Happy 2024! I hope everyone had a great New Year’s celebration. If you celebrated by raising a glass of bubbly and making a toast, then you continued a tradition started by our Roman ancestors. Romans also celebrated by drinking wine and toasting their friends, but sometimes the wine was not of the best quality. Homemade wine could turn bitter and acidic, making it taste more like vinegar than a fine wine. Nevertheless, the party must go on, so Italians came up with the idea of putting some burnt bread or blackened toast into the bad wine. The charcoal in the toast would soak up the acid and reduce the bitter taste, making the wine more palatable. This example of Italian ingenuity kept the party going in ancient times and gave us our modern toasting tradition.
Another drinking tradition, the clinking together of glasses, has a darker history. We picked this one up from the Greeks who were also great wine-makers. The first record I could find of this custom among Italians comes from the Empress Livia Drusilla born in the first century BC. She was rumored to have a habit of poisoning the wine of any guest she didn’t like. This became a common practice among Roman nobility. In response, guests would clink their glasses together with the host so that some of their wine would spill into the the host’s glass, ensuring that the guest and the host were drinking the same wine. If you refused to clink glasses with someone, you might be accused of poisoning their drink.
At larger gatherings, the host (or a servant food-tester) would bring out a large decanter of wine, raise a toast to all the guests to their health (“salute”) and drink it. If he didn’t fall over dead, then everyone would drink from the same decanter and party on!
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Submitted by Charlene Pardo
Sources:
worldhistory.us/ancient history