The Little Ice Age - or why Americans favor beer over wine

It is curious little items like this that make TV channel surfing interesting. Recently I surfed onto a program about the 'Little Ice Age", an event that lowered and fluctuated the temperature spanning the years between 1450 until 1850. Just a few degrees colder than what was considered 'normal' was enough to alter the lifestyles of people in Northern Europe forever, and it was people from Northern Europe who first sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and settled in America.

From a brief excursion into the histories of beer and wine, I find it hard to tell which came first - beer or wine. The Bible mentions beer as one of the victuals loaded onto the Ark by Noah, but the Bible also mentions that Noah planted a vineyard and made wine. I don't know the Bible very well, but I think that probably the vine planting took place after the Flood, so that means beer came first. That would probably be a time between 2,900 and 2,750 BCE when the Persian Gulf flooded. Ancient nomads of the deserts of the Middle East are said to have drunk beer.

Fossilized grapevines dating back 60,000 years have been found, but a date for the origin of wine is not clear. There is a Persian fable about a princess who had lost favor with her father the king. She was so sad, she decided to commit suicide by eating spoiled grapes. To her surprise, she didn't die - she got drunk. From personal experience with headaches from wine drinking, I find it hard to believe, but the fable says she felt so good afterwards that her personality changed, and she became so vivacious and fun-loving, her father cared for her again, and ordered more vines to be planted for 'spoiled grapes'. It's hard to date ancient Persian fables, but that one may go back as far as Ur, one of the first cities in the Fertile Crescent that is now in Iraq. Ur predated the Egyptian heydays. (I wonder where that word came from?)

Roman soldiers introduced beer and wine to France about 55 BC. A bottle of wine was found cached between stones in a sarcophagus in Germany in 1867. It was dated from 350 AD. It is thought that a layer of olive oil floating on top of the wine helped keep the wine from evaporating. The full bottle is still on display at Historisches Museum der Platz.

Hard liquor came later. Unlike beer and wine that are fermented, it is a distilled beverage with an alcoholic content of 35% or higher. If it has sugar added, it is a 'liqueur'. With no sugar, it is a 'spirit'. Spirits include whisky, gin, rum, brandy, vodka, tequila, and German schnapps. American schnapps has sugar added, so it is a liqueur.

So, what has all this to do with the Little Ice Age? Well, after a long warm spell throughout the Roman heydays, (I like that word) and the Middle Ages, in the middle of the fifteenth century the temperature suddenly started to drop. Every year was followed by another year still colder. There came a time when grapes could no longer grow anywhere in Northern Europe except for Southern France. The Thames River of London froze solid for the winter months one year in the 1400s.

But the short growing season was not a life-threatening problem for the hardy Northern Europeans of the early 16^th century. The climate was so cold that there was a scarcity of food. Almost everything like grain and vegetables were grown above ground and froze during  the very early winters. That is when the potato from South America came to the rescue. In several of its 3000 varieties, the potato had been introduced into Europe by the Spanish explorers in the 1500s. Soon potatoes were being eaten in every European country except France. The people in France disdained potatoes as food fit only for cattle. As the temperatures dropped, and only root vegetables like the potato survived, the stubborn French people faced famine. It was during this time that Queen Marie Antoinette is reported to have said of the starving people of Paris, "Let them eat cake," not long before she was beheaded on the Guillotine.

There was a Frenchman named Antoine Parmentier, who had learned to appreciate potatoes while he was a German prisoner of war. When famine threatened the people in France, when the emperor expressed a desire that the peasants eat the despised potato, the enterprising Parmentier planted a field of potatoes near Paris. Because there were royal troops assigned to guard the field, the starving citizens thought there must be a delicacy fit for royalty growing there, so they sneaked in and stole some of the potatoes. Thus the potato became part of Parisian cuisine.

The Little Ice Age was still in progress during the early settlement of North America, and those settlers were mostly the faithful beer-drinking people from Northern European countries like England, Germany, Holland and Sweden. The very cold weather accounts for the failure of the earliest colonies in Jamestown and Maine.

So, according to my TV program, the reason why Americans still drink a lot more beer and hard liquor than wine is due to the habits of our early settlers who drank beer. Wine consists of only 11 % of the alcoholic beverages consumed in the United States, and 70% of those wine drinkers live on either the east or the west coasts.

Beer is still king in the hinterlands of the U.S. of A. During the time of Prohibition in the 1920s, almost all beer drinkers made their own brew. My mother made a batch of bottled beer, and had it stored in the cellar just below the dining room. One night in the 1920s when we had company for dinner, we were gathered around my mother's prized mahogany dining table eating. Suddenly there was a lull in the conversation when a series of pops sounded. Everyone turned to everyone else and smiled. It turned out that Mother had bottled the beer too soon, and the caps were blowing off and hitting the ceiling that was also the floor beneath the dining room table.

I made beer once myself back in the 1950s, but that is another story that I have told before. Maybe I'll dig it up and repost it here.