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The whole of Europe drank wine; only a part of Europe produced it. --Fernand Braudel (1) In Mexico and Peru, which is the great Continent of America, it is prohibited to make Wines under great penalties for fear of starving of trade: so that all the Wines they have are sent from Spain.... There is more canary brought into England than to all the world besides.... When sacks and canaries were brought in first among us they were used to be drunk in aqua-vitae measures, but now they go down every one's throat, both young and old, like milk. --James Howell (2) Your best sacks are of Xeres in Spain ... your strong Sacks of the islands of the Canaries and of Maligo. --Gervaise Markham (3) Taken together, these epigraphs attest to the pervasive presence of imported beverages in England and Europe and allow us to see how viticulture and wine consumption were complexly implicated in global systems of production and trade. Like Falstaff's tavern reckoning in Eastcheap, his weapon case at Shrewsbury, and his ample body everywhere, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English bodies and English literary culture were replete with an intolerable deal of (1 Henry IV 2.5.493). (4) James Howell's seemingly hyperbolic claims about English consumption of Spanish wines in the second epigraph above are in fact corroborated by historians of the trade. Although wines of varying origins and quality were referred to as sack, those whose trajectories I trace in global trade networks and English literary culture were produced in Spanish dominions, whether the Canary Islands or Xeres and Malaga on the peninsula. Even as viticulture came to dominate the economy of the Canaries, that trade came to rely exclusively on export market: England. While Shakespeare's Falstaff plays refer to the Spanishness of sack only obliquely, the later texts on which I focus in this paper foreground the origins and of sack sharply, though with differing effects. Before turning to these texts--particularly James Howell's letter to Henry Clifford (1634) and John Taylor's Drinke and Welcome (1637)--I will offer a very brief glimpse at the pervasiveness of sack in England, including the depiction of that globe of sinful continents Falstaff [2 Henry IV 2.4.258), whose excessive consumption of and effusions about sack in the Henriad are, I argue, firmly situated in a wider, emergent cultural discourse about these wines, their trade networks, and identity. Sack wines circulate variously in early modern literary and material culture. Serving as a mechanism for the conduct of civic affairs in towns across the nation, they were often used as a form of payment to parish priests and local officials. (5) Canary wine was offered in payment to Ben Jonson, whose petition for an increase in his annuity was granted by Charles I in 1630--from 100 marks annually to 100 English pounds sterling and one terse of Canary Spanish wine yearly from the king's own cellars. Sacks were prominent among wines offered to the lords of the Star Chamber at the publically funded dinners during the law terms. Since the Lords were the monarch's dinner guests, carefully recorded accounts of all their dinners survive for the years 1519-1639. According to Andre Simon, who collected and printed excerpts of these materials, the accounts offer first-hand evidence of the changes which took place during those hundred and twenty years in the variety and the cost of the food eaten and the wines drunk in London by the elite, (6) and thus are of interest to scholars of diet and identity in our period. Sack stands out amongst the high volume of all wines purchased for these occasions. During the latter part of Elizabeth's reign, when the costs of all wines were rising precipitously, wine consumption by the Lords went unabated. For example, during Michaelmas Term 1590, when the Lords dined 15 times in the Star Chamber, the bill for wines was as follows: 55 gallons of the best Sack at 9 [pounds sterling] 3s 4d 3s. …
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