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EXCURSUS III
ON PUTTING NEW (νέον) WINE INTO FRESH (καινοὺς) BOTTLES
It is usually considered a sufficient explanation of this passage to say that the ‘bottles’ of the ancients were skins, and not bottles of glass; and that whereas fermenting wine would burst old, worn, and suncracked skins, it would only distend new skins.
It is exceedingly doubtful whether such an explanation is tenable.
α. It is quite true that the ‘bottles’ of the East were skins, as the Greek word ἀσκὸς implies[430]. They are still made in the East exactly as they used to be made thousands of years ago, by skinning an animal from the neck, cutting off the head and legs, and drawing off the skin without making a slit in the belly. The legs and neck are then tightly tied and sewn up, and the skin with the hair on it is steeped in tannin and pitched at the sutures (Tristram, Nat. Hist. Bib., p. 92).
[430] The root is sk, found also in skin.
β. It is also quite true that ‘wine’ must here mean the juice of the grape which has not yet fermented, ‘must,’ as this explanation implies. For ‘still wine’—wine after fermentation—may be put in any bottles whether old or new. It has no tendency to burst the bottles that contain it.
γ. But unfermented wine which was intended to ferment certainly could not be kept in any kind of leather bottle whether old or new. The fermentation would split open the sutures of the leather, however new the bottle was.
δ. It seems, therefore, to be a very probable conclusion that our Lord is not thinking at all of fermented, intoxicating wine, but of ‘must’—the liquid which the Greeks called ἀεὶ γλεῦκος—tuns of which are kept for years in France, and in the East; which (as is here stated) improves by age; which is a rich and refreshing, but non-intoxicating beverage; and which might be kept with perfect safety in new leather bottles.
ε. Why, then, would it be unsafe to put the must in old bottles? Because if the old bottles had contained ‘wine’ in the ordinary sense—i.e. the fermented juice of the grape—or other materials, “minute portions of albuminoid matter would be left adhering to the skin, and receive yeast germs from the air, and keep them in readiness to set up fermentation in the new unfermented contents of the skin.… As soon as the unfermented grape-juice was introduced, the yeast germs would begin to grow in the sugar and to develop carbonic dioxide. If the must contained one-fifth sugar it would develop 47 times its volume of gas, and produce an enormous pressure which no bottle, new or old, could withstand.”
Unless, therefore, some other explanation can be produced, it is at least possible—if not most probable—that our Lord, in speaking of ‘wine,’ here means must.
Thus much is at any rate certain:—the conditions of our Lord’s comparison are not fulfilled either by fermented wine, or by grape-juice intended for fermentation. Fermented wine could be kept as well in old bottles as in new; and grape-juice intended to ferment would burst far stronger receptacles than the newest leathern bottle. See Job 32:19. “The rending force of the pent-up gas would burst even the strongest iron-bound cask.” When fermentation is intended, it goes on in the wine-vat.
Columella, an almost contemporary Latin writer, describing the then common process of preserving grape-juice in the form of unfermented must, lays the same stress on its being put into a new amphora.