Moors, the consumption of alcohol was forbidden but some winemaking continued to exist in the region as part of trade and commerce with the non-Muslim neighbors. The Moors also introduced the process of distillation known as alembic to the region which created a crude form of grape liqueur and would be a precursor to the technique of adding brandy to Sherry. Under Moorish rule the Roman town of "Ceret" was renamed to Sherish which later evolved to Jerez de la Frontera as it became the frontier town between Christian Spain and the Moorish kingdom in the 13th century. Age of Exploration During the "Age of Exploration" the ports of Sanlúcar de Barrameda and Cádiz were the starting points for many of the voyages to the New World and the East Indies, including some of the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan. On many of these voyages, stocking up on ample supplies of the area's wine was considered a necessity. Christopher Columbus almost certainly had Sherry with him when he made some of his voyages to America which makes Sherry, in all likelihood, the first wine brought to the New World. For Magellan's voyage 594,790 maravedis were spent on wine compared to 566,684 maravedis on all the ships's armaments and men's weapons. At the turn of the 15th century, several factors came into play that had a major impact on the global wine market. The Venetian traders were losing their supply of sweet wine from the lands of Cyprus, Greece, Romania and Hungary to the emerging dominance of the Ottoman Empire. War with France had lost the English their access to the wines of Bordeaux. Seeing an opportunity to capitalize on this, the Spanish Duke of Medina Sidonia made several moves to put Sherry into the forefront of the world's wine market. In 1491, the export tax on wine was abolished for both Spanish and foreign vessels coming into Sanlúcar. In 1517, English merchants were given preferential merchant status-including the right to bear arms in the region. For a period of time, English sales of Sherry (or "Sherris sack" or just "sack", as it was sometimes known) were large and they continued to grow till the foreign relations between England and Spain declined with Henry VIII's divorce from the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon. In addition to triggering the English Reformation and the break from the Roman Catholic Church, it