My first encounter with Zinfandel was back in the early 1980s, on holiday in Hawaii. I chose the wine from the restaurant wine list because the name was so unusual, I didn’t know whether Zinfandel referred to the grape, the name of the wine or the grower. Since this was early in the 1980s what came to the table was a salmon pink off-dry wine which was an ideal accompaniment to the seafood on offer. And at the risk of putting off readers so soon in the story, I enjoyed this wine and thought no more about it.
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HISTORICAL CHARACTERS AND WINE, RECREATION AND ENTERTAINMENT

That comes to you son, and asks: “pa, and tell me about the orgy” – what you tell him? But parental authority depends on the little things, like awareness of the ancient orgiastic cults. “I had a friend … So here it is, if what his father asked – always got a full, no discount on childhood response. Ask why airplanes fly – in response to a lecture on aerodynamics. Wondered why the snow white – gets excursion into the visual system of mammals and the physics of light. I’ll try and I in the same style to tell about the orgy (no, not his, but those old).

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Do not read before dinner

Maybe you think that the concept of “style”, “school” and “classic” refers only to things like music and literature? From St. Petersburg School of Rock “,” a classic picaresque novel “,” neo-Gothic style “? In fact, the history of poisoning conceptualized in similar terms. Italian School of poisoning – subtle.

French – vulgar. Poisoned gloves or a key – a classic, but, say, a hyperactive strain of tuberculosis in the borsch (who poisoned Baron Wrangel) – fashioned kitsch. But the richest source of “classics poisoning” is a good old 19 th century England. The incredible availability of poisons, which appeared practice of life insurance and the lack of reliable ways to prove the facts of malicious poisonings in court creates a whole new wave of “domestic homicide”.
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Wine as a way of masking poison

The most common poison in our great-grandmothers was arsenic. The average person could buy him under the pretext of buying rat poison. Arsenic has no smell and can accumulate in the tissues, which makes possible the gradual poisoning of small doses. Plus, the symptoms of arsenic poisoning can easily be confused with symptoms of cholera, and the gradual poisoning – with a lot of diseases until venerichiskih, the benefit of the then medicine has not yet reached today’s heights.
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Wine as a poison by itself

When you suggest wine woman, she would probably prefer a sweet or semisweet that pokisley and drier. Sweet taste in wine – historically the most popular. Therefore, the technology of its production since Roman times, were aimed at sweetening. In particular, the Romans boiled grape juice to a syrup by boiling it in lead containers. One simpotomov lead poisoning – the loss of reproductive ability. Lead water pipes and lead-sweetened wine – one of the main causes of low fertility in ancient Rome.
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Poisoning literature

Due to the mass poisonings in Victorian England and noisy trials of poisoners, formed a genre of detective literature. Chief nightmare of Victorian novels – is a nurse-killer or a mysterious woman-poisoner type Lydia Gvilt in Wilkie Collins’s novel “Armadeyl.

Also classics of the genre – Agatha Christie “Villa White Horse”, which describes the thallium poisoning.

A typical 19 th century pattern of poisoning is very clearly and simply described A. Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo “:
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