Wine Storage in Goatskins: New Wine and Old Wineskins

Goatskin Wine Storage Technology

Wine storage and transport in the ancient Mediterranean world used several container types: ceramic jars for long-term storage and ship transport, wooden barrels in later periods, and animal-skin bags for portable, flexible containers for shorter-term use and everyday household storage. In Palestine, the goatskin wine bag was the dominant portable container for wine from the Bronze Age through the Roman period and beyond.

The construction was straightforward: an entire goat hide was removed by the 'pulling' technique (pulling the carcass out through the neck opening rather than cutting), which left the skin as a complete, intact bag. The leg openings were tied off with cord or leather bindings. The neck opening was left open as the pour and fill point, and when sealed with a cork of cloth or wood, the entire bag was essentially airtight. Typical capacity was 5-15 liters depending on the animal's size.

Treatment of the skin before use was critical. Fresh, untreated hides will rot quickly when in contact with liquid. The standard treatment involved rubbing the interior with salt, resin, or olive oil to preserve the skin and prevent the wine from absorbing tannins or off-flavors from the hide. Wineskins treated this way could last for years of repeated use - becoming progressively stiffer and less elastic with each use as the skin fibers dried out.

The Old-Skin Problem

The fundamental mechanical problem that Jesus's parable addresses is straightforward physics. Grape juice pressed from grapes is not yet wine - it is a sugar-rich liquid that will ferment over the following weeks as yeast converts the sugars to alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. The fermentation process is active and generates significant internal gas pressure in any sealed container. A new, pliable goatskin can flex outward as the gas pressure builds, accommodating the expansion without rupturing. A used, dried-out skin that has lost its elasticity has no flex left; the gas pressure builds until the skin tears at its weakest point - typically a seam or a repaired area - spilling both the skin and the wine.

This was not a rare or unusual problem but a routine agricultural frustration that every household that made its own wine would have experienced. The harvest and pressing season in late summer (August-October) was followed immediately by the fermentation period, and any family that tried to save wine in an old, stiff skin risked losing both the container and the contents.

Biblical Passages

Matthew 9:17 records the parable: 'Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.' Mark 2:22 and Luke 5:37-39 provide parallel accounts, with Luke adding the observation that 'no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, 'The old is good.'' This Lukan addition deepens the parable's application: the problem is not only structural incompatibility but human preference for the familiar.

The parable appears in a specific context: Jesus has just called Levi (Matthew) and is eating with 'tax collectors and sinners,' and the Pharisees and John's disciples are questioning why Jesus's disciples do not fast. The wineskins parable (following the wedding-garment parable) addresses why Jesus's movement cannot simply add its practices to existing religious structures. The issue is not quality but compatibility - a new kind of fermenting movement requires containers capable of accommodating its expansion.

Joshua 9:4-13 contains a famous narrative use of old and worn wineskins: the Gibeonites deceive Joshua by bringing 'worn-out, cracked, and mended wineskins' as evidence of a long journey. The detail implies that new wineskins were recognizable, that wineskins wore out and required patching, and that the condition of a wineskin could be read as an indication of how long it had been in use.

Dead Sea Scrolls Evidence

The Damascus Document (CD 12:1-2) includes regulation of wine in the community's daily life, and the Community Rule describes communal wine-drinking at meals. Wine storage at Qumran used ceramic vessels (numerous storage jars have been excavated), but the community's members traveling to and from the settlement would have used portable wineskins. The Qumran community's general preference for pure, uncontaminated food and drink would have made proper wineskin preparation a matter of purity law as well as practical food safety.

Parallel Cultures

Goatskin wine containers were universal in the ancient Mediterranean world. Greek and Roman travelers routinely carried wine in skin bags, and multiple Greek and Latin terms distinguish between different sizes and qualities of skin containers. The Greek askos (a small skin bag, from which English 'ascos' derives) appears in Homer and throughout classical literature as a portable wine container. Pliny (Natural History 14.25-27) discusses various wine storage methods including skin bags, noting that properly treated skins preserve wine well for short-term use but that ceramic jars are superior for long-term aging.

Egyptian tomb paintings from the New Kingdom depict skin bags being carried by servants at feasts, confirming their use in a cultural context parallel to Palestine. Assyrian administrative records include wineskin repairs among workshop products, confirming that wineskin maintenance was a recognized craft activity.

Scholarly Sources

Gustav Dalman's Arbeit und Sitte Vol. 4 (1935, pp. 380-395) provides field ethnography of Palestinian wine production and storage including wineskin use. The ISBE article on 'Wine' covers the storage technology. Joachim Jeremias's The Parables of Jesus (1963) analyzes the parable's context and application. For the material culture, Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager's Life in Biblical Israel (2001) covers wine production comprehensively.

Modern Misconceptions

The most common misreading treats the wineskin parable as Jesus's rejection of 'old' forms of religion in favor of 'new' ones - a reading that positions the parable as wholesale repudiation of Judaism. Jesus's language is more careful: the problem is not that old wineskins are bad but that they cannot accommodate the new wine's expansion. Matthew's version explicitly states that both wine and skins are preserved when they are properly matched - 'new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.' The parable is about structural compatibility, not about discarding the old. Luke's addendum about people preferring old wine adds the psychological dimension: the resistance to the new is not only structural but human.

• Dalman Vol.4 p.390
• ISBE: Wine