This brings us onto the issue of what grape the wine Jesus and his followers imbibed of that fateful evening would have been made from. Trying to determine this might seem on first glance like looking for a needle in a haystack, but researchers in the past few decades have actually developed a number of specific theories about what grape varietal was involved.
The top contender is unquestionably Marawi, which is also called Hamdani. This grape is native to Palestine and was in widespread use by viticulturists here in the first century BC and first century AD. The curious thing about this is that Hamdani is a white grape variety which would have been used to make white wine.
It is typically just simply assumed that the wine which was involved in the Last Supper was red, given its association with blood, but the evidence of the local grapes suggests it could well have been white. Indeed another possible contender for the grape used is Muscat from Roman Egypt, most of which were white, yellow or pink grapes used to make white wines. Jandali too is a white grape varietal which was native to Palestine and used in winemaking in Israel at the time.
The number of red grape varietals which have been nominated as contenders for the wine consumed at the Last Supper is also fairly limited. It could quite possibly have been made from Syrah grapes which were being produced abundantly just to the north of Roman Judaea in the province of Syria.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Damsel of the Sanct Grael (1874)
Baladi is a red grape varietal which is native to Israel and was used to make wine in the region two thousand years ago. Other native red varietals which are common to the region include Balouti, which in Hebrew means something akin to ‘acorn’ and Zeitani, zayit meaning olive. These are particularly small grape varietals, thus their names.[7]
Thus, there are a number of specific grape varietals which are either native to the Levant or adjoining regions which have been proposed as the possible grape type from which the wine drank by Jesus from the Holy Grail at the Last Supper was made. Curiously, many of these are not well-known, but as we will see shortly, they are becoming major features of Israeli winemaking today.
There are of course further theories still which push the boat out even further. Patrick McGovern, the world authority on ancient wines, who has been dubbed the Indiana Jones of ancient alcoholic beverages, has argued that there are substantial reasons to believe that the wine which might have been consumed at the Last Supper from the Holy Grail was actually a strong, concentrated wine. He notes that while most of the Roman and Greek cultures of the Mediterranean at the time favoured watering down their wine, the Jewish people of Roman Judaea favoured rich, concentrated wines.
This theory is supported by archaeological discoveries in recent times. For instance, the remains of wine jars which were found in Jerusalem some time ago bore an inscription which in translation read, ‘Wine made from black raisins’, while other inscriptions on wine jars found in Israel contain descriptors like ‘very dark wine’. As a result, McGovern and others have speculated that there were large amounts of strong wine being made in Roman Judaea around Jesus’s time, ones which would have had a port-like strength, consistency and flavour.[8]
Some might have been made from grapes which were dried out in the sun on reed mats and were consequently raisin-wine to all intents and purposes. As such, the wine which Jesus drank at the Last Supper might very well have been similar to an Italian Amarone, which is a rich wine with an above-average alcohol content of 15% ABV or more.[9]
Now that we have some general ideas about what the wine which Jesus and his twelve followers were drinking at the Last Supper, we might ask, what else was served? This question actually has a fairly clear answer. Many have speculated that Jesus’s talk of the ‘lamb of god’ insinuates that lamb was served and indeed zeroa, a Jewish dish of lamb shank, was traditionally eaten at Passover. It would have been served with maror or chazeret, a bitter herb like horseradish, charoset, a brown paste of fruits like dates and nuts, karpas, a crudité of vegetables like celery dipped in salt water and beitzah, a hard-boiled egg. This was a traditional Passover feast or Seder plate, as it is known.[10]
While the issue of what wine was served at the Last Supper was quickly forgotten by the leaders of the early Christian church, the significance of the Last Supper and the Grail in literature, art and western culture in general only continued to grow. Following the closing of the Middle Ages and the advent of the Renaissance it became a common feature of the art of the period. It is, for instance, prominent in Fra Angelico’s The Last Supper, painted in 1442, where the Grail stands on a table before the Apostles, though partially obscured by Jesus’s outstretched hands. Others were more mysterious in their depictions. Curiously, Leonardo da Vinci did not include any Grail in his famous depiction of The Last Supper.[11]
In more recent times the Grail has continued to feature in everything from operas such as Richard Wagner’s last work, Parsifal, which premiered in 1882, to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s famous painting finished just a few years before Wagner’s play debuted, The Damsel of the Sanct Grael. The twentieth century has continued the trend with everything from Hollywood films to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the Assassin’s Creed video-game series referencing the Holy Grail.[12]
In tandem, there has been a perennial interest in identifying the real-life Holy Grail. There are over 200 contenders, with various collectors, religious orders and churches claiming that they have a chalice or cup which may home come all the way from Roman Judaea in the early first century AD. The most recent one to gain considerable attention is the chalice of the Infanta Dona Urraca in the Basilica of San Isidoro in the city of León in Spain. Researchers have tracked its journey from the Holy Land across the Maghreb to Spain in the early Middle Ages.
But surely what is most curious about this assertion is that the chalice of the Infanta Dona Urraca, like many others which people have argued, are the Holy Grail over the years, is an ornate, jewel-encrusted goblet. Surely the cup from which the Christian messiah and his Apostles drank in Jerusalem approximately 2,000 years ago was a more modest affair.[13]
