in the noisy streets of ancient rome, drinking alcohol was no aristocratic whim or simple tavern vice: it was an indispensable piece of daily survival. and every 23 april the whole city celebrated it, because on that day the wine of the latest harvest was officially opened and it was confirmed that the plebs would have liquid bread and drinkable water for another year.
the feast was the vinalia priora, the first of the calendar’s two great wine festivals. its literal sense was to open the dolia, the great fermentation vats where the previous autumn’s must had fermented for months, and to taste at last the result. but before a single drop ran for consumption, an offering was made to the gods —a religious offering, not a tribute—: a libation of new wine was poured onto the earth in honour of jupiter, lord of the sky and therefore of the climate on which every vineyard depended. only then did mass sales begin in the city’s food shops.
here is the key the romantic image of the roman banquet hides. the city’s water was not equally reliable in every neighbourhood. the aqueducts supplied above all public fountains, baths and well-off residences, while in many popular districts people depended on wells and springs that contaminated easily: stagnant water, sources of intestinal diseases that in a city of a million inhabitants could be deadly. wine, acidic and alcoholic, was safer against germs, provided dense calories and masked the bad taste of the water it was mixed with.
to celebrate the vinalia was to celebrate that the plebs would have, probably, another year of subsistence assured: a water that often sickened, offset by a wine that masked its perils.
because the romans almost never drank wine neat. doing so was a stigma of barbarism, a custom they ascribed with contempt to the peoples of the north. the civilised practice was to dilute it always with water, and often to season it without restraint: honey, pine resin to preserve it, boiled spices, and in the cheapest vats of working-class districts, even seawater to stretch the product. what reached the day labourer’s cup little resembled the refined wine a senator drank, but it served the same vital function.
the topos of permanently drunken rome deserves qualifying, mind you. precisely because people drank daily and diluted, open drunkenness was frowned upon and traditional morality condemned it harshly, especially in women. wine was more a foodstuff than a recreational drug: part of the basic diet, present on the table of the poor and the rich though in abysmally different qualities. authors like pliny the elder dedicated whole pages to classifying harvests and regions, proof of just how far the product structured the economy and the culture.
that is why the vinalia were much more than an excuse to drink. they were the moment the city verified that one of the pillars of its subsistence was assured, just as the grain festivals verified the other. rome conquered the mediterranean with its legions, but it kept its citizens on their feet, day after day, with a cup of mediocre wine cut with dubious water.
