Sure, we all know alcohol has fueled plenty a writing session. William Faulkner — who once said, "civilization begins with distillation" — was known to have kept a bottle by his side while he typed away throughout his writing career.
But for centuries, writers relied on alcohol to keep the words flowing in a far less boozy form than the Burroughs and Hemingways of literary history: the wine ink pen.
Wine, it turns out, was a key ingredient in many recipes for iron gall ink — for all you non-ink nerds, that was the writing ink used by most of the Western world from the Middle Ages all the way up to the 19th century.
"Anyone anywhere near famous will have something in iron gall ink," says Elmer Eusman, head of the conservation division at the Library of Congress.
A 1297 copy of history's great political document, the Magna Carta, was penned in the stuff. Van Gogh drew with it, Da Vinci jotted notes with it and Bach composed with it.
"The practice of adding wine into historic inks was quite widespread," says chemist Matija Strlic, a senior lecturer at University College London who has worked with historic parchments and inks.
The chemistry involved can get pretty wonky, but basically, the wine was believed to make the coloring agents in ink more stable. Wine was also considered a purer solvent than water. And iron gall inks were prized because they were so indelible.
So why did these inks fall out of favor? Sadly, they didn't play nice with the new-fangled steel pens of the 19th century, says Abigail Quandt, head of book and paper conservation at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The inks corroded the writing implements, so different formulations had to be developed.
Which conservators would probably say is a good thing. The inks weren't just corroding pens, but also the paper on which historic documents were written. In some of Rembrandt drawings, for example, the ink has made the paper fragile and brittle, Eusman says.