Excerpt from A History and Description of Modern Wines Most wines used by the Romans were adulterated with various substances, and were consequently not wines of the purest kind, in the modern sense of the term, and, indeed, in the ancient sense too, as the reader will see in the account of the best wine given by Mago, quoted hereafter. It was in the best and most flourishing times of Rome, in the Augustan age, that wine was most de teriorated. Yet that was the age of the Falernian, the taste and colour of which have been so much disputed which some have fixed in their fancies was like that of Madeira in colour, which one writer thinks was white, and various commentators black, but was very proba bly neither. The poets frequently use a slight appear ance which any object assumes, for the reality, hence the black of Martial, applied to Falernian, might be in tense red, or purple, or violet, but was hardly white. To receive the language and allusions of poetry as direct evidence, would be to change the nature of poetry itself, which professes to accommodate most things upon which it touches to a standard of non-existing excellence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.