Although the word sack ceased to be used in the eighteenth century as the name of a Spanish wine, its frequent use by Shakespeare—who made the wine the favourite beverage of his greatest comic character, Sir John Falstaff—has prevented the word from being entirely forgotten. (The same cannot be said for the now utterly defunct names of other wines such as aristippus, caprike, charneco, camplete, and sheranino.) For a long time, the word sack was thought to have been derived from the French sec, meaning dry, the assumption being that sack was a dry wine. However, a few sixteenth century references to sack describe it as sweet, not dry, causing some etymologists to doubt its derivation from sec. Accordingly, it has been suggested that the real source of sack is the Spanish word saca, meaning export, a plausible suggestion considering the wine was indeed exported from Spain. Whatever the origin of this sack, it is almost certainly not related to the sack that means large bag, a word that derives, through Latin, from the Greek sakkos, meaning coarse doth.
An old term for white wine.
Sack is an old term used to refer to various types of dry white wines that were popular in sixteenth century England, and which were imported from Spain and the Canary Islands. The name “sack” is believed to have originated from the French word “sec,” meaning dry. Today, the term is still used as a name for certain types of sherry wines.
In the realm of white wines, particularly hailing from Spain and the Canaries, there exists an ancient appellation that has traversed time sherry stands as the sole contemporary ambassador of this distinguished lineage.