Wine

Wine was famously grown and aged by Benedictine Monks in France and Italy, some of the greatest wines of the medieval era and beyond originating in regions like Loire, Bordeaux, and Burgundy. Some of the most famous monasteries and abbeys produce many organic products like wine, cheese, butter, beer, and ales. Syres is very familiar with some of the monastic houses of Italy and France. Many of the religious houses became rich off the vast farm and grazing lands that they owned. Syres travels to several of them during his time in the service of the Pope and Matilda of Tuscany. Wine supports not only abbeys and monasteries but the towns that sprang up around them. Cities like Paris, Lyon, Rouen, Milan, Florence, and Siena had many religious houses that produce all sorts of different wines and spirits which Syres was happy to test and be a part of. He has always enjoyed wine even if it takes him a while to get drunk. Scores of France's most notable appellations were developed by monks – Chablis, Chassagne-Montrachet, Vosne-Romanée, Pouilly-Fuissé, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Pommard, to name but a few, as well as dozens of the great Bordeaux – and many still carry the names of the monasteries that thrived for centuries until The Revolution. Syres has stayed in many of these places while traveling, soldiering, or working for powerful allies and friends. Syres never learns how to grow vines or make the wine himself but he appreciates a good flavor, realizing he is one of the very few people to experience such diverse and rare kinds of wine saved only for the richest and most noble. He becomes a somewhat expert on wine as he drinks it almost every day for over 300 years. However, wine also has religious uses as Christians believe Jesus turned water into wine.