As you can see, answers to your question are not immediately forthcoming (meaning that while there are redditors hanging out here, it's going to take someone with very specific expertise to answer your question). Hopefully, they can speak to the issue of alcoholic beverages in the Islamic Middle East in the time frame you're interested in. I can only speak (briefly) to notions about studying "sneak"/black market behavior. Regardless of what documentations (or even implements) are found to illuminate this question, there will always be a lot that's unknown.

First, if a behavior is against social norms and is practiced on the sly, people are very unlikely to leave any sort of written record of it. We sometimes call these interactions "black market" interactions, and Clifford Geertz considers some of the non-normative, supposedly unapproved actions in an Islamic culture in his book, "Interpretation of Cultures." He also goes into this issue in depth in two other publications:

Islam Observed, Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1968), University Of Chicago Press

and

Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology.

None of these will answer your question, but they will give you an idea as to why most historians can't answer the question either. Receipts, etc., don't usually exist for black market operations; brewing equipment and stills are usually hidden and carefully guarded; operations, when discovered, are broken apart and destroyed and the culprits often rendered incapable of transmitting their knowledge of how to make the beverages. It is still possible, given the human predilection for alcohol, though, that such enterprises existed.

The cultural past is very difficult to study, when we try to study non-normative behaviors (such as violations of prohibitions). Unless there's a great deal of press and freedom of speech, there may be few clues as to what was going on. Geertz says that if one sees current practices that violate norms such as the ban on alcohol within Islam, and if one talks to older people who tell you that for as long as they've been around, people have been sneaking alcohol, then he believes the better assumption is to assume that it has been going on for awhile rather than that the people are lying.

He then states that if other aspects of the contemporary culture parallel the older culture, and we have no other way of answering an important question, we can take clues from contemporary culture (realizing of course that this is not "doing history" but doing a different kind of analysis).

At any rate, he examines taboos against alcohol and against homosexual behavior (both of which are violated in the various Islamic cultures he visits both in Asia and in North Africa). The subject is too fraught with the implications of the taboo for him to get much clarification from subjects, even after living among them for awhile.

So it is likely that even if historians had time machines, and showed up in the Middle East, circa 700-1500, they wouldn't be able to get others to answer these questions. You probably have to be born in and become a trusted (possibly powerful) member of the culture before you'll reveal even to your closest associates that you're breaking these taboos. They are strictly held observances, often with punishments attached for breaking them. Geertz argues that with such customs, it's unlikely that people are going to leave much evidence lying around, either past or present.

The funds needed to obtain, collect and test old drinking vessels are not currently large. I know of no one in physical anthropology or archaeology taking any such approach. Older vessels are in museums (mostly in the Middle East) and people still have religious ideas about these practices, so it's unlikely that local curators will turn these things over to some grad student or even a prof for study (it just isn't happening with world archaeological heritage, to be frank - most nations are now very uncomfortable about this kind of study).

There may be some middle eastern specialists in archaeology who know about brew technology for this period, but I can't find any references to it and would be happy to learn what those references are. Again, hidden or underside behaviors in cultures are frequently unavailable to contemporary social scientists for study (which is why, back in the 80's, when people started studying crack houses and prostitutions seriously and anthropologists like Philippe Bourgeois pioneered fieldwork in "underside" culture, it was revealing).

If you showed up in an older culture, with an active taboo against alcohol, with second language skills and from a different culture, it would likely be a difficult and perhaps treacherous journey from wanting that drink to finding the means of having one (even if some people did have alcohol).

Geertz's experience (I believe it was in a bar in Morocco, maybe Algeria) shows just how difficult it can be to learn who to trust in such a setting. That is discussed in Interpretation of Cultures (I believe it's chapter 2).

It would be very interesting to know if any legal records exist of prosecution of black market criminals who violated the prohibition, so if there's an Islamic Middle East legal historian here, hopefully they can say what they know. But absence of legal records, in and of itself, is not proof positive of what was really going on, only suggestive.

I haven't read any historical analyses of the wine industry itself, but from medieval Arabic literature wine seems to have been commonplace, easy to get, and widely discussed.

Here for instance is Hamadhani's Maqama of Wine, written in the 10th century by a Persian writer, in Arabic and basically describing a typical tavern scene.

Poetry, especially, is practically overflowing (terrible pun) with wine references. Although there is always the excuse that the poets didn't necessarily have first hand knowledge of what they were rhapsodizing the sheer volume and format of the wine literature suggests otherwise. The wrote about its effects, the etiquette of wine parties, what they looked like, what people wore, how the jugs were decorated, what the wine smelled like, what color it was, how they slept with boys while drunk etc. etc. Abu Nuwas (9th century) is the most infamous example: "Give me wine to drink in public; clasp me tight and play the whore with me."

As a practical matter it was made and sold by Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians.

The Cambridge History of Abassid Belles Letres article on Wine Poetry is an excellent summary.

@Vladith "If I was a middle-class urban citizen in 10th century Damascus and really wanted something hard to drink, what could I do?"

You'd go to some christian monastery and pay them and get some wine. Or just you'd go and buy it in meykhane or any place like it....or make it yourself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirazi_wine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arak_(drink) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_wine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijani_wine

Let's not forget all the Sufis who used to connect with God via wine (and many other things)

If the ruler wasn't too religious, or too orthodox all those wine industry was perfectly fine.

I have a very limited knowledge of this topic but I can provide an example for:

Were there any known cases of high-status Muslims "sneaking in" alcohol? If so, was there a black market for liquor?

My example is the warlord Zangi who is best known for retaking Edessa from the Crusader States and starting the Zangid dynasty of which Nur al-Din was the most famous member. Zangi wasn't a particularly good Muslim when it came to observing the dietary rules and had quite the reputation for drinking. He was quite public with this but it wasn't exactly a popular attribute of his. His heavy drinking was often brought up in contrast to his son Nur al-Din who was a very strict Muslim who took his piety very seriously.

Where he got his liquor I'd be in a harder position to state. The Crusaders certainly had wine at the very least because they would need it for communion but then Zangi wasn't exactly on the best of terms with them. That said, Crusaders did trade with Muslims and it's not out of the question that those Muslims would then trade with Zangi giving him indirect access. It's also possible he got wine/beer/alcohol from somewhere in Muslim controlled lands but I just don't know enough about the subject to say.

Thomas Asbridge The Crusades coves Zangi in some detail while Amin Maalouf's The Crusades through Arab Eyes does so in much greater detail.