English wine cask units the mediæval French and Italian "botte") or pipe was half a tun, or 1008 pints. Tradition has it that George, Duke of Clarence, the brother of Edward IV of England, was drowned in a butt of malmsey on 18 February 1478. (However, Josephine Tey in "The Daughter of Time" suggests that "drowned in a butt of malmsey" means rather that George, Duke of Clarence, drank himself to death rather than literally drowning in a container of wine.) In Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Cask of Amontillado", the narrator claims he has received "a pipe of what passes for Amontillado".
Sack (wine) as "Rumneys" and "Sacks". This period in time coincides with the planting of vines in the Canaries, after the Spanish all but exterminated the indigenous Guanches in the 1490s. Málaga, formerly in the Kingdom of Granada, also took to using the name sack for its wines, which were previously sold as “Garnacha”. This wine was similar to another wine known as 'malmsey', made from Malvasia grapes. William Shakespeare's character Sir John Falstaff, introduced in 1597, was fond of sack, and sometimes refers specifically to Sherris sack. William Shakespeare's minor character Sly, a drunkard and an object of a jest, declares