History
Wales has a long history of alcohol creation; but distillation came in the Middle Ages. 'The Great Welsh Warrior' Reaullt Hir is said to have distilled 'chwisgi' from braggot brewed by the monks of Bardsey Island in 356 AD. These monks then allegedly developed the art of distilling further.
However the name "Reaullt" is a High Mediaeval loanword from Anglo-Norman French; and "chwisgi" comes from either the Scottish Gaelic uisge beatha or Irish uisce beatha (both meaning "water "), themselves calques from Mediaeval Latin aqua vitae. The Mabinogion refers to fermentation but not distillation; and the end of the "Mead Song" in a 16th century manuscript of the Tales of Taliesin mentions distillation, although mead is a fermented beverage.
Read more about this topic: Welsh Whisky
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)