The author fails to understand modern wines to begin with. Amarone is not a raisin wine at all, the link to the appassimento method correctly explains that the Amarone process is initially based on dried grapes, but the result is a dry wine.
> This method would have been quicker and cheaper than drying grapes for weeks.
do the economics make sense? Honey is quite cheap in today's world but I'm not sure this was always true.
> likely cared less about authenticity than we do today.
I’m not so sure that folks care that much about “authenticity,” these days.
There’s an enormous knockoff market. Many folks buy fakes, knowing full well, that they aren’t the real thing (the “Times Square Rolex” is pretty much a meme), and some of the fakes are good enough, that regular people have no idea they aren’t real.
I have also heard that “premium fakes,” often produced by the same factories that make the originals, are fooling even experts.
So the whole thesis here is based on the fact they also made honey? Seems like a really weak argument…
Makes me wonder what modern food & drink would pass the ancient "authenticity" test
Like the ancient Romans I couldn't care less about the authenticity of any wine so long as it tasted reasonably well. Anyone making a fuss over provence outside of whether or not it's safe to drink, tastes good and a few basic criteria is just a snob.
"Oh dear boy, how can you drink that Burgundy, it's not even from Chateaux le Snob".
It would be worth trying to make the mixture to further test the theory.
The wheels of justice turn slowly indeed...
I'm not sure this is the right interpretation...
The implication here is that honey is a cheap additive used to mimic the effects of a long process. However honey isn't a trivial component to produce
I suspect they added in honey as a source of sugar for fermentation. Honey is a pretty common component of making fermented drinks (mead being a well known one). So this sounds like a natural coupling to me.
It's tough to tell without someone making a couple test batches for us to get tanked on