sweet new wine: freshly pressed, still-fermenting grape wine at its sweetest young stage, prized for its taste yet potent enough to make a person drunk
Greek and Roman winemakers had a specific name for wine at its sweet, young stage: freshly pressed juice that was still slowly fermenting, or a sweet young wine kept from turning dry. It was a real, marketable product, sold and taxed like any other, not merely juice and not yet ordinary aged wine. Doctors and philosophers even studied why it made people drunk more slowly than fully aged wine, taking for granted all the while that it did make them drunk.
The word appears only once in the New Testament, at Pentecost. When the disciples begin speaking in languages they had never learned, mocking bystanders sneer that the group is simply full of sweet wine (Acts 2:13). Peter's reply does not deny that this drink could intoxicate. He points out only that it is nine in the morning, far too early for anyone to be drunk. The sting of the insult is precisely that they would be drinking the sweet stuff first thing in the day.
Readers often notice a puzzle: Pentecost falls in early summer, months after the autumn grape harvest, so how could freshly made wine be on hand to mock? The answer is that winemakers deliberately kept this sweet wine available all year, sealing it in jars and sinking them in cold water so it stayed sweet and did not finish fermenting. Roman writers describe the technique in detail and even record a Greek name for such year-round sweet wine, so a jug of it at Pentecost was an ordinary thing, not a contradiction.
Disputed
Whether γλεῦκος at Acts 2:13 denotes genuinely fermented, mildly intoxicating sweet wine, or unfermented grape juice (with the mockers speaking sarcastically).
- majorityIt is sweet, young, still-fermenting wine that could intoxicate; the mockers imply real drunkenness, and Peter's reply (2:15) contests only the hour, not the possibility. Job 32:19 LXX, where γλεῦκος is "seething" and bursts the skin, is decisive.; BDAG, s.v. γλεῦκος; Louw and Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, §6.199 and note at the οἶνος cluster; C. K. Barrett, The Acts of the Apostles (ICC), vol. 1, 124-125; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles (Anchor Bible 31), 240-241
- minorityIt is preserved non-alcoholic grape juice; the mockers are being ironic, insinuating drunkenness on a drink they knew could not produce it.; Samuele Bacchiocchi, Wine in the Bible (Biblical Perspectives, 1989; rev. 2001); William Patton, Bible Wines, or The Laws of Fermentation and the Wines of the Ancients (National Temperance Society, 1874); Robert P. Teachout, Wine: The Biblical Imperative (Th.D. diss., Dallas Theological Seminary, 1979)