How London Changed the World of Wine Forever
Geographically, culturally and socially, the British really should never have become wine drinkers.
We’re a northern bunch, see, and typically it is beer that is so sacrosanct to northern Europeans, not by choice, but out of a sensual necessity.
The flat-lands of Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany act as a borderland to they used to signify where vines ceased to be productive — It’s what Jonathon Meades calls “the hop-grape divide”. Our weather just isn’t up to it…
And yet, in much same way as we pine for package holidays and ludicrously exotic takeaways, the British have always obsessed over the cliche of sybaritic southern living; sun, sex and sommeliers.
So, since the 13th Century, merchants have been shipping wine to Britain in far greater quantities than any of our northerly neighbours.
Of all the trade routes in the middle ages, the most important was in fact between Bordeaux and England and it was the marriage of Henry Plantagenet II of England to Eleanor of Acquitaine that helped establish one of Britain’s first colonies abroad.
Eleanor, like all medieval princesses betrothed against their will, came with a dowry. Hers included included land all the way from the Loire Valley down to the Pyrenees including the great rivers of the Loire, the Gironde and the Dordogne which allowed enormous river trade to flow out into the Atlantic. At the time all these areas comprised a greater region known then as ‘Acquitaine’. Thus, for the next three centuries these lands were essentially one kingdom- the kingdom of England and Acquitaine.
The fact that juicy plump reds had been produced in these newly acquired territories since the Roman times was a major boon for Henry and his descendants. Consequently, the English drank the majority of the crop from the Bordeaux vineyards leading as many as 400 boats to congregate in the port of Bordeaux every October to take the new vintage back to England.
At a time when the English channel was predominantly used for small fishing vessels as well as the last few stops along the Hanseatic fur trading routes, barrels of wine became hot capital and the potential for new import markets was huge. In just one year in the early fourteenth century, an insane 900,000 hectolitres were exported from clay shores of the right bank, across the bay of Biscay and onto Albion itself. It was the largest shipping traffic in the world at the time…
The Middlemen
This new emerging wine business in Bordeaux became unique as English ‘negociants’ flocked to Bordeaux to get a slice of the action and set prices for the importers in Blighty. These middlemen held a huge amount of influence over the winemakers and took a decent chunk of the profits.
A nation of opportunists, bulk importers began to do the same on the other end of the la manche and after the Civil War, well-established networks in operation encouraged curio-hobbyist vineyard owners like Arnaud III de Pontac to cut out the middleman once and for all. Arnaud set up a tavern in London selling wine directly to his patrons. Operating out of a pub come wine-bar, ‘The Pontach’s Head’ sold excellent value claret that customers could enjoy alongside a flagon of ale for the first time.
One of the wines on sale was a little known product from Pessac known then as “Ho Bryan”, eternalised by the first modern wine critic, a certain Samuel Pepys…
Pepys wrote on April 10th 1663 that “Ho Bryan hath a good and most peculiar taste I never met with before.” Such was his admiration for this new wine that when the Great Fire of 1666 swept through town, Pepys took it upon himself to bury underground his most prized possessions including a wheel of parmesan cheese and a bottle of claret for safekeeping.
Fresh from a decade of enforced sobriety under the draconian killjoy Lord Protectorate, Oliver Cromwell, Pepys, like many Londoners, took to wine with reckless abandon after Charles II was returned to England to much celebration (it is said that the fountains of the Royal Palaces were even filled with wine…)
Around the same time as Londoners regained their oenological palates, the marshlands of the Medoc in Bordeaux were drained exposing the sites that would become the world renowned first growths of Lafite, Latour and Margaux.
*Cue a flood of investors seeking out the highest, warmest, most gravelly grounds in Bordeaux seeking to capitalise on a newly wealthy mercantile class and a captive market in London. *
Berry Bros and Rudd
Napoleon Bonaparte once called Britain a nation of shopkeepers, but shopkeepers are taste-makers — and taste-makers decide what’s fashionable.
On 3 St Jame’s Street sits Berry Brothers and Rudd, one of London’s most prestigious wine shops and importers. Linked to the Royal St. James’ Palace for over 310 years, Berry Brothers and Rudd have been fine tuning the palates of the royals and aristocracy thereby setting
A year before Pepys had sampled “Ho Bryan”, in 1662, a development by Henry Jermyn began starting with St. Jame’s Square and six years later the shop front that stands on Pall Mall today came into existence.
With cellars that allegedly link up to a subterranean tunnel that runs up into Buckingham Palace, Berry Brothers and Rudd has been proffering rare bottles to the Kings in waiting, giving these wines a touch of class and thereby pushing up the prices for the regular punters.
Always keen to attract new high-ticket customers, services in the shop even extend to the weighing of customers. Once believed to be a sign of well-being, knowing your weight in the 18th Century was of critical importance in the land of pretense and ruptured social classes. Those weighed over the years in store have included King George IV, the Aga Khan and Lord Byron…
Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter. Sermons and soda water the day after…
Lord Byron
Such was the prestige and global reputation of Berry Brothers that they would receive global news by telegraph in advance of the Fleet Street papers. In mid-April 1912, №3 received a telegraph from the other side of the pond informing them that the Titanic had sunk in the North Atlantic and the prognosis was damning. That is to say that there was no mention of the passengers on board but it was mentioned that, tragically, there had been 69 cases of wine amongst the casualties.
Now, I’m not one for superstitious rituals, but as a side note it is worth mentioning that there was a long-standing practice of breaking a bottle over the prow of a ship at the launch of a new vessel and this tradition goes back to Viking times when a libation of blood was used in place.
Until the 17th Century Royal Navy ships were christened by throwing a ‘standing cup’ (chalice) of precious metal over the side.
King William III decreed that this was too wasteful given the number of ships being build for the rapidly-expanding navy in the boom period of the British Empire and so a bottle of wine, naturally, was substituted.
Although the practice of christening ships with alcohol was the norm, it was not followed by all commercial lines from the late 19th Century onwards. The White star line in particular had a rather more utilitarian view of the ceremony and refrained from it as a matter of principle.
This is precisely what (didn’t) happen(ed) when the Titanic set sail in 1911. The lack of ceremony gave rise to the legend that perhaps the Titanic was doomed to suffer from bad luck…?
Clubland
London has more clubs than any other city in the world and is sometimes called ‘the mother city’ of clubs. A number of the more famous clubs are situated in the dog-leg formed by Pall Mall and St. Jame’s Street.
The Oxford and Cambridge club was the home to the educated glitterati of London High society dating back to the early 19th Century. It was in clubs like these that customs and habits were also shaped by wisened alumni.
The thrill-seeking bachelors who passed themselves off as Grand Tourists and international scholars would often find themselves hopelessly diverted on their way down to Italy and need to stop in upstream Pouilly-sur-Loire or even on the other side of the Gironde to get their bearings back.
Any export business conducted in the ports was purely incidental…
Thus the British booze cruise was born and as creatures of convenience we adapted to learn how to fill up a car boot with claret from Calais without having to go all the way to the south of France…
Sadly, throughout the 1700s both Claret and Burgundy were still a little on the light side even as care and expenses were profitably lavished on their cultivation. The syphilitic rakes and red-nosed squires portrayed by William Hogarth demanded that their wine be made up with stronger, darker wine — adding a substantial dollop of cheap and inky Iberian wine.
Portugal
Within these Elitist male drinking clubs, there are a number of long-standing wine etiquette rules and traditions to follow including the passing of the port which is to be placed on the table to the right of the host or hostess who pours to the guest on their right before passing the port onwards in the same direction. Anyone except the host or hostess can then pour themselvess or pour to the left first before going back to pour themselves.
Port is never passed back on itself or across the table and on completion of the circle the host or hostess is the last person to serve themselves.
If someone holds the port decanter for too long they may be asked “do you know the Bishop of Norwich” as a subtle albeit humiliating nudge for them to pass the bottle along.
This stems from the late 18th Century when incumbent Bishop Lewis Bagot in later life gained such a bad reputation that one day he went to preach a sermon in the chapel of in Cambridge and found attached to his lectern a note that read:
The Bishop of Norwich is fond of his port, too fond, for the villain won’t pass when he ought…
Only in recent years, owing to the boom in Portuguese tourism has the city of Porto been able to reclaim it’s name with the associated fortified wine from the thieving, pedantic British…
For centuries in the service of their neighbours across the Bay of Biscay, the Portuguese have been Britain’s most faithful and longest standing ally since King Richard II committed his long-bow archers to help the Portuguese fend of the Spanish in the Battle of Aljubarrota in 1386. A military pact was signed thereafter known as the Treaty of Windsor and marks the longest-running, unbroken military alliance between two nations to this day
Such a magnanimous gesture from the British would not be soon forgotten and is the only possibly explanation for the trading of salt cod from the North Atlantic for copious amounts of wine made from Touriga Nacional, Tinta Roriz and Castelao.
Port is from the Douro valley which despite fraternal ties is still a long way from England by boat. As the ship-hands of the late Admiral Nelson quickly figured after the battle of Trafalgar- if you want to suspend in time the souring of anything made in nature you have to fortify it with spirits.
Originally fortified by brandy, Port quickly became a perennial favourite of officer’s serving in the British army who realised they could kill two birds with one stone.
To be fair to them they took their orders from the Queen and Victoria liked to mix her red wine with whiskey. That was until she overcame her addiction to this lethal and frankly unbalanced cocktail by instead mixing laudanum with cocaine… So you know, swings and roundabouts…
King Edward VII
Now, if you thought that Prince Harry was the first black sheep of the Royal Family, you would be sorely mistaken. It was Edward VII (known affectionately as Bertie) who takes the title of the most ungrateful son to a King or Queen in Britain.
Nicknamed Edward the Caresser, Bertie, who had been waiting a long, long time for his mother to fall off the perch, preoccupied himself with hedonistic pursuits in the meantime.
His parents, Victoria and Albert had tried their best to instill in him as a child the Victorian values of the day as well as an intense programme of moral and intellectual enlightenment.
Unfortunately, the effect was lacklustre and throughout university, the young Prince Regent applied himself more comittedly to cigars, cock-fighting and the dowdy musical halls and after-hours theaters of the East End.
In a final play of the card his parents set him up in an arranged marriage with the stunning but boring Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Un-encouragingly, her influence was slight and even permissive when it came to his alleged ‘Champagne baths’ with a different mistress for each night of the week in the brothels…
As he became more infantilised by the press he was sidelined increasingly by the family until he finalled succeeded the throne in 1901 and begins to prove his critics wrong…
In his first trip overseas as King he returns to the bawdy Belle-Epoque scenes of Paris that he had become so familiar with from his time as the Heir.
Coming in strong on the back of a decade of shipping disputes between the British and the French in the 1890s (some things never change…) tensions were high and all-out conflict had only been narrowly avoided several times in the decade.
In a brazen PR stunt, the newly crowned King returns to the Parisian theaters, bars and restaurants of his bachelor years to the surprise and captive attention of the French press. On return to his old haunts the new King waxes lyrical to journalists about his love of all things French: Women, food and wine…
A year later, the Entente Cordiale is signed in 1904 marking the end of 800 years of conflict between the British and the French, an alliance that would come in handy ten years later…
Would the 1914 Champagne vintage still have been one of the best of all time had the Germans not been forced to retreat from Epernay weeks before the harvest under allied bombardment? Revisionist history is always a tad facetious but it begs the question — what would the 20th Century have looked like if Champagne had been German?
Bubbles in the city…
Since it’s inception, the cosmpolitan Ritz hotel has been considered as one of the more kitsch of London’s decadent hotels, hosting a palm court that emulates Versailles in it’s anachronistic 18th Century swagger but in the 20th Century
In 1951, the American stage and screen Doyenne Tallulah Bankhead celebrated her arrival in London by drinking Champagne from a slipper at the Ritz hotel. Once the preserve of Russian officers showing their appreciation for the dancers at the Bolshoi ballet (sic. водка) Bankhead’s self-styled stiletto stunt broke the male dominated tradition for more egalitarian imbibing.
It is worth noting that Champagne from the slipper of a film actress would taste sweet to any simping fan but were it not for the London palate, all sparkling wines from Reims (and perhaps the rest of the world…) might still be sugared.
Until the mid-19th Century this was the case. On the eve of the European revolutions in 1848 a London importer by the name of Burnes requested a bottle of Perrier Jouët’s signature wine sans sugar.
A highly unusual request at the time it backfired with his local audience and like Marty Mcfly, mid-guitar wail, the British merchant said “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet, but you’re kids are going to love it.”
Fast forward nearly two hundred years and Doux and Demi-Sec Champagnes account for less than 10% of Champagne sales. Granted other sweeter alternatives like Prosecco and Moscato D’Asti have flooded the market since the millennium but are they a fraction as suave or as sophisticated?
On the one hand it is not surprising that a land-grabbing Empire with a near monopoly on global capitalism should have an influnce on their neighbours produce. It’s also worth remembering that a lot of the pretense and etiquette that we associate with wine and the French is most likely the fault of our own pompous aristocracy.
Times haven’t changed but the climate has…British wine-making, now a serious industry in its own right and no longer the punchline at international wine fairs, is seriously indebted to those countries whose customs and traditions it now emulates.
Similarly, the premium national exports France, Portugal and Spain (we didn’t even get started on Rioja…!) would look very different today were it not for those meddling poms across the channel.
Then again, diamonds can only be formed under intense pressure, so perhaps they should be grateful.
If you’re curious to learn more about how London changed the world of wine follow me on instagram @london_detour or email me at info@londondetour.com where I offer guided tours on foot around the Cities of London and Westminster with adequate opportunity for refreshment along the way…
