1892 Drinks of the world

DRINKS,

15.7

which they had infused berries of the lentiscus, or a portion of its tender wood. The artificial wines made either with this lentiscus, or with other aromatic herbs, called by Gregory of Tours vina odoramentis immixta^ were the only approaches to the modern liqueurs, even some time after the discovery of the process of distil- lation. Among these liqueur wines must be mentioned that species of cooked wine which was the result of a por- tion of must reduced to half or a third of its original bulk by boiling. The capitularies of Charlemagne speak of this drink as vinum coctum, and the southern pro- vinces called it Sabe, from the Latin sapa, which with the Romans had the same signification. Both Galen and Hippocrates refer to a Greek composition called SircEum or Hepsema, which, says Pliny, we call sapa. The fashion in which this wine was cooked is shown in the Picture antiche cV ErcolanOy t. I., tab. 35. Those artificial wines which consisted solely of infu- sions of aromatic or medicinal plants, such as absinthe, aloes, anise, rosemary, hyssop, and so on, were called herb wines, and were frequently employed as remedies and preventives. With a herb wine, the wine of a honied absinthe, it was that Fredegonda poisoned him who reproached her with the murder of the Pretextate. The most famous of these wines were those into which entered, besides honey, the spices and aromatic confec- tions of Asia, to which were given the name of pig- ments. The highly spiced and "most odoriferous" wine sweetened with honey is one of those drinks which Cedric bids Oswald, in Ivanhoe,^ to place upon