Wine Therapy, Middle Ages

Grens discusses the use of wine to treat diseases during the Middle Ages. In 1395, the Hopital Civil de Strasbourg, at the time an almost-300-year-old hospital, dug a wine cellar specifically to serve its patients--and not just with meals. From high cholesterol to herpes, doctors of the Middle Ages were prescribing wine for "pretty much any disease," says Azelina Jaboulet-Vercherre, a wine historian at Ferrandi Paris, a culinary and hotel management institute. European physicians of the Middle Ages were by no means the first to use wine medicinally. A millennium earlier, the Greeks and Romans were using wine in concoctions to treat various ailments and as a wound cleaner.