Professor Rod Phillips Speaks on Wine and Water at a Conference in France

Professor Rod Phillips gave a paper at an international symposium; “Le vin et l’eau, toute une histoire!”/“Wine and Water, What a Story!” at the Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, in Toulouse, France.

Papers at the symposium focused on the historical and current relationships of wine and water, including the dynamic symbolism of the two in Christian thought, the importance of waterways for shipping wine, and the influence of lakes and rivers on viticulture.

Rod’s paper addressed the common belief that from the Middles Ages until the 1800s – generally expressed as ‘in the past’ – people drank wine and other alcoholic beverages because they were safer than the often-polluted supplies of drinking water from rivers, lakes, and wells. (The process of alcoholic fermentation kills off some bacteria.)

Many early modern physicians recommended against drinking water, but Rod pointed out that the reason they gave was not that the water was unsafe because it was polluted, but that it was water.  In the humoral system that was then influential in explaining health and illness, water was considered a ‘cold’ food, and these physicians thought that drinking it undermined the natural warmth of the body.  They argued that water-drinking cooled the body until it reached its ultimate coldness, death.

Rod also looked at the wine available on some urban markets in early modern France and showed that there was not enough to rehydrate everyone.  Children did not drink wine, women drank much less than men, and the poor could not afford to buy alcoholic beverages. There just might have been enough to rehydrate most adult men, but it is likely that some men drank more than the average, leaving others with not enough for rehydration.

If most people (children and the poor made up a majority of early modern populations) could not rehydrate with wine, they must have done so with water.  There were no fruit juices or soft drinks, and coffee and tea were luxuries. Thus most people drank only water, some drank both water and wine, while a few might have drunk only wine.  If the local water happened to be unsafe, it contributed to illness and the low life expectancy of the period.

Rod concluded by pointing out that if it’s not true that people drank wine to avoid polluted water in the past, the reverse is somewhat true today. Alcohol is now widely considered unhealthy, and many people instead drink water and beverages, like juices and soft drinks, that are almost wholly water.