Roman Wormwood Wine (Apsinthium Romanum)

History

This wormwood wine survives in Book I of the collection known as Apicius (De re coquinaria), among the opening conditum, or spiced-wine, formulas that begin the work. Like the book as a whole, it reaches us through a late-antique compilation (c. 4th–5th c. CE) that carries the name of the 1st-century gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius rather than any demonstrable authorship by him. The recipe builds on the method of a preceding spiced wine, the conditum Camerinum, steeping Pontic wormwood — offered as a stand-in when the preferred wormwood is wanting, an echo of the ingredient substitutions common in Roman cookery — together with mastic, nard leaf, costmary, saffron, and aged wine, then straining it cold; the compiler notes that charcoal clarification is unnecessary because of the drink's bitterness. Every ingredient is Old-World and period-correct. Wormwood's intense bitterness was prized as a digestive, which is why it recurs across aperitif and digestif drinks, and infused wines of this kind belong to an old tradition of medicinal wormwood wine (vinum absinthiatum) reaching back to Hippocratic practice. Such Roman absinthium wines are frequently cited as forerunners of vermouth — whose very name descends from the German wermut, "wormwood" — as a line of continuity rather than a single documented descent.

Ingredients

• ounce Pontic wormwood (absinthium)
• ounce Thebaic date/terebinth (terebinthus)
• mastic
• scruples bay leaf (folium)
• scruples costmary (costus)
• scruples saffron
• sextarii aged wine

Instructions

1. Follow the method for the Camerine spiced wine, substituting the wormwood step done Roman-style.
2. Use cleaned Pontic wormwood and terebinth (about an ounce each) with one Thebaic measure.
3. Add mastic, bay leaf (3 scruples), costmary (6 scruples), and saffron (3 scruples).
4. Add 18 sextarii of aged wine; no coals are needed, since the bitterness finishes it.