Don't forget about that sweet, sweet lead. I'm sure you already know but for anyone else that doesn't. Leadacetate was a lead based sugar that was used to sweeten wine in Rome. If I remember right wine makers would boil grape juice in pots made of lead, reducing it down to a syrup that would be added back into the wine. The rich and powerful would down this shit by the barrel. This of course caused lead poisoning and was likely the reason that so many of the uppercrust of the empire had more than a few screws loose.
I hope MC isn't about to get lead poisoning.
Indeed! They used lead for a variety of things, especially piping (and thus why we call lead "PB" on the periodic table and call plumbers, plumbers; they are named for the plumbarii, who worked with plumbum, aka lead, to make water pipes), though the hard water that was piped through lead pipes or atop sheets of lead laid within aquaducts was a) primarily used for the public baths, and b) generated its own limestone scale upon the surfaces it travelled upon, and would soon after initialization passively barrier itself from the metal. They also were quite wary of lead in its other forms, too, so likely did not employ it as widely (at least, on its own) as we initially assumed, especially given that historical forensics show that the lead volumes in the bones of Bretons was even higher than that of Roman citizens.
As for boiling grape juice down to get defrutum or sapa, when they used copper vessels it was just fine; it was when they used lead that it became a problem, and they were the preferred vessel, as, "in the boiling, brazen vessels throw off copper rust, and spoil the flavour of the preservative" (Columella), though the use of a leady alloy to line the inner surface of such a vessel would also have sufficed. Boiling to one-third volume, as was typical, resulted in a whole gram of lead per liter, though this would be diluted quite a lot both in the wine it was sweetening, and then again in the carafes or cups of the drinker, as five to three and three to two ratios of water to wine were commonly employed to dilute it.
Anyone interested in more lead history of the Romans can find a great article on the topic here:
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/leadpoisoning.html