Did medieval people think of wine as a sophisticated or luxury drink? If not, how did it get that image by modern times?

opinions-about-tiaras:

racefortheironthrone:

Wine’s luxury status then and now really depends on how prevalent wine-making is in a given region and thus how expensive wine is. In areas where wine grapes grow easily, it’s not considered a sophisticated or luxury drink per se, except at the top of the market. In areas in which they don’t, or where beer or other drinks predominate, wine is considered more of a rarity. 

Food history can be amazing like that.

Modern example: oysters. Oysters are an expensive luxury food, right? Even in places near oyster beds. But go to your supermarket or local fish market and price some out, and unless you’ve a lot more money than I have, you’ll go “well, I certainly can’t eat these every day.”

Except… not always the case in all times and all places. Before the pizza slice or the hot pretzel, you know what food was universally with New York City, the one consumed by all residents and damn near synonymous with the place as a whole, a symbol of the metropolis?

Oysters. Everybody ate them. All the time. There were street carts selling them everywhere. Every restaurant had them, they were the equivalent of having chicken fingers on the menu. People from Europe would come to NYC and be all “god damn, these people love their oysters.” They were a very democratic food, beloved by all classes and segments of society. (Except maybe people with a shellfish allergy.)

That lasted for a long time, but because we can’t have nice things, it stopped because we wrecked the Hudson and East rivers as well as their estuary, which at one point is estimated to have contained roughly half of all the oysters in the entire world. We ate’em all up and polluted the water so any new ones grown there aren’t safe to eat. And so now, these days, oysters there are a luxury food where once they were a food of the masses. They’re damn near a Veblen good in some ways, in fact.

Yep. Good example of how this stuff changes: today, lobsters are generally considered something of a delicacy and fairly pricey. In the 19th century, lobsters were food for poor people and criminals, because A. lobsters were crazy abundant and therefore cheap as all get out, and B. lobsters were considered bottom-feeders and thus unclean.