Fasting Half the Year: The Ethiopian Church’s Wine Problem

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is one of the oldest Christian bodies on earth, and one of the most demanding. Its members fast for something like half the year, and its worship turns on the Eucharist, which requires wine made from grapes. That last requirement created a centuries-long logistical problem, because Ethiopia’s highlands were among the harder places in the Christian world to grow a grape. For most of its history, this wine-centred church grew up in a country that produced very little wine.¹

The drink Ethiopia did produce, in abundance, was honey wine, which the sacrament does not allow. For more than a thousand years the church kept grape wine on its altars mostly by importing it.

The most demanding fast in Christianity

The Ethiopian Orthodox calendar asks laypeople to fast on around 180 days a year; for clergy and the especially devout, the figure runs to roughly 250.² These are not token fasts. On a fasting day the observant take no food or drink before the afternoon, usually three o’clock, and then eat a single meal that contains no meat, no dairy, no eggs: a strict vegan discipline followed for months of the year in total.

The days add up from several sources. Every Wednesday and Friday is a fast, outside the joyful weeks after Easter. On top of that sit the great seasonal fasts: the fifty-five days of Great Lent, the forty days of the Advent fast before Christmas, a fortnight for the Assumption of the Virgin in August, the Fast of the Apostles after Pentecost, and the short, sharp Fast of Nineveh.² By most counts it is among the most heavily fasted calendars in Christianity.

But the altar still needs wine

Fasting restrains ordinary eating and drinking. It does not touch the Eucharist. At the centre of the liturgy stands the consecrated wine, and across the ancient churches the rule is old and firm: the wine of the sacrament must be true wine, fermented from grapes.³ However many days a year the faithful fasted, every priest saying the liturgy still needed grape wine, and needed it reliably.

That is a modest demand in France or Georgia, where the vine grows almost as a weed. It was a real one in the Ethiopian highlands. The country’s altitude, its rainfall pattern and its long tradition favoured other crops, and the European wine grape did not take to it easily.

A land of honey wine

What Ethiopia had instead was tej. Tej is a honey wine, a mead, fermented from honey and water and flavoured with the leaves and twigs of gesho, a native buckthorn that works rather as hops do in beer, lending bitterness and helping preservation.⁴ It is ancient and beloved, poured at Ethiopian feasts and weddings for as far back as the record runs, and central to social life across the country.

But tej is made from honey, and the Eucharist requires grape wine, so the country’s most popular drink was not one the church could use at the altar. The gap even shows up in the language, where the ordinary word for wine carries within it the word for honey wine.¹

In Amharic the word for grape is woin; the word for wine is woin tej — wine named, in part, after honey.

Where the wine came from

If the land could not readily supply grape wine, it had to come from somewhere, and for much of Ethiopian history it came by sea. The ancient Aksumite kingdom traded through the Red Sea port of Adulis, and wine was among the goods it brought in; Ethiopian viticulture and wine use can be traced back to the early centuries of the first millennium, with wine noted in the inscriptions of the fourth-century king Ezana and viticulture carved on an Aksumite obelisk older still.¹ For the church, sacramental wine was often a precious import, carried inland to the highland monasteries and churches where it was needed.

Where imported wine ran short, the wider grape-poor Christian world had a workaround: wine made from dried grapes, raisins steeped in water and fermented, which counts as true grape wine because it comes from the vine. How heavily Ethiopian churches leaned on that method is not well documented, and it should not be overstated, but the underlying problem it answered was very real. Keeping wine on the altar in the Ethiopian highlands depended on logistics and trade rather than a nearby vineyard.³

The Rift Valley closes the gap

The modern chapter is the one that finally eased the old problem. Ethiopia’s first commercial winery, Awash, was founded in 1956 and grew into a substantial producer, turning out millions of bottles a year for the domestic market.⁵ Then, in 2014, the French drinks group Castel opened a large modern estate of around 120 hectares near Ziway, in the Rift Valley south of Addis Ababa, and began producing grape wines — Merlot, Syrah, Chardonnay — at a scale Ethiopia had never seen, a good share of it exported.⁵

For the first time, a country that had imported its wine for the better part of two thousand years was making it in quantity from its own vines. The vineyards of the Rift Valley are a commercial venture, aimed at restaurants and export markets as much as anything. But they also mean that the grape wine an Ethiopian priest needs for the liturgy can now be grown in Ethiopian soil, after centuries of arriving by ship.

Related dates

Wine and worship have been entangled for as long as both have existed. Explore what else happened on this article’s date below.

Read more

Wine sits at the origin of the faith: read how wine became the blood of the new religion, and how the Vatican devised a half-fermented loophole for priests who cannot drink wine. For more on the continent’s deep vinous past, see the long history of Africa’s wineries.

References

1. On Ethiopia’s wine history being bound up above all with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s Eucharistic needs, the ancient Red Sea port of Adulis as a route for imported wine, viticulture traceable to the early first millennium (with wine noted for King Ezana and on an Aksumite obelisk), and the Amharic terms woin (grape) and woin tej / nebit (wine): STIAS, “Viniculture in Ethiopia,” and histories of Ethiopian wine. ↩
2. On the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo fasting calendar — roughly 180 fasting days for laypeople and up to about 250 for clergy and the devout, the rule of no food before mid-afternoon and a vegan diet on fasting days, and the main fasts (Great Lent, the Advent fast, the Assumption fast, the Fast of the Apostles, the Fast of Nineveh, and every Wednesday and Friday): accounts of fasting and abstinence in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. ↩
3. On the requirement across the ancient churches that sacramental wine be true wine fermented from grapes, and on wine from dried grapes (raisins) as a grape-derived option where fresh grapes are unavailable: general accounts of sacramental wine. ↩
4. On tej as an Ethiopian honey wine (mead) fermented with honey and water and flavoured with gesho (a native buckthorn used rather as hops are), and its long-standing popularity: histories of Ethiopian food and drink. ↩
5. On Awash Winery, founded in 1956 as Ethiopia’s first commercial winery and later producing millions of bottles a year, and on the French group Castel’s roughly 120-hectare estate near Ziway in the Rift Valley, which began large-scale grape-wine production in 2014 with a substantial share exported: reporting and reference accounts of Ethiopian wine. ↩

Books worth reading

As an Amazon Associate, This Day in Wine History earns from qualifying purchases. Book links are affiliate links.

Ethiopia: The Living Churches of an Ancient Kingdom
Mary-Jane Marsh (ed.)
A richly illustrated survey of the ancient church whose liturgy set the wine problem in the first place.

The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
The sweeping global history of wine, from the ancient Near East to the far corners it reached through faith and trade.