[Avodah] Wine

[Joel Rich]

Some of you may know that one of my pet peeves was that I was taught that
the reason that wine was watered down in talmudic times was because wine
was much stronger back in the day. However, I have since found out that
wine will not naturally ferment to more than 18% alcohol content. So why
should it have been more of an issue then more than now. I recently heard a
presentation by Shulie Mishkin where she gave a number of possible reasons
The first were simply cultural – cultured people drank watered down wine
(me-with their pinky at the proper angle?). Another possibility was that it
was being drunk as a beverage, and therefore you didn’t want to have too
high an alcohol content if you were going to be drinking a lot. It was also
conjectured that they wanted to treat either their water or wine to make
them more palatable. Also, in certain places wine was sold as concentrate.
Lastly, a kaballistic reason is that water and wine represent din and
rachamim.

Note that for some of the reasons it seems we might have been affected by
surrounding cultures (I wonder who invented hseiba?) Any thoughts
appreciated


GCT
Joel Rich
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