Homemade Wines and Liqueurs

After inspecting a whole volume dedicated to the preparation of homemade wines and cordials, I discovered why they were considered so extremely luxurious by country people and made regularly in bourgeois and upper-class households only. Their sugar content was so outrageous that no peasant household could ever have spent the money just for the sugar needed to produce a good bottle of tonique. I use the word tonique, of course, in the old French manner, because these wines were supposed to pep up the consumer and have special curative effects. The mere fact that a slice of toasted bread soaked in a mixture of half wine, half water could have been considered a comforting potion for postpartum mothers and sick old people alike, can be taken as an indication of the pharmaceutical properties attributed to flavored wines.