Snow-Chilled Wine in Ancient Greece and Rome

Snow Chilled Wine

An ice cube in a glass of pinot grigio can add a refreshing clink to a bottle that was never chilled. A purist, though, would never forget to chill her bottle and would likely recoil at the thought of tainting a fine vintage with a chunk of ice. At this level of connoisseurship, the wine should be presented at the correct temperature–no ice necessary. Ice, and its resulting cold, can dull the discerning taste of the palate and bring out bitter tones in the wine. Even worse, as it melts, the ice will dilute the wine, altering its refined proportions. 

Prior to the age of the electric wine cooler, the ancients were no strangers to drinking a chilled glass of wine, especially in summer months. Both the Greeks and the Romans avidly consumed cold wine. How did they do it? They put snow in their wine. 

Luckily, the oenophiles of ancient times did not have the same concerns about diluting wine as modern day connoisseurs. On the contrary, dilution of wine was the norm for both Romans and Greeks who nearly always cut their wine with water. It was considered crude and intemperate to drink unmixed wine. Snow, therefore, served the dual purpose of cooling the wine and watering it down. 

The storage and use of ice and snow for refrigeration dates back thousands of years. Mesopotamians in Ur had ice pits as early as 2000 BCE which were likely used for chilling wines (beer was more common but apparently not drunk cold). Both Greeks and Romans harvested snow in winter months from the mountains and stored their haul in subterranean pits covered with grasses, branches, or sawdust for insulation. A first hand account of this practice survives in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus. He describes Alexander the Great’s siege of Petra when the general had 30 trenches dug, filled with snow, and covered with oak branches. The outermost layer of snow in the pits invariably became dirtied. 

A double-sleeved Greek psykte
A double-sleeved Greek psykter with a top opening for wine and side spouts for chilled water. from Walters Art Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The collection of winter snow, the maintenance of storage pits, and the sale of the product at market must have called for a fairly large industry in both Rome and Greece, although no reports of “snow-sellers” exist. What we do know is that snow was a luxury. In his Epigrams, the Roman Martial wrote both “Of what use to you is the noble luxury of iced water?” and  “Do not, my slave, mix the smokey wine of Marseilles with iced water, lest the water cost you more than the wine.” Cold drinks were such a luxury that the refrigerant may have cost more than the wine itself. Seneca the Younger noted that some drinkers were so picky that they forwent snow for the more solid ice that formed at the bottom of the pits. 

While both the Greeks and Romans enjoyed chilled wine, they did so in slightly different ways. Greeks invariably mixed their wine with water in a large communal vessel known as a krater. All drinkers would enjoy wine at the same level of dilution. Greeks placed snow directly in the krater to simultaneously dilute and chill the wine, but they also had a piece of pottery called a psykter (ψυκτήρ in ancient Greek). Early examples of the psykter from around 700 BCE were wine amphorae with outer sleeves. Wine was stored inside the amphorae and the sleeve could be filled with snow-chilled water through a separate spout and drained by a tap at the bottom. Later examples were simple amphorae that were placed in snow-filled krater. Amphorae could also be lowered into wells to chill their contents. The variety of cooling methods, and the historical progression of cooling technologies, accents just how important chilling wine was for the Greeks.

One Greek poem read:

‘T is sweet to the thirsty in Summer to drink of the mountain snow,

And sweet to the sailor when Winter is o’er the Crown doth show;

But sweetest it is when two have found shelter beneath one plaid,

And the tale of love’s in the telling betwixt a man and a maid.

 

Etruscan wine strainer 4th or 3rd C. BC On exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Art
Greek wine strainer
Greek wine strainer with handles ending in duck heads circa 300 BC On exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Art

The Romans had their own wine parapheniala. In Italy, they were known to place snow directly into their wine in order to chill it. They also employed the colum nivarium, or snow strainer, to mix their wine with snow. These metal or cloth strainers would be filled with snow over which wine was then poured. This chilled the wine and filtered out impurities from both wine and snow. 

While the Romans borrowed unabashedly from Greek culture, they also observed some practices unique to their Seven Hills. For one, Greeks always drank wine out of a communal krater, whereas the Romans practiced more individuality during their drinking parties. Revelers would water their wine down according to their own taste from epitonia, or taps of water–cold and hot. 

The use of hot water to mix wine was unique to Rome and even emblematic of imperial wine drinking. Greeks were known to drink hot water, but never to mix it with wine. Wealthy Romans took this to an extreme and had ornate pieces known as authepsa or miliarion that held hot coals in one chamber surrounded by a second chamber of water. Cutting wine with hot water, calda, is well documented in various poems and works of literature from the empire. The authepsa was even featured on tombs and sarcophagi. Eventually, hot beverages became so ingrained in Roman culture that thermopolium sold hot drinks on the street. 

 

A lavish athepsa used for heating water
A lavish athepsa used for heating water from William Smith (1813–1893), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In trying to discover the true nature of thirst, Plato asked “is thirst thirst for hot drink or cold or much or little or in a word for a draught of any particular quality, or is it the fact that if heat is attached to the thirst it would further render the desire—a desire of cold, and if cold of hot?” Clearly the Greeks were intellectually aware that the cold man wants a hot drink and the hot man wants a cold drink. Said differently, quenching a thirst can depend on context. Both the Greeks and Romans were privileged enough to have access to snow in their winter months and stored it to quench their summer thirsts. Perhaps the context was different in Rome, for they also quenched their thirst for wine by drinking it hot. 

 

Snow chilled wine

Sources Cited

Dunbabin, Katherine M. D. “Wine and Water at the Roman Convivium.” Journal of Roman Archaeology, vol. 6, 1993, pp. 116–141., doi:10.1017/S1047759400011508

Edmonds, John Maxwell. Some Greek Poems of Love and Wine. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Geer, Russel M. “On the Use of Ice and Snow for Cooling Drinks.” The Classical Weekly, vol. 29, no. 8, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935, pp. 61–62, https://doi.org/10.2307/4339639.

Koester, Craig R. “The Message to Laodicea and the Problem of Its Local Context: A Study of the Imagery in Rev 3.14–22.” New Testament Studies 49.3 (2003): 407-424.

Love, Richard. “Chillin’at the Symposium with Plato: Refrigeration in the Ancient World.” ASHRAE Transactions 115.1 (2009).

Martialis, Valerius. Martial, Epigrams. Book 14. Mainly from Bohn’s Classical Library (1897), https://www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/martial_epigrams_book14.htm.

“Plato, Republic.” Plato, Republic, Book 4, Section 437d, https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat. Rep. 4.437d&fromdoc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0168.

Skogsberg, Kjell. Seasonal snow storage for cooling applications. Diss. Luleå tekniska universitet, 2001.

Wilson, Harry Langford. “A New Italic Divinity.” The American Journal of Philology, vol. 28, no. 4, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1907, pp. 450–55, https://doi.org/10.2307/288382.

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