The aperitif of the Roman table: young wine blended with honey, served before the meal to open the appetite. Recipes survive — Columella and the cookbook of Apicius give proportions, and a spiced version, conditum — which makes mulsum one of the few ancient drinks that can genuinely be reconstructed rather than merely imagined.
Its line is unbroken in spirit. The medieval hippocras — wine sweetened with honey or sugar and mulled with spices — is mulsum's direct descendant, and every honeyed, spiced wine since belongs to the same family. Here the continuity is real, even where the Roman recipe's exact taste is not.