“In Pinta studiorum essentia quinta”: The Wine-Drinking and Wine-Making Culture of Illyrian Literary Men in the 18th Century

This paper deals with the wine-drinking and wine-making culture of Illyrian literary men in the 18th century. In Croatia, by the end of the 17th century, Count Baltazar Patačić had already founded the Society of Wine doctors or Pinta for the purpose of encouraging sociability. This wine society counted among its over 170 members a number of nobles and dignitaries. This and other Croatian wine associations were part of a European phenomenon of associations and clubs, and they were actually the forerunners of forthcoming social and scientific changes. The attempt to make suggestions in the field of scientific winemaking was also present among Serbs and so in 1783 Zaharija Orfelin published Iskusni podrumar, a work on agronomy and applied science. In some parts of his book Orfelin followed an anonymous German model (1731?; Keipert 1990), but the question remains as to what extent Orfelin worked independently and this paper proposes other possible models, such as Johan Knohll’s wine-making books (1660, 1700, 1711). Orefelin’s book may very well be related to the Viennese Reforms, as was probably the case of Kratkoe nastavlenije (1818), another volume about “winemaking”, first published in French and then translated into German. In this paper the original French text (later translated into Serbian, Hungarian, Slovak and Rumanian) is considered.