Spiced Wine (Conditum Paradoxum)

The Romans traditionally served a honeyed wine as an aperitif with the first course at dinner. This was known as mulsum. It was a simple mixture of honey and wine in a ratio dependant on personal taste. This recipe is something finer: a special spiced wine or conditum, a distant ancestor of modern aperitifs such as the Martini.

Reference: Apicius I,I

1 Fine Spiced Wine (Conditum Paradoxum)
The composition of this excellent spiced wine is as follows. Into a copper bowl put 6 sextarii​1 of honey and 2 sextarii of wine; heat on a slow fire, constantly stirring the mixture with a whip. At the boiling point add a dash of cold wine, retire from stove and skim. Repeat this twice or three times, let it rest till the next day, and skim again. Then add 4 ounces of crushed pepper,​2 3 scruples of mastich, a drachm each of nard or laurel leaves and saffron, 5 drachms of roasted date stones crushed and previously soaked in wine to soften them. When this is properly done add 18 sextarii of light wine. To clarify it perfectly, add crushed charcoal​3 twice or as often as necessary which will draw the residue together and carefully strain or filter through the charcoal.

1 Sextarii. Tor. partes XV; G.‑V. pondo XV; List. partes XV . . . pondo lib. . . . qui continent sextarios sex. One sextarius (a "sixth") equals about 1½ pint English.

Thayer's Note: The sextarius was in fact at most 1.02 imperial or "English" pints (1.22 pints American measurement), and probably significantly less than a pint.
2 Pepper. Piperis uncias IV — ordinarily our black or white pepper grains, but in connection with honey, sweets, and so forth, the term "pepper" may just as well stand for our allspice, or even for any spicing in general.

Thayer's Note: Sharp-eyed reader and cook Carole Newson-Smith points out that allspice is native to the New World, and was therefore unknown to the ancient Romans.
3 Charcoal. Still a favorite filterer for liquors.

List. Apicius is correct in starting his book with this formula, as all meals were started with this sort of mixed drink.

Tor. deviates from the other texts in that he elaborates on the cooking process.

Spiced Wine (Conditum Paradoxum)
reprinted from The Classical Cookbook by Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger

1 bottle (70 cl) medium-dry white wine
6 oz (3/4 cup/ 170 g) clear honey
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 bay leaf
Pinch saffron powder or strands of saffron
Pinch mastic (optional)
1 fresh date, the stone roasted for 10 minutes and the flesh soaked in a little wine

Put 5 fl oz (2/3 cup/ 150 ml) of the wine in a saucepan with honey and bring it to a boil. Skim if necessary. Repeat and remove from the heat. Add the seasonings to the wine while it is hot: this speeds up the flavoring process. When it is cold, add the rest of the wine and allow to stand overnight. To serve, strain through a fine sieve or muslin. Makes six glasses.

Conditum Paradoxum, Ancient Roman Spiced Holiday Wine
from https://www.drinkhacker.com/

December is the month of many holidays, but one winter celebration that’s been lost to time is the ancient Roman tradition of Saturnalia, a festival that lasted from December 17th to December 23rd. The Saturnalia was dedicated to the Roman God Saturn, and involved banquets, gift-giving, and a flipping of social norms such as slaves being waited on by their masters.

One of the crown jewels of the season was a spiced wine called conditum paradoxum, which loosely translates to something like “surprise wine.” Conditum was so prized by the Romans that it’s the very first recipe in the Apicius, one of the oldest cookbooks in the world. Since we have the Apicius recipe readily available, and since the Saturnalia is as good a time as any to try, we’ve attempted to recreate this ancient alcohol. Follow along, and if you make a bottle for your own December celebrations, remember the Roman toast: Salus!

Conditum Paradoxum

“Put six sextarii of honey into a bronze jar containing two sextarii of wine, so that the wine will be boiled off as you cook the honey. Heat this over a slow fire of dry wood, stirring with a wooden rod as it boils. If it boils over, add some cold wine. Take off the heat and allow to cool. When it does cool, light another fire underneath it. Do this a second and a third time and only then remove it from the brazier and skim it. Next, add 4 ounces of pepper, 3 scruples of mastic, a dragma of bay leaf and saffron, 5 date stones and then the dates themselves. Finally, add 18 sextarii of light wine. Charcoal will correct any bitter taste.” – Apicius, 1.1

The original recipe called for mastic, which is something we had never even heard of before attempting this; it’s apparently a gum made from the sap of trees found only on a single island in Greece called Chios and, if Amazon is anything to go off of, costs a fortune to import. Mastic apparently tastes piney and licoricey, so instead our recipe uses fennel seeds as an inexpensive substitute. As for the wine itself, Apicius doesn’t specify. Since you’re adding so much to it, a light, dry white wine would be best, we used an inexpensive Italian pinot grigio for that Roman touch.

750 ml bottle of white wine (Italian pinot grigio suggested)
1 cup honey [use less]
1 date
1 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp fennel seeds or mastic gum
2 bay leaves
pinch saffron

Put the cup of honey, 75 ml of wine, and the date in a saucepan and bring to a boil, make sure the honey dissolves completely.

Once the honey-wine mixture is boiling, lower the heat to simmer and add the remaining ingredients. Cover the pan and let simmer for 10 minutes, giving the spices time to infuse.

Strain the mixture into a pitcher with a fine strainer and a coffee filter. If any of the spices make it into the pitcher you can pour back into the saucepan and re-strain as many times as you’d like. Add the rest of the wine into the pitcher and stir. Use a funnel to pour the wine back into the bottle if desired. Either way, put the wine into the fridge and chill.

Makes one bottle.

So How Is It?

So you’ve made a bottle of conditum, now how about a taste test? Our wine is rich yellow-gold, a much fuller-bodied color than the initial pinot grigio. It’s also a bit cloudy, which is perhaps something that the charcoal filtering could have taken care of. The honey is strong on the nose, but the pepper pushes its way through, giving it a strong and sharp backbone. The other scents are more muted, mostly just a general melange of spice in the background.

And the taste? Very, very sweet! When the wine initially touches your tongue it’s a strong honey rush, somewhat like moscato. The rest of the spices don’t register much until the finish, which is lightly warming on the tongue and the roof of the mouth. The Romans drank conditum chilled, but this might actually be pretty nice warmed, like a mulled wine. It could probably do with some time in the bottle as well; the first taste test we did was after about a half hour of chilling and it was pure dessert-wine sweetness. The second glass, tried about 10 hours later, had more nuance to it, with a little more bite from the spices. The pepper is stronger, much like it was on the nose, with the fennel seeds giving a light anise-like bitterness under the taste of the honey and date. It’s definitely a more unique wine than it first seemed. It’s still a bit sweet, but if you’re a fan of dessert wines it could definitely be worth a try, and the peppery spices might warm your belly on a cold winter night.