From A Book of Wines

by William Turner, 1568

And in the book of good and ill juice he (Galen) sayeth thus: 'The wines that are too old or too new are to be eschewed. For the old do heat too much, and the new wines as long as they are green, or very new, heat nothing at all; so far are they from helping men to digest their meats, that they are very hardly digested themselves, and oft times they hang and abide still in a man's stomach, even as water.'

A seemingly sound pice of advice for anyone interesting in buying wines. He goes on, however, to discuss the distinction between red and white wines with an unforeseen insightfulness that could scarcely be 'eschewed.'

When I was a scholar in Cambridge, there was there a stinking butchery and very noisome to them that went by it or through it. What if a man should have been hired for forty shillings in the year to keep the butchery and the rest of the town sweet by carrying out the puddings, guts, and stinking blood? If this fellow should carry out all the filthiness out of the butchery once in the week unto the market hill, and let it lie there, should this man justly be called a scourer or cleanser of the town that carreieth the filth therof from one place only to another, and not quite out of the town? I think no. Even so if small white wines should drive humors from divers places of the body, and should not carry them forth by the water vessels but let them lie stinking there, it ought not to be called a scourer but a defiler, and an hurter of the body.

If the master of the pudding-cart before named would let the filthiness of the butchery tarry so long there, until it stank so sore, by reason of long continuing in that place and for lack of carrying out betimes, that both they of the butchery and all the neighbors about were grievously vexed with the foul stink of that filth that tarried so long there, another carter offered for the same wages every second day to carry out all the uncleanness of the town, which of these two men were more worthy to have the offce and name of the town-scourer? Small white wines scour and drive out the uncleanliness of the body as much as it is possible to be done by them, and red and Claret wine stop and hold back and fill the body full of ill humors. Now, which are most profitable to be taken most commonly by a man for the keeping of his health?

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