Wine is good for you. But that’s not news. Wine has long been known for its medicinal benefits, it figures in almost all the remedies recorded by Hippocrates, from a general antiseptic to cooling fevers, and this connection to health continued through the middle ages. The grape has been part of the triumvirate of good throughout history, and the triumvirate are those benevolent institutions: the church, hospitals, and vineyards.
Now, the way I see it, the church, some of them at least, had a tradition of helping the poor, and hospitals are one way of helping. Further, most of them also had the tradition of making life comfortable for their own members, and wine, in addition to its medicinal uses, was both enjoyable and profitable. This seems to hold true in respect to the Barefooted Monastery near Zurich, which was first documented in 1247. The monastery was renamed "Holy Spirit Hospital" in 1293.
Wine’s medicinal and financial properties were also the reason secular hospitals maintained extensive wine cellars. Again, this was true later in the century when the house of “Zähringer” founded the “Hospital of the poor," in the region.
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