Years ago, I had a priest friend who wrote a column for a major US newspaper. It was about odd things he had discovered while looking for other things. With a tip of my cap to him for the idea, here are a couple of strange things I have noted…
Most of us learned about the temperance movement and prohibition somewhere in history class. I was surprised to learn that during this period some Anglican churches experimented with ‘unfermented wine.’ (Isn’t that another name for grape juice?) The issue became serious enough that the Archbishop of Canterbury created a committee to examine the matter. The result was published in 1917 and said that fermented wine was always used in both Eastern and Western Christian tradition and that some water was always added to the wine in the cup.
Before you fill that wine cruet, take a look at the bottle. Did you know there is a difference between table wine and communion wine? Commonly communion wine has a higher alcohol content than table wine, which helps preserve it longer. If you worship in a smaller church (where I spent most of my ministry), you know that bottles may be open for considerable time at room temperature. While table wine can be up to 14% alcohol by volume under current U.S. law, Roman Catholic canon law allows communion wine to rise to 18% by volume. (We Anglicans don’t have such precise rules.) Other wines with a higher level of alcohol content are technically dessert wines and not limited by the 14% rule for table wine. Port and Sherry are examples of wines in this latter class.