The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (11 page)

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Kermes vermilio
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Scale is a tiny insect that latches onto a branch and hides under its protective shell. This particular species preys on
Q. coccifera,
a species of oak tree in the Mediterranean. The females suck down tree sap until they are as big and round as a tick, secreting a crimson gummy exudate. At some point, in the course of scraping scale off the tree, somebody must have noticed that the red pigment stained clothing and hands. It was certainly well known to the Greek physician Dioscorides, who wrote an odd entry in
De Materia Medica
(50–70 AD) about little insects that grow on oaks and are “similar in shape to a little snail, which the women there gather by mouth.” Dioscorides was known to get a few things wrong; it's unlikely that women actually picked bugs off trees by mouth when a stick would do. Even using a stick was tricky: the bugs had to be removed more or less intact, then killed (usually by steaming them or dropping them in vinegar), and then dried and taken to market, where they would be sold as a fabric dye.

Like most strange and unusual things in the natural world, the red pigment found its way into Italian liqueurs. The recipe can be traced back to an eighth-century medicinal tonic called
confectio alchermes
that called for taking a length of silk that had been dyed red with the insect, soaking it in apple juice and rose water to extract the dye, and adding extraordinarily rare spices that included ambergris (sperm whale bile), gold flakes, crushed pearls, aloe, and cinnamon. Over time, the recipe changed to include more familiar flavors like cloves, nutmeg, vanilla, and citrus, and the red dye came from cochineal, another insect-based dye newly arrived from the Americas. It was brighter in color and easier to harvest.

By the nineteenth century, the bright red liqueur known as alkermes (or alchermes) was made by several Italian distillers as a digestif, not a medicine. It also became the flavoring for a layered spongecake desert called
zuppa inglese.
A modern version of the liqueur is still available in Italy and can be found in specialty Italian food shops. The ancient Santa Maria Novella pharmacy in Florence carries their own formulation. Unfortunately, alkermes made with actual kermes scale are a thing of the past; the only red insect-based food dye allowed in the European Union is E120, the cochineal scale.

 

GRAPES

Vitis vinifera

vitaceae (grape family)

Q
uick: name a fruit that is made into alcohol. What comes to mind first? Probably grapes. But believe it or not, the very existence of grapes is surprisingly unlikely. The fossil record shows that grapes were established in Asia, Europe, and the Americas fifty million years ago. But when the last ice age, the Pleistocene epoch, began about 2.5 million years ago, vast sheets of ice covered much of the grape's range and nearly drove it to extinction. The vines that managed to pass the time in unfrozen corners of the world were the only ones left for early humans to encounter. It's entirely possible that the grapes that flourished before the ice age were far more diverse and interesting than what we grow today.

To make the success of the grape even more improbable, those early vines would have yielded nothing like the abundant clusters of sweet, marble-sized fruit we know today. The grapevines that survived the ice age were dioecious, meaning that each plant was either male or female. The vines depended upon insects to transport their pollen, and if a female was too far away from a male, it simply wouldn't happen. The fruit from these couplings was unpredictable as well. Grapevines, like apples, can produce offspring whose fruit will be quite unlike that of its parents. Some of those grapes would have been small, bitter, and full of unpalatable seeds.

So what happened to improve the grape's prospects? A mutation that changed the plant's sexual orientation. In dioecious plants, the females are female because a gene suppresses the formation of male anatomy and vice versa. But sometimes those genes go awry and nature creates a hermaphrodite. The vines that resulted from those mutations had both male and female anatomy on the same plant. Because the pollen didn't have as far to travel, the vines produced more abundant fruit. The earliest agrarians might not have understood why certain vines were more prolific, but they would have selected them to grow in their settlements. That selection process began about eight thousand years ago, and from there, it was simply a matter of choosing the tastiest fruit and taking cuttings to get a genetic clone. Fortunately, pottery was also being invented around the same time, leading to the happy circumstance of crushed fruit stored in a container long enough for wild yeast to find it.

One more lucky break made wine making possible. A particular species of wild yeast that feeds on the exudates of oak tree bark managed to crawl into early wine vats around five thousand years ago and do a particularly good job of fermentation. There would have been other yeasts living naturally on grape skins, but they would not have been nearly as well suited to the job. But somehow, oak yeast got into the mix.

How did this happen? Scientists have a few theories. It might be that grapevines occasionally climbed up an oak tree and picked up the yeast. It's also possible that people gathered acorns and grapes at the same time, commingling the microorganisms on each, or that insects picked up the yeast on an oak tree and carried it to a grapevine because it was attracted to the rising sugar in the fruit. However it happened, that yeast species,
Saccharomyces cerevisiae,
found its way into wine somehow. Today it is an entirely domesticated creature, rarely found in the wild and widely bred into specialized strains that are used around the world to make bread rise and to ferment wine and beer.