Renaissance Vintage: The Popularity of Sack Wine in Early Modern Europe

Before there was sherry, there was sack. For the better part of two centuries, the strong, often sweet white wines of southern Spain and the Canary Islands poured into England by the shipload, and Tudor and Stuart drinkers loved them with a devotion that Shakespeare made immortal in his most famous drinker, Sir John Falstaff¹. (See also: Shakespeare and wine.)

Sack was the wine of the age — and its story runs from the solera cellars of Jerez to the deck of an English privateer to the stage of the Globe.

What was sack?

Sack was a strong white wine from the hot south: chiefly from Jerez (then spelled Xeres) in Andalusia, but also from the Canary Islands and Málaga¹. The most prized was “sherris-sack,” a fortified white from Jerez made on the solera system, in which older wines in cask are continually topped up with younger ones to keep a house style consistent year after year⁴. It is, in every meaningful sense, the direct ancestor of modern sherry²⁸.

Canary sack, made largely from the Malmsey (Malvasia) grape, tended to be sweeter still — a wine Shakespeare had a character call “a marvellous searching wine” that “perfumes the blood ere one can say ‘What’s this?’”⁵

Where the name came from

Etymologists still argue over the word. The likeliest source is the Spanish sacar, “to draw out” or “to export” — wine drawn from the cask for shipment abroad — though some trace it to seco, “dry.” Either way, “sherris” is simply an English mangling of Jerez, which is why the drink we now call sherry still hides the old town’s name inside it¹⁶.

Falstaff’s addiction

No character in literature loves a drink the way Falstaff loves sack. Across Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare names sack again and again, and gives his fat knight a genuine philosophical oration in its praise — a comic theology in which sherris-sack warms the wit, fires courage and makes a man fit company⁷.

“If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them should be… to addict themselves to sack.”— Falstaff, in Henry IV, Part 2³

It is thanks to Falstaff that a vanished Tudor wine still has a hold on the imagination four centuries later — proof of how deeply a drink can lodge itself in a culture’s literature³.

Drake, plunder and a fashion

Sack’s great surge in fashion has a swashbuckling origin. In 1587 Sir Francis Drake raided Cadiz — the famous “singeing of the King of Spain’s beard” — and among the plunder he carried home were thousands of butts of sack⁴. That sudden flood of captured wine helped turn sack into the height of Elizabethan fashion, exactly as Shakespeare was beginning to write for the London stage⁵.

From sack to sherry

Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the word “sack” slowly faded, and “sherry” took its place; the Canary and Málaga trades declined while Jerez endured². But the line is unbroken. The fortified, solera-aged wine that Victorian Britain would later drink by the ocean — and that we still pour today — is the direct descendant of Falstaff’s beloved sack¹.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Wine in Victorian Britain
• Wine in late Georgian Britain
• The sublime language of wine and poetry

References

1. Jancis Robinson (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Wine — “sack.” www.jancisrobinson.com ↩
2. Encyclopædia Britannica — sherry. www.britannica.com ↩
3. Standpoint — Falstaff’s Sack (on Shakespeare and sherris-sack). standpointmag.co.uk ↩
4. Jerez-Xeres-Sherry — Sherris Sack and the Sack Trade. jerez-xeres-sherry.blogspot.com ↩
5. The Drinks Business — Top 10 Shakespearean drinks. www.thedrinksbusiness.com ↩
6. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust — Here’s to Shakespeare. www.shakespeare.org.uk ↩
7. Encyclopædia Britannica — Falstaff (fictional character). www.britannica.com ↩
8. Familia Morgan — Sack (wine glossary). familiamorgan.com ↩

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
A masterly history of wine, excellent on the Anglo-Spanish sack trade and the rise of sherry.

A Short History of Wine
Rod Phillips
A crisp global history of wine, strong on the trade routes and tastes of early modern Europe.

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