La exportación del vino y las pasas de Jerez de la Frontera a finales de la Edad Media

ABSTRACT Jerez de la Frontera and its wines enjoy an unquestionable reputation. The expansion of wine production and consumption in the Early Modern period was made possible by developments that began at the end of the Middle Ages, on which this paper focuses. Our aim is to analyze two products of the vine, raisins and wine, which had distinctive identifying characteristics in the period studied. It was in the fifteenth century that Jerez de la Frontera, according to its socioeconomic situation, became the second most important city of the Kingdom of Seville, due in part to the production of wine and the thriving community of merchants, as well as the activities associated with its pier (called El Portal) and the port at Bahía de Cádiz. The present study centers on the period from the fifteenth century through the turn of the sixteenth to examine the place of raisins and wines from Jerez in commercial circuits along the Mediterranean Sea and the north–south routes of the Atlantic Ocean.