THE WINDING PATH OF WINE CURES

As the Black Death, also known as the Black Plague, ravaged Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s, people became increasingly desperate for any iota of respite. Some tried blood-letting. Others opted for rubbing onions—or, in some cases, a chopped snake—directly onto their infected boils.

If that wasn’t quite doing the trick, a plague-stricken individual could always try drinking a wine-based curative, according to Pat McGovern, scientific director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Project at Penn Museum in Philadelphia. McGovern has written two books on the archeological history of wine, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages (University of California Press, 2019).

“There’s one [recipe] that was put together by a king of Pontus in Turkey named Mithridates,” says McGovern. “There’s 73 ingredients that go into it.”