermentation worked, the pine pitch the used to seal the amphoras leeched into the wines, and they typically attempted to hide the bad character of the wines by watering it down and then adding all kinds of sweet and spicy additives to it.

If the wines were sweetened after fermentation, then how were they stabilized? Something needs to be added to stop fermentation (or it must be fermented very strong).

Or add spirits.

Another way: Let ferment it to the max. If fermentation doesn't consume all the sugar, then it's somewhat stable.

Ancient wines also had resins added. Today these would probably have tasted almost medicinal, but often they are diluted before serving. Wine dilution is still a custom in some parts of Italy. I was invited to a party in Tuscany and they served a lot of Lambrusco amabile and for the children they diluted it and because Lambrusco amabile is rather sweet it was a little bit an oldfashioned soft drink. I tried it, too, and it's refreshing. I don't know whether it's sacrilegous but as one says, in Rome do as Romans do.

> However honey isn't a trivial component to produce

And you think grapes are?

We were probably farming honey long before we were farming grapes.

> I suspect they added in honey as a source of sugar for fermentation. Honey is a pretty common component of making fermented drinks (mead being a well known one). So this sounds like a natural coupling to me.

They definitely knew about mead. Pliny the Elder (one of the article's sources lol) even talks about mead (Hydromeli/Hidromel), and observes "it is nowhere more highly esteemed than in Phrygia (Turkey)". He also points out honey is sometimes added to "artifical wines", which seem to be just ancient-roman talk for foreigner-booze.

- https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

> It's tough to tell without someone making a couple test batches for us to get tanked on

I'm down.

"However honey isn't a trivial component to produce"....indeed it is not, apiaries were built on boats in roman times as a means to insure polenation for crops along water ways and increase honey production with an eye on shipping logistics to get it to the highest paying markets. there is cave art that depicts honey gathering from truely ancient times and it is impossible to think that humanities ancestors were not oportunistic honey gatherers, with the bee's wax having a multitude of good uses as well. the liklyhood is that honey and wax were sometimes scarce and sometimes in abundance, and sometimes popular as additives and loathed by others. there are various claims and evidence for the earliest deliberate fermentation, but a general agreement that fermentation is truely ancient, with some evidence to suggest that fermentation was the impetus for the first permanent settlements, and as (some) humans ability to metabolise alcohol is a recent genetic adaptation to produce the nessesary enzymes, we will get more evidence as to who, where and when that happened, or kept happening..... edit: my point(if I have one) is that it could be argued that grapes were first to be snuck in as an aduterant, with honey and other ingredients having much longer prior use

I do wonder if the motivation was more about speeding up production or just experimenting with flavor profiles

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