There is a scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian in which the hapless messiah, played by Graham Chapman, hawks ancient Roman snack food in Jerusalem's Colosseum. His tray is filled with ocelot spleens, jaguar earlobes, and wolf-nipple chips, and we think to ourselves that Roman food was probably just as gruesome. But what about Roman wine? They apparently liked to cut it with seawater and honey. How disgusting was it? We will never know, because no one will ever be able to reproduce exactly the combination of varietals, viticulture, and climate that prevailed in Roman Europe 2,000 years ago. As with ocelot spleens, we will have to guess.
