We know early modern women and men drank wine. But we can't know exactly what that wine tasted like. As a knowledge problem, wine joins many other mysteries of gendered experience in the past. Surviving evidence confirms an historical phenomenon we can call ‘English wine’ and some of the ways in which it was gendered. As we will see, it is easy to document popular attitudes toward wine in ballads and plays. We can readily find recipes for making, using, or ameliorating wine, as well as fulminations against and paeans to it. We can also find references to wine in inventories and account books, lyric poetry, letters and diaries, popular accounts of commensality and of murder, recipe compilations, medical texts, the notebooks of early experimental scientists, and in the surprisingly large literature advocating English grape growing and wine making in the seventeenth century. Moving across the social landscape, wine left archival stains that offer tantalizing traces of its cultural centrality and its instability. To understand it, we need to gather evidence from a range of sources, accepting that the resulting assemblage will still be missing pieces and can never answer all of our questions. As we try to pin down women's lived relationship to wine as consumers and producers, we find enigmatic hints, marginal comments, texts of questionable provenance. No matter how widely we forage, the specifics of how that wine smelled and tasted elude us.

In early modern England, most people, young and old, male and female, queens and servants, routinely drank fermented beverages of some sort since water was widely and wisely distrusted.