Hedonism and claret

Dec 17th 2009

From The Economist print edition

THE birth of the cult of fine wine can be dated precisely. On April 10th
1663, Samuel Pepys, diarist and man-about-London, noted that he had
enjoyed “a sort of French wine called Ho Bryan that hath a good and
most particular taste that I never met with”.

He drank what is now called Château Haut Brion at the Royall Oak
Tavern in the heart of London, one of many such establishments that
had sprung up after the return from exile of King Charles II three
years earlier and which offered such new delicacies as tea, coffee and
classy wines. The hedonistic atmosphere of the times was responsible
for the introduction not only of “Ho Bryan” and the other great wines
of Bordeaux, but also of port from the Douro Valley in Portugal, the
sparkling wines of Champagne and the brandy from a little town called
Cognac, north of Bordeaux.

As Pepys was savouring his tipple, big economic shifts were under way.
London was on the rise, starting to replace Amsterdam as the hub of
world trade. Its merchants were growing in power, wealth and appetite
—for, amongst other luxuries, claret. By the 18th century Londoners
were the world’s biggest consumers of good claret.

Previously drinks became famous and popular because of their royal

connections. The court of France’s King Louis XIV, who himself drank
Burgundy and the still wines of Champagne, was the arbiter of most
alcoholic taste. Now, for the first time, a wider social group, including
both aristocrats and commoners such as Pepys with fashionable
aspirations, set the tone.

The English had been drinking claret for five centuries before Pepys’s
time; but it was poor stuff, shipped immediately after the harvest and
drunk quickly before it turned to vinegar the following spring. As late
as the end of the 17th century it continued to be drunk mostly by
those who wanted “claret to cool their port” in the words of one
observer. Much of it was fake. A poet calling himself Satyrical Dick
wrote how a “jolly wine-cooper” could combine a “pint of old port” with
some rough Spanish wine and thus “could counterfeit claret the best of
the sort”.

The owners of Ho Bryan were the Pontacs. They were the top
winemaking family of their day, and founded a fashionable restaurant,
called Pontack’s Head, in London, in 1663. John Locke, the philosopher
whose theory of the social contract inspired America’s revolutionaries,
but who had worldlier interests too, spotted the reasons for the
superiority of Ho Bryan on a visit to the vineyard in 1667. He found “a
little rise of ground...white sand mixed with a little gravel; scarce fit to
bear anything.” He added that “they say the wine in the next vineyard
to it, tho’ seeming equal to me, is not so good.” Today that vineyard is
still rated just below its neighbour.

Locke had seized on the essential concept of terroir, the combination

of soil, subsoil, drainage and microclimate which provide the conditions
for the production of fine wine. Another connoisseur, the 18th-century
economist Adam Smith, noted that “the vine is more affected by the
difference of soils than any other fruit tree. From some it derives a
flavour which no culture or management can equal.”

Claret was getting more popular partly because it was getting better.
The craft of claret-making had developed. By the early 18th century,
the wine was designed to be kept for years not months, notably by
being carefully stored in oak casks. Better corks allowed wine to be
stored longer and more safely. Bottles were produced that could be
“binned”—laid down on their sides to mature.

By Smith’s time the shape of the industry was established for centuries
to come. Advertisements in theLondon Gazette at the time noted the
sale of wines from four châteaux: Haut Brion, today a green oasis in
Bordeaux’s suburbs, and Latour, Lafite and Margaux, all on the gravel
banks above the Gironde estuary in the Médoc, the peninsula north of
Bordeaux. The four estates remain the greatest brands in wine. Their
main competitors, then as now, are a handful of tiny vineyards in
Burgundy.

British appetite for their produce was growing; but so, too, were the
obstacles to getting hold of it. Britain, Portugal and their allies were at
war with France and Spain. Port (from Portugal) was therefore
considered the patriotic drink. In a comedy called “The Winder”, staged
in 1714, one character protested that “I have been drinking Claret and
Champaign and Burgundy and other French wines, Sir, but I love my
country for all that.” The vendors in the 1707 sales, and many others,
claimed that their supplies were captured by British ships in the
fighting; but they probably weren’t.

In the 18th century drinking claret helped the rich to distinguish

themselves from England’s port-sodden squirearchy. Port was not only
the more traditional drink, but also—because it attracted much lower
duties—far cheaper. John Hervey, the first Earl of Bristol, spent four
times as much on claret as on port, whereas the lusty trenchermen
who gathered in the Barbers Hall in the City of London spent a mere
£2 on claret as against £850 on port.

When Britain made peace with France in 1713, claret became more
accessible and the wine trade flourished. Claret was pricey but rich
Londoners, who were also by then big spenders on theatres, spas and
music produced by fashionable immigrants, such as Handel, consumed
conspicuous quantities. Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime
minister, used navy ships to smuggle his favourite wines from France.
The most expensive one he bought was old burgundy, but that—as
now—was available only in tiny quantities. So he relied largely on
claret, buying four hogsheads of 24 dozen bottles of Margaux and one
hogshead of Lafite every three months. In a single year his wine bill
amounted to over £1,200 (£100,000 today). British consumers bought
the best stuff and paid top prices. By the time of the French revolution,
the British were paying five times as much for their claret as the wine’s
other main customers, the notoriously parsimonious Dutch, who
preferred the cheaper, lower-grade stuff.

The wines were no longer drunk, or even bought, when young: in 1714
Walpole was buying bottles of the 1706 vintage of the classier wines.
His sophistication was echoed by that of his clerk, who was notable at
the time for his ability to spell all four estates correctly. In the 18th-
century accounts Lafite rarely had only a single f and t, Margaux was
spelt Margoose, Margose, and Margon, and the O’Brian variation on
Haut Brion led to constant speculation over the years that the owner
was Irish.

Claret was still largely for the prosperous well into the 19th century. In
“Every Man His Own Butler,” published in 1839, Cyrus Redding, a wine
merchant and author, wrote “claret for a bishop, port for a rector,
currant for a curate and gin for the clerk”. The fine-wine merchant was
an unusually respectable figure—for a tradesman. In a newspaper
article Anthony Trollope described one of them, “Mr Prettyman”, as “a
handsome old gentleman with grey hair, always well-dressed”. Three of
his contemporaries survive today—Corney & Barrow in the City of
London, Justerini & Brooks and Berry Bros & Rudd in St James’s
Street, just down the road from The Economist.

But claret was beginning to flow down the social hierarchy. A free-
trade treaty between Britain and France in 1860 drastically reduced
the duty on French wines, thus encouraging the British middle classes
to ape their social superiors; and in that year the chancellor of the
exchequer, William Gladstone, keen to stiffen the nation’s moral spine,
cut the duty on table wines to 40% of that on more intoxicating
fortified wines such as port and sherry.

The following year came the Single Bottle Act, allowing grocers to sell
wine by the bottle. A much-despised, enormously popular drink called
“grocers’ claret” was born, with the result that, between 1859 and
1878, sales of French wines, largely from Bordeaux, rose sixfold to
36m bottles. The Gilbey family, one of the most remarkable
commercial dynasties of Victorian England, franchised 2,000 grocers
licensed to sell wine, largely claret. Their business grew so fast that by
1875 they were able to buy Château Loudenne in the Médoc to hold
their gigantic stocks of claret. As the middle classes turned to claret,
so the upper classes abandoned this increasingly common tipple in
favour of hock and champagne.

Then the fortunes of the claret business turned. In the late 1870s and
1880s an attack of mildew tainted the wines: the reputation of Lafite,
for instance, was ruined when the 1884 vintage turned mouldy after
only a couple of years in bottle. At the same time, the phylloxera bug
began to devastate Bordeaux’s vineyards.

Claret came back into its own in 1960 when the splendid 1959 vintage
coincided with the arrival of big American buyers. Its popularity has
risen steadily since. London remains at the centre of the fine-wine
business—home of organisations such as the Institute of Masters of
Wine, of Decanter and World of Fine Wine magazines, and of most of
the world’s biggest wine auctions. Liv-Ex, the world’s first stockmarket
for fine wine, is based in London; and its figures show that nine-tenths
of the wine trade is still in “classed growth” (leading) clarets.
Newcomers from vineyards in a dozen countries trying to launch their
finest wines on the world market come to London first for validation.
Yet though London may still have much of the knowledge and the
market, as consumers the British may be past their best. This year,
57% of the fine wine that Sotheby’s sold globally, by value, was
bought by Asians; four-fifths of those buyers were from China and
Hong Kong.