6th great grandfather Edward Antill wrote an 80 page paper on the cultivation of grapes for wine in early America. From 1758, there had been an award offered for wine that best copied the British wine, but American growers were unable to match the quality. There were more pushes to encourage it and 6th ggf and Lord Sterling finally both won the award for their wine. I found the paper interesting, and only gagged on the following:
Three or four days after the second fermentation begins, which you must carefully watch by visiting your wines every day, again try your wine in a glass, and if it be pretty fine, prepare a cask sweet and good, burn a good large brimstone match in it, and as soon as the match is burnt out, whilst the cask is full of smoke, draw off the wine into it; now fill up your cask to the brim, and bung it up tight and stop the vent hole; the smoke or the brimstone will hinder any further fermentation; and this is called stumming: then make a morter of clay and horse dung mixed up with strong flaxseed tea, and cover the bung and vent hole close with it, and so let it stand until it is fit to sell or to use.
An ESSAY on the cultivation of the VINE, and the making and preserving of Wine, suited to the different climates of North-America, 1769
https://www.iment.com/maida/familytree/antill/edwardgrapesarticle.htm
As long as it isn’t “raisiny”. I hate barollos. Love a full bodied wine but keep your figs to yourself. Also, don’t muzzle slimes abjure wine?
Gaza was a much nicer place not all that long ago:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/unseen-gaza-photos-1940s/