re: By the Greeks, at least in the early period, wines were drunk mixed with various substances, as grated cheese and flour ( Il.xi. 638), barley-meal and honey ( Od.x. 234).

so you're saying that wine mixers and wine smoothies are really a greek invention? and not some marketing ploy of our age?

adding honey and and ground barley meal, would make the wine sweet and thick, like a smoothy, (though i doubt they added snow or ice, as the roman's did to special drinks, as well as serving snow with fruit and honey (snow cones!))

barley is rather sweet, soaked in water, its starch is sweet, and it starts to ferment and change that starch into a barley sugar in a flash! i am sure that harsh bitter wine was quickly turned into a snazzy drink with a bit of honey, and barley!

the grated cheese and flour mixture doesn't strike my fancy... but it could be good, (maybe a nice creamy ricotta type cheese) and zowee, you have a creamy wine cooler, something like the new yogurt smoothies, only with a kick!

we often don't look at the ingredients of our own food, or if we do, we don't pay them mind.. unless you have a premium brand of ice cream in the house, chances are it contains 'carregeen'-- or seaweed..

now think about a scholar telling you, in the late 20th and early 21st century, it was common to have a sweet dairy dessert, made of milk and seaweed.. sound gross? I used to love the column in Natural History about the anthropology of food- bare facts of food often sound gross, but i doubt that the greeks make horrible melanges of their wine. (unless of course, you think sangria, and wine cooler, and smoothies are horrid melanges!)


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