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Before artificial sweeteners, people satisfied their cravings for sweetness with natural products, including honey or dried fruit. Raisin wines, made by drying grapes before fermentation, were particularly popular. Historical records show these wines, some known as passum, were enjoyed in the Roman Empire and throughout medieval Europe. The most famous of raisin wine of the period was Malmsey, with varieties of this type produced across the Mediterranean.
Today, the popularity of raisin wines has declined, although some are still held in very high esteem. The best-known of these are Italy's appassimento (literally "withering") wines, such as Amarone. High-quality modern raisin wines from the Veneto region of Italy are left to dry for three months before being pressed and undergoing fermentation, a time-consuming process.
Ancient sources describe similar techniques for producing raisin wines. Columella, a Roman agricultural writer, noted that drying and fermentation together took at least a month. The Roman author, Pliny the Elder, mentioned a process in which grapes were partially dried on the vine, then further dried on racks before being pressed eight days later.
For the past ten years, I have been studying the process of how this wine was created at the archaeological site of Knossos in Crete. While famous for its earlier, Minoan, remains, Crete was renowned throughout the Roman empire for producing high-end sweet raisin wine, which was traded far and wide.
High-quality raisin wines required patience and time, but it seems as if Knossos's wine producers might not have been following these traditional methods.
What my archaeological investigations of a wine production site, as well as at wine shipping container (amphora) production sites at Knossos, is that Cretan wine-producers may have been deceiving their Roman-era customers with a knock-off version of passum.
Crete's winemaking legacy
Remains of a wine production facility in Knossos present a picture of winemaking practices a generation or so before the Romans conquered Crete. More intriguingly, ongoing studies of excavated Roman-era pottery kilns revealed a repeated pattern of four key artifacts being produced in one region of Knossos: amphorae for transporting wine, amphora stands for filling them, large ceramic mixing bowls, and ceramic beehives.
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