I was watching Troy with somebody who happens to know a lot of useless things (his words, not mine). The Trojans and the Greeks were having a feast and he mentioned that they used to dilute their wine.
So we read into it. The natural max alcohol content in wine is 15%. Apparently, the Greeks used to dilute it up to 9:1, as in 9 parts water, 1 part wine!
I decided to try it with a 13% Montepulciano to get that full-bodied Mediterranean taste that opens sweet and ends earthy. We decanted it for an hour.
As a baseline, it was rich, sweet, with an astringent end-note.
At 1:1 (1 part water, 1 part wine), it was very sour with the astringent aftertaste.
At 2:1, it was sour, like pink grapefruit juice, the astringent aftertaste was lighter.
At 4:1, it was like lemon water with a mind astringent end-note. Sort of refreshing.
At 6:1, I couldn’t tell there was alcohol in it.
I don’t think I will be trying it with red again. I think white will come out more with the dilution.
A millennial's musings 
I like to add water and a little sugar. It removes some of the putrid taste.
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Haha, so you make it into a soft drink 🙂
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Sorta defeats the purpose of drinking…at least for the Irish!
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Just enough wine to kill the bacteria. Every culture that achieves any level of population density needs a way not to die from dysentery or some other nastiness. Having any more than a few people living in one place tends to put stuff in the water.
Therefore, civilization = some way to purify water: wine, beer, mead, tea ceremonies, coffee, something. Until they get municipal water facilities.
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I think there were many practical reasons for it. It’s barely palatable though (tu-dum-tsss)
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Wine into water — ah, the anti-christ then.
I’ll do you one better, I can turn the darkest Guinesss into a bland yellow stream… which is mostly water, I think, although, sometimes I believe it might be anti-freeze, (that is, the cats seem to like it.)
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Ah Mole, keep it classy
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Where is that line I keep crossing… Ah, I’ll find it eventually.
So, I was reading the WordPress EULA the other day and found out why commenters cannot edit their comments. It’s because the site owners are responsible for ALL content including comments. That’s why a site owner can EDIT a comment made by someone else. (Or delete them at will.) Which also means that comments can get you kicked out of WordPress if not properly managed.
Bottom line, feel free to nix anything I post in the likely case I drool out some drivel which is off-color, crude or distasteful. Like, now for instance.
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HAA!
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Do realize that their wine was much closer to vinegar than wine is now and that it was quite tart at full strength. The dilute may have actually helped reduce that. (It may also have been an anti-drunkenness effort.)
On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 5:35 PM, When something is cognitively taxing, who gets the tax? wrote:
> Dr Martina Feyzrakhmanova posted: “I was watching Troy with somebody who > happens to know a lot of useless things (his words, not mine). The Trojans > and the Greeks were having a feast and he mentioned that they used to > dilute their wine. So we read into it. The natural max alcohol content ” >
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That’s why I went with a cheap montepulciano 😉
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Here in the U.S. “cheap” and “montepulciano” don’t go together. USers are forever gullible so if someone slaps Montepulchiano on a label, they think “Eh, they won’t be able to pronounce this, so we can charge extra!”
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Lol. Well, it’s like this for American things over here… Levis jeans, GAP and drugstore cosmetics brands are the perfect example. They’re sold at a huge premium
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