ABSTRACT
From Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Luke 12:19) – Food and Wine in Byzantium. Copyright © 2007 by the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd,
In Act I, Scene IV of Shakespeare’s Richard III, the duke of Clarence is famously done to death by being first stabbed and then, just to make sure, drowned in a ‘Malmsey-butt’.1 Malmsey was a type of sweet wine, which was originally associated with the Peloponnese, especially the area around Monemvasia. When the Franks took over Monemvasia after 1204, they called the city and the wine they found there ‘Malvoisie’. Malvoisie was in turn anglicized into Malmsey. By the fifteenth century, the type of grape which produced Malmsey was also being cultivated on Crete and Cyprus and even in Spain in order to produce the quantities needed to satisfy the market.2
