most important example of sack in the
plays of Shakespeare.
For derivation, a more satisfactory one is implied in the early
dictionaries. W. Rider, 1589, has “Vinum Hispanense saccatum, sacke, or
rumney”: and “Sacke, a wine that cometh out of Spaine. Vinum Hispanense.”
“ Sack ” from saccatus is hard to avoid. Saccatus is “ Put in a
Sacke ” in Rider, from which one might believe in a reference to the Spanish
wine-bags known as borrachios. But the earlier dictionary, The Nomenclator
(1585) is most explicit: “ Vinum saccatum ... sackt wine, or wine strained
through a bag, hippocras.” It appears to have been a part of the winemaker’s
business to strain wines in early times, and the word sack may thus have come
to us through the Latin saccatus. In Holland’s Plinie, xxiii. r
(p. 153), I find again corroboration: ‘ ‘Howbeit to speake generally, the wholesomest
wines both of the one sort and the other, and for all persons, be such as have
run through a strainer or Ipocras bag, and thereby lost some part of their strength.”
Sack was a strong, hot, Spanish wine, in need of sugar, and improved by a reduction
in its strength, whether by burning or straining. For “burnt wine,” see also Dicke
of Devonshire (Bullen’s Old Plays, ii. 36): “Like wine that’s burnt, you
must be set light by, and then you’ll come to a temper.” Dekker has “he ... commands
a gallon of sacke and suger to be burnt for the yeamen,” Jests to make you Merrie
(Gros. 11. 349), 1607.
Again, Mr. Hart
is entirely correct that the reader will find many conflicting texts concerning
sack. We are (I hope) in the process of
teasing a single truth from them. First,
Dicke of Devonshire properly informs us that every kind of wine was
burnt not only sack. Sack itself is a
specific wine apart from any burning it may undergo.
“Burnt sack” is
a sack that has been prepared in a certain way after the product has
been purchased. Burnt or unburnt it
remains sack just as Merlot wine is Merlot whether or not it has been mulled. And one type of burning is not identical to another. In France and Italy, mulled wine is traditionally
called vin brulé (burnt wine) and is older than Pliny (who, however, was
not describing it in Hart’s quotes from Holland’s translation). In Shakespeare and other writers of the time,
burnt sack clearly only involves adding sugar.
Mulling, on the other hand, generally includes a variety of spices.
Having
downloaded my own searchable copy of Holland’s Plinie through the
miracle of the Internet, I can improve upon Hart’s choice of quotations. His refer to the common processes of finishing
wines, which is quite a different thing from mulling or burning a finished wine. In Book 14, Chapter xvi, page 420, Pliny is
actually talking about mulled wines.
I find also, that they used to make
a kind of spiced wine or Ipocras, not for sweet perfumes and ointments onely, but
also for to drinke…. Much after the same
manner we spice our wines now adaies also but that we adde pepper and honey
thereto : which some call Gondite, others Pepper-wines…. Now the order [recipe] of it is to take of
the root fortie drams to six Sextars of Must or new wine, and hang it in a
cloth togither with a weight [of spices], in manner above said.
The “cloth” is
the sack that Mr. Hart asserts gives us the name of “sack”.
But Falstaff’s
favorite kind of sack is “sherrie sack” and it is this that tells us what was sack. Sherry is the demotic 15th century
English pronunciation of “Jerez,” the region of Spain in which the distinctive wine
is produced. What makes the wine so
distinctive is not its grapes but the way it is produced. First, it is fermented longer than other
wines until all of the sugars are fermented away and only the astringent (dry) taste
of the tannin remains. This, of course,
is the very definition of a “dry” wine, and “sack” is the demotic 15th
century English pronunciation of “secco” or “sec”. Thus “sherrie sack”.
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