CHAPTER 4

Selling to Reluctant Drinkers: The British Market
and the International Wine Trade

The Prince of Wales had a small quantity of remarkably fine wine; and his household chose to drink it out. The prince ordered some for the table, and none could be got; there were only two bottles left. The man who had the management of the wine went to the City, to a merchant, and stated what he wanted. The dealer said, “Send me a bottle of what remains, and what I send must be drunk immediately, I can imitate it.” The trick was successful, and was repeated three or four times.

—Report from the Select Committee on Import Duties
on Wines, 1852:663

THE DIFFICULTIES IN CREATING a mass market for wine in nonproducer countries can be examined by considering in detail the nature and organization of the British market. Britain’s growing, comparatively wealthy urban population offered significant potential for wine producers everywhere: if it had consumed just one-tenth of the French figure in the 1890s, this would have created a demand for wine equivalent to 18 percent of Spain’s total output, 14 percent of Italy’s, or 105 percent of Portugal’s.¹ Yet although imports almost tripled between the late 1850s and the mid-1870s, there was no permanent change in drinking habits, and wine consumption then declined, so that on the eve of the First World War per capita consumption at a bottle and a half was no higher than it had been a century earlier, and the city of Paris consumed about seven times as much wine as the whole country.²

The major cause of the failure to develop new export markets was the inability to solve problems of asymmetric information that existed between seller and consumer, resulting in consumers facing three different but interrelated forms of confusion and deception. In the first instance there were the problems of artificial or adulterated wines, which were manufactured with substances other than just grape juice and sold to consumers as being the genuine article. While fraud had always been present in most food and beverage markets, its nature changed significantly over the second half of the nineteenth century because of the growing physical separation between producers and consumers, the shortages of genuine wines caused by phylloxera and other vine diseases, and the development of new preservatives, such as borax, benzoic acid, and salicylates, that allowed manufacturers to mask food deterioration and to lower costs, often making food adulteration imperceptible to consumers.³ Wine quality varied significantly, which provided greater opportunities for fraud and adulteration than were present with other imported goods, such as cereals, butter, coffee, or frozen meat. To put it bluntly, cheating in the wine trade was very easy, and an increasingly belligerent local and national press presented consumers with large numbers of real and fictional food scares, so that by 1900 it was widely believed in Britain that most wines were adulterated in some form or another.

A second problem involved the mislabeling of wines. The commercial success of an individual (Château Lafite) or collective (claret) brand encouraged producers from other regions and countries to label their own wine in such a way that they could also benefit from the name. While companies could protect their private brands in the courts, this was not possible with claret and sherry, and these became generic terms for all wines enjoying certain vague characteristics. Confusion for British consumers was increased by the fact that it was legal to sell in that market “British claret,” “Hamburg sherry,” or “Spanish port.” The result was that even strong private brands, such as Château Margaux, Moët & Chandon, and Gonzalez Byass, saw their sales threatened by the decline in the collective reputation of claret, champagne, and sherry, respectively.

Finally, attempts by importers to create buyer-driven commodity chains by selling large quantities of wine under their own brands enjoyed only limited success. Unlike breakfast cereals, canned soup, or bottled beer, the fact that wine quality varied significantly from one small producer to the next, and deteriorated quickly if not properly stored, implied that there were few economies of scale to be achieved through bulk purchases and retail chains.

This chapter shows that wine was traditionally a luxury because of the high and discriminatory import duties, which benefited Portuguese and Spanish producers at the expense of the French. With the reforms of the early 1860s there was a temporary increase in consumption and a switch in preference away from Iberian fortified wines toward French table wines. Merchants blended cheap commodity wines from different locations to minimize quality fluctuations, but although retail prices remained remarkably stable during the phylloxera-induced period of shortages, this was achieved only by significantly reducing product quality. Poor wines and numerous press reports concerning their adulteration led to falling consumption. The failure of buyer-driven commodity chains such as the Victoria Wine Company or Gilbeys to significantly cut marketing costs implied that the small family retailer remained competitive, but neither could simultaneously cut prices and guarantee product quality for consumers.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE WINE TRADE IN BRITAIN
PRIOR TO 1860

The importance of wine in international trade, its status as a luxury item, and the comparative ease for most governments to tax imports encouraged restrictive mercantilist trade policies from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The British had hoped that the profusion of vines they found in their North American colonies would free them from European producers, but the indigenous American wild vines produced little or no wine that was drinkable.⁴ Policy instead turned to discriminate between European producers and to limit trade with countries with which Britain was at war, especially France.⁵ The mercantilist nature of policy was made clear in the preamble to a late seventeenth-century law: “It hath been found by long experience that the importing of French wines, vinegar, brandy, and other commodities of the growth, produce, or manufacture of France . . . hath much exhausted the treasure of our nation, lessen the value of the native commodities and manufactures thereof, and greatly impoverished the English artificers and handicrafts, and caused great detriment to this kingdom in general.”⁶

A growing tendency to drink Iberian rather than French wines was reinforced by the Methuen Treaty of 1703, which limited duties on the imports of Portuguese wines to a maximum of two-thirds of what French wines paid; in exchange the Portuguese repealed the restrictions on the entry of certain types of English cloth.⁷ The Methuen Treaty made Portuguese wines more competitive than French, but wine remained very expensive for British consumers. From 1831 French wines paid the same duty as those from Portugal and Spain, but while Iberian wines were responsible for around three-quarters of imports during the 1850s, French wines accounted for just 6 percent of the market.⁸ Some commentators attributed the failure to increase market share after 1831 to the unsuitability of French table wines for the English market, while others believed that they continued to be discriminated against, as the fortified Iberian wines (ports, sherries, etc.) paid less duty per unit of alcohol. Sherry and port were also much more expensive than ordinary French wines, so the duty represented a smaller share of the retail price,⁹ and French exports were limited to expensive claret and champagne.¹⁰

There were few British wine drinkers before 1860. According to George Porter, author of The Progress of Nations, consumption was limited to “the finer kinds of wine,” and these were only within reach of “the easy classes.”¹¹ In a similar vein, W. B. James believed that most wine was drunk by the half a million heads of families that paid income tax, or less than 10 percent of the population, which would imply an average per capita consumption of fifteen bottles a year for this select group.¹² Import duties averaged 6s. 7d. a gallon during the first half of the nineteenth century, or just over a shilling a bottle, at a time when the average weekly wages for male workers was about 16 shillings.¹³ Taxes on wine imports contributed around 3 percent of government revenues, or £1.75 million over the period 1820–60, but taxes on all forms of alcohol and public places for alcohol consumption accounted for a massive 30 percent during the nineteenth century.¹⁴ The trend toward free trade in Britain led to widespread debate on the wine tariff, and, as John Nye has recently noted, “the problem for nineteenth-century leaders was how to reform the protectionist side of the ledger while preserving the revenues that the state had come to rely upon.”¹⁵

A parliamentary select committee was created in 1852 to consider the implications of tariff reform on the wine market. Sir James Tennent argued that as wine was a luxury, the rate of duty was less important in determining demand than other factors such as taste and fashion,¹⁶ so that cutting duties would not increase consumption, but simply reduce government revenue. He noted that while in France annual per capita wine consumption was about 90 liters, the British each drank 95 liters of beer and 4.5 liters of wine and spirits, and he believed that these beer drinkers would be unlikely to consume more wine.¹⁷ In a similar vein, John McCulloch argued in his Commercial Dictionary that lower duties would be irrelevant for consumers of the “finer” wines, while “inferior and low priced wines” would find little demand among “the bulk of the population” even if all duties were totally abolished, so free trade would simply imply a loss of revenue for the Treasury.¹⁸

By contrast, a number of other influential commentators, including Cyrus Redding and T. G. Shaw, both authors of popular wine books, and the port-wine shipper J. J. Forrester, believed that if duties were cut sufficiently, new social groups would be attracted to wine, and government revenue maintained.¹⁹ Forrester demanded radical changes and a reduction in duty to a shilling per gallon to convert wine from being a luxury to a necessity, allowing “everyone” to be able to afford to drink it.²⁰ Forrester, as many others in the debate, was not a disinterested observer. According to one retailer, there were “three classes of traders who prefer high duties: those who supply the richer classes; those who . . . concoct solely for fraud; and those who ship improper mixtures for the drawback: these two latter could not do it, except under a high duty.”²¹ The Iberian traders of fortified wines were among the first category, and, as Shaw noted after the tariff reforms of the early 1860s, they tried to keep their dominant position in the industry by opposing change.²² Rivalries among interest groups within the drinks trade continued throughout the period.²³

Many of those who gave evidence before the Select Committee argued that high wine duties were responsible for the widespread adulteration and production of artificial wines. These included “British wine,” which, according to William Gladstone, the chancellor of the exchequer who was responsible for the liberalization of trade in the early 1860s, in the hands of “respectable merchants” was made of raisins, sugar, and brandy. British wine was much cheaper than the genuine article, as “the duty paid on these materials is reckoned as amounting to 1s. 2d. a gallon. Therefore you have a duty on foreign wine of 5s. 10d. the gallon—on colonial wine of 2s. 11d., and on British wine of 1s. 2d. the gallon. The result is the consumption of foreign wine diminishes, the consumption of colonial wine has increased, and the consumption of British wine has doubled within the last ten years.”²⁴

Gladstone believed that lower duties would allow cheap, “good and wholesome” wines to be sold instead of adulterated ones, and if duties were reduced sufficiently, the increase in trade would be “immense.”²⁵ The comparison with tea was made explicitly:

Here especially we are met by the cry that wine is the rich man’s luxury. It is the rich man’s luxury. . . . Is tea the rich man’s luxury? No. It is the poor man’s, and above all, the poor woman’s luxury. But I speak in the year 1860. In 1760, tea too was the rich man’s luxury. In 1760 there was no more tea consumed per head of the population than there is wine now. In 1760 there were 4,000,000 lb. of tea consumed; now the annual consumption is 76,000,000 lb. The price of tea which is now sold at 3s. per lb. was somewhere about that time advertised by the cheap houses at £1 per lb. Wine is the rich man’s luxury, and you may make tea or sugar, or any other article of consumption, the rich man’s luxury if you put on it a sufficient duty.²⁶

A radical reduction in duty from five shillings and nine pence to one shilling per gallon, such as debated by the 1852 select committee, would have required annual consumption to grow from 275,000 to over 1.36 million hectoliters just to maintain tax revenues. Some contemporaries questioned whether the supply of wine was sufficiently elastic, arguing that if output failed to increase, the beneficiaries of the lower duties would be foreign growers and exporters who would enjoy higher prices, and there would be no increase in imports for British consumers. Although British imports in the early 1850s were significantly less than 1 percent of Europe’s total wine production, possible supply shortages were taken very seriously.²⁷ Approximately three-fourths of all imports were port and sherry, and genuine wines came from specific geographical areas where the potential to increase output by extending the area of cultivation or increasing yields was strictly limited.²⁸ In 1851, for example, the total production of port was 94,123 pipes (equivalent to about 500,000 hectoliters), of which 41,403 pipes were classified as first quality and 20,000 set aside for export to Europe (essentially Britain and Ireland).²⁹ With sherry, William Tuke, a London wine broker, did not “believe that fine Sherry could be produced in larger quantities than it is now,” but he admitted that Spain could produce 100,000 pipes of white wine “not Sherries.”³⁰ Possible supplies of fortified wines from other regions were not promising, as the “repeated exertions . . . made by enterprising importers, to introduce into this market cheap but wholesome wines, the lower growths of France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Italy, and other countries, failed, with the ‘solitary exception’ of Marsala.”³¹

Others believed, however, that the supply was more elastic, especially as, because of adulteration, many people already consumed wines that were not genuine port or sherry. The huge potential supply of French and Spanish light table wines was recognized, but this would require consumers to drink a very different sort of wine from that which traditionally had been imported.

GLADSTONE AND THE RSE AND DECLINE IN CONSUMPTION IN THE
LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The debate was ended with the Anglo-French (Cobden-Chevalier) Treaty in 1860, when lower duties on wines were used as a bargaining tool to encourage a French reduction in duties on a wide range of British industrial goods. By 1862 duties on wines with an alcoholic strength of under 14.8 degrees Gay-Lussac (equivalent to 26 degree proof Sykes) had been cut from 5s. 9d. a gallon to 1s., with those between 14.8 and 24.5 degrees paying 2s. 6d.³² The new legislation also introduced major changes in the marketing of wines, especially the Single Bottle Act of 1861, which allowed general retailers, on the payment of a relatively small license fee, to sell bottles of wine for consumption off their premises, while another license fee permitted alcohol to be consumed with food in refreshment houses “of good repute.”³³

TABLE 4.1
Impact of Duties on Retail Wine Prices in the United Kingdom, 1850s and 1860s

Table 4.1 gives an idea of the theoretical impact of these changes on wine prices. Before the tariff reforms in the early 1860s, duty accounted for half the retail price of ordinary table wines and about a third on “good” fortified sherry, so it was the cheap, low-alcohol wines that benefited most from the cuts. If the supply of all types of wine had been perfectly elastic, allowing wine producers to increase output to meet demand without raising their prices, the new tariffs would have involved price cuts at the retail level of up to 70 percent.³⁴

These changes caused wine consumption in Britain to almost triple between the late 1850s and mid-1870s. It was not maintained, however, but fell 30 percent between 1871–75 and 1909–13 to just over half a million hectoliters on the eve of the First World War, a figure equivalent to little more than 1 percent of French output.³⁵ Per capita consumption, which had reached about three bottles in 1873 and 1876, declined by half by 1909–13 (fig. 4.1).³⁶

These movements in aggregate consumption were accompanied by two other important changes. First, the decline in duties encouraged British merchants to import wines with a lower alcoholic content, so that while in the late 1850s almost 85 percent of all wines were fortified to over 14.8 degrees (essentially port, sherry, and cape), by 1875 this figure had fallen to 75 percent, and it continued to decline to 56 percent by 1882.³⁷ The changes in 1886, which raised to 17 degrees the ceiling for those paying the lowest rate of one shilling duty per gallon, resulted in little more than a third of all imported wines paying the higher rates.³⁸

Figure 4.1. Wine consumed in the United Kingdom, 1815–1914. Source: Wilson (1940:332–33 and 364–65)

A second, related change was the origin of the wines. Port and sherry shippers now argued that the new tax regime discriminated against them, as their strong wines had to pay more, and made them less competitive, leading to French wines increasing their market share from about 5 percent in the 1820s to 40 percent in the 1880s (table 4.2).³⁹ The switch to light French wines was initially slow, as an English merchant (in a letter quoted by Pasteur) noted in 1863: “at first these Wines met with a ready sale, but importers soon found that this branch of Trade was far from lucrative, as it entailed endless trouble and frequent loss, in consequence of the difficulties in keeping these Wines in marketable condition.”⁴⁰ By the 1870s this was no longer true, and the leading British trade journal, Ridley & Co.’s Wine and Spirit Trade Circular, noted on a number of occasions how wine merchants had become more professional in their handling of these wines.

TABLE 4.2
Source of Wine Imports to the United Kingdom

Beyond these aggregate changes, most individual wines experienced a period of rapid growth followed by a slump. Sherry, or more correctly “Spanish white,” saw a boom from the 1840s to 1875, when a massive 42.7 million liters was imported, or 43 percent of all wines (fig. 4.2). Imports then declined virtually every year and in 1896 fell below 9 million liters. By contrast, “Spanish red,” which was produced mainly in Tarragona (Catalonia) and considered as a cheap alternative to port, grew from less than 4.5 million liters in 1871 to peak at 12.7 million liters in 1900 before also declining rapidly.⁴¹ Exports of red wine from the Gironde (Bordeaux) increased dramatically after 1860 but peaked in the early 1880 and then fell sharply for the rest of our period (fig. 4.3). Champagne continued to be a success story despite the general fall in wine imports after 1875 (fig. 4.4) but also saw a decline in the years prior to the First World War.⁴² Finally, although port imports avoided the sharp downturn prior to the First World War, there were also significant fluctuations in demand over the nineteenth century (fig. 4.5).

Figure 4.2. UK imports of sherry and “Spanish white” wines, 1850–1905. Sources: Wilson (1940:362–63) and Ridley’s (various years)

Figure 4.3. Wine exports from Bordeaux to the United Kingdom, 1825–1911. Source: France. Direction Générale des douanes (various years)

Figure 4.4. Exports of champagne to the United Kingdom, 1831–1911. Source: France. Direction Générale des douanes (various years)

Some contemporaries attributed these shifts in consumer preferences to changes in fashion. While there is clearly some truth in this, the literature also suggests that once a wine had become popular, it was frequently imitated by producers elsewhere, and the subsequent criticism in the local and national press led to a decline in the popularity of the genuine article.

THE RETAIL MARKET AND PRODUCT ADULTERATION

The British retail trade for foods was still highly specialized in 1850, and in the grocery trade, for example, “the blending of tea, the mixing of herbs and spices, the curing and cutting of bacon, the cleaning and washing of dried fruits, the cutting and millgrinding of sugar, and the roasting and grinding of coffee were essential functions of the retailer, apart entirely from the tasks of weighing out and bagging.”⁴³ Wine merchants were equally skilled, especially in the area of blending different wines to meet a particular consumer’s demand, and to “refresh” old ones.⁴⁴ At times, as noted at the start of this chapter, merchants could literally create new wines. In general, contemporaries believed that blending was acceptable if it was not carried out in order to deceive, either by mislabeling a wine’s origin or through adulterating wines with other substances, especially those that were dangerous to health. One wine merchant, Christopher Bushell, argued that “if you have a pure wine from the south-east of France, and you blend it with a Port wine, it is true that it is not a Port wine, but equally true it is not adulterated.”⁴⁵ Another, J. W. Dover, noted quite simply that “mixing two good wines together is not fraudulent; if they mix cider with wine, it is fraudulent.”⁴⁶ Cyrus Redding agreed, writing in his classic work, A History and Description of Modern Wines:

Figure 4.5. UK imports of port wine, 1814–1910. Source: Wilson (1940:362–63)

By the adulteration of wine is not to be understood the mixture of two genuine growths for the sake of improvement . . . but, in the first place, a clandestine amalgamation of an inferior kind of wine with one which is superior, to cheat the purchaser, by passing it off for what it is not; and secondly, what may be denominated with more propriety the product of fictitious operations passed off as genuine growths, having little or no grape juice in its composition. The first of these heads may be divided into adulterations of wines before and after they are imported.⁴⁷

The problem facing the trade was that although blending by skilled merchants was legitimate and often improved quality and reduced prices for consumers, any unskilled or unscrupulous merchant could mix two wines and mislabel them for selling. The problem for consumers was to know how to identify the honest merchant and avoid the dishonest. Klein and Leffer suggest that a firm will maintain a long-term relationship with consumers and not cheat on quality if the present value of expected profits from future, repeat sales exceeds any shortterm, temporary increases due to shirking on quality.⁴⁸ In other words, a merchant who had invested heavily in reputation was much less likely to cheat than one that had recently only started business, especially if it was in an area of rapid growth, such as the wine trade after 1860. For expensive, fine wines a limited number of private buyers and repeat purchases was expected, so many merchants were willing to maintain quality standards. Because consumers often came from similar geographical and social backgrounds, short-term, opportunistic behavior by a wine merchant selling poor wine at inflated prices to one consumer was likely to quickly be known to others. This had always been true of the best French wines, but from the late eighteenth century it also included expensive vintage ports and fine sherries.⁴⁹

While economic incentives for well-established wine merchants selling fine wines to cheat their consumers were limited, this was less true for retail merchants and tavern owners who sold cheap wines. Indeed, consumers might prefer adulterated wines if the result was that they could consume goods that otherwise would be inaccessible to them.⁵⁰ In this respect, just as today there is a demand for false Gucci handbags, nineteenth-century consumers were happy to drink “port” that had been produced a considerable distance from the Douro valley. In the 1850s South African cape paid only half the duty of other wines, and considerable amounts were imported. Yet according to H. Lancaster, a London wine merchant, “it comes in as Cape, and pays Cape duty; and I hear of no Cape selling as Cape, except some little Constantia that may be asked for now and then.”⁵¹ Most was sold as port. From the 1870s Tarragona red wine from Spain was imported for a similar use (chapter 7). Blending wines from different locations therefore allowed retailers to create new products for their customers. However, not only did this increase the problems of classifying wines, but in an age with few public health regulations and limited ability of consumers to detect fraud, it encouraged cheating through mislabeling and the addition of substances other than wine.

High import duties had previously encouraged merchants to adulterate wines. Cyrus Redding, writing in the early 1830s, noted that sherry was sometimes mixed with cheap wines to create “inferior sherries” and then strengthened with brandy before being exported, but they were never adulterated in Spain.⁵² By contrast, in England “sherry of the brown kind, and of low price, when imported is mingled with Cape wine and cheap brandy, the washings of brandy casks, sugar candy, bitter almonds, and similar preparations, while the colour, if too great for pale sherries, is taken out by the addition of a small quantities of lamb’s blood, and then passed off for the best sherry by one class of wine sellers and advertisers.”⁵³

Not surprisingly, British retail merchants were not popular among foreign wine producers, and in 1825 one port shipper referred to them as the “most rotten set in London,” while a couple of decades later Cyrus Redding noted that “no branch of trade is open to the practice of more chicanery and fraud than that of wine dealing.”⁵⁴

The publication of Dr. Arthur Hassall’s scientific work in the Lancet between 1851 and 1854 showed both the extent of food adulteration at this time, and its implications for public health.⁵⁵ Whether this was actually greater than at earlier periods is impossible to determine, but the increasing importance of national and local newspapers resulted in wider public awareness and the demand for regulatory action by local and national authorities. Henry Bartlett, a fellow of the Chemical Society, believed in 1872, as Cyrus Redding had earlier, that most adulteration took place in England rather than in Spain, and that the major problem was mixing wine with “bad spirits.”⁵⁶ Until the 1870s most packaged alcohol was bottled by retailers, and these often sold wines under their own brand. This was encouraged by the domestic wine trade press, and the Wine Trade Review noted that “it is to the real merchant that whatever value which may attach to a brand should belong, as it is he who should be responsible to the consumer for the quality of the article supplied him.”⁵⁷ However, as Paul Duguid has reminded us, wine shippers had long used long iron brands to mark their names on the casks.⁵⁸ This, he argues, represented not so much a fight between rival producers, but an attempt to control “what was done in (or with) their names by suppliers or clients” along the supply chain.⁵⁹ Development of an effective national framework to combat fraud began in Britain with the Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1875, which defined adulteration in terms of risk to the consumer’s health, or deception concerning the description of the product.⁶⁰ This placed the regulatory emphasis on the retailer rather than the producer and allowed the mixing of wines (“compound foods”), provided that these were not “injurious ingredients” to health and were adequately labeled.⁶¹ It proved to be insufficient to control the wine trade.

The heterogeneous nature of wine made it a difficult product to sell, but the problems of marketing in the nineteenth century were also caused by extreme market volatility. Mark Casson has suggested a number of types of volatility that organizational structures have to overcome.⁶² In the first instance, supply and demand fluctuated within established markets caused, for example, by a harvest failure in Bordeaux or a business depression in the manufacturing districts of northern England. Although the timing of these events could not be predicted accurately, they were not entirely unexpected, and short-term movements in prices were usually sufficient to balance supply and demand. However, the fact that wine quality also changes with each vintage significantly increased the problem of classification.

A second type of volatility involved major structural changes in the market. Gladstone’s innovations of 1860–62, by reducing tariffs and creating new forms of distribution, significantly increased the size of the potential wine market. These changes, together with improvements in transport, also encouraged new merchants in both the traditional and new regions to trade with Britain. However, volatility was also produced by breakdowns and interruption of supply and these, as we have seen, were frequent during the second half of the nineteenth century (table 4.3). The first important one was oidium or powdery mildew, which reduced harvests and wine quality, especially between 1853 and 1856, and caused prices to soar briefly. Phylloxera led to French production slumping and prices rising by a third between the early 1870s and the early 1880s before declining once more in the face of massive imports, adulteration, and a recovery in domestic production. Finally, the appearance of downy mildew in the 1880s not only reduced the size of harvests but, in Bordeaux especially, ruined wine quality (see chapter 5).

TABLE 4.3
Vine Disease, Harvest Size, and Prices in France

The wine trade in producer countries tended to respond to these supply disruptions in two very different ways: by raising prices of fine wines because of the shortage of good-quality stocks, or by reducing quality by blending with cheaper, often inferior wines from other regions to compensate for the smaller local harvests. For example, powdery mildew caused the price of fine old sherries to triple in Britain between 1850–53 and 1860–63, but at the same time the reduction in import duties and the ability of shippers to export “sherry” from other regions led to a fall in prices of the cheaper wines.⁶³ In fact, London prices for a wide range of cheap commodity wines from Iberia stagnated over several decades, despite significant fluctuations in both the size and quality of the vintages, as well as the tendency for wine prices in producer countries to increase from the late 1870s (fig. 4.6). The same was true of other wines. Thus it was noted in 1907 that the price of “vintage” champagne “may fluctuate considerably,” but for nonvintage ones it was “pretty constant,”⁶⁴ while in Bordeaux Ridley’s reported in 1881 that, as a consequence of the significant decrease in harvest size caused by phylloxera, “no pure Claret can now be put on board under £8, and then of less satisfactory quality than was a few years since easily obtainable at £5; whilst blends with Spanish Red, South of France, and other Wines are sold, occasionally under their true designation, but generally under the usurped title of ‘Claret,’ at from £5 to £7 per hhd.”⁶⁵

In conclusion, although merchants maintained stable retail prices for cheap wines by blending (or adulteration), quality in the late nineteenth century dropped, leading to a decline in consumption. The problem was not limited to these wines. As Akerlof notes in a different context, buyers with insufficient knowledge concerning quality prior to purchase were discouraged from buying all types of wines because of the continual negative reports in local and national newspapers.⁶⁶ In particular, the markets for fine sherries and clarets collapsed in part, as we shall see in later chapters, because large quantities of “villainous trash” were being sold under these names, which eventually undermined the reputation of even the best brands.⁶⁷

Figure 4.6. Prices of cheap Iberian wines in London, 1869–94. Source: Ridley’s (first issue in January and July of each year)

WHO CONTROLS THE CHAIN? EXPERIMENTS AT “BUYER-LED”
COMMODITY CHAINS

In the early part of the nineteenth century British producers and exporters in places such as Porto or Jerez established the commodity chain and developed wines specifically for their home markets. These wines were bought by the cask from the retail merchant who then bottled it, often in the consumer’s house. The lower duties and the Single Bottle Act of the early 1860s provided opportunities to package and market wines in new ways, such as creating national brand names, and developing new forms of advertising. Retail merchants jealously tried to defend their right to bottle and saw the growing sale of bottled wines, whether expensive vintage champagne or cheap ports and sherries in multiple chain stores as a threat to the traditional retail business, believing that it would reduce them to mere “penny-in-the-slot machines deprived of all judgment in their buying and selling.”⁶⁸ Ridley’s complained as early as 1869 that the foreign shippers rather than the merchants enjoyed “the lion’s share of the plunder,” and the consequence of this change was not lost on the British trade journal, which continued: “It is daily becoming a more interesting question both in our own and other branches of commerce—“how is the middle man to exist?,” the only rejoinder from the producer and consumer, between whom he was formerly the medium of communication, being apparently the somewhat cynical one,—“there is no necessity that he should exist!”⁶⁹

These changes encouraged the appearance of buyer-driven commodity chains. In theory importers, by blending wines regardless of geographic origin, could improve quality and lower costs by avoiding poor local vintages, and make large purchases after good ones. In other words they could perform, on a larger geographical scale and in Britain, the sort of operations for which the Bordeaux négociant, for example, had traditionally been responsible. Wines could then be bottled centrally and sold under the importers’ brand via select retail outlets. The Victoria Wine Company, which was established in 1865 in Mark Lane in the City of London, had by 1886 some ninety-eight retail stores throughout the country.⁷⁰ The company bottled its own wines and placed the fact that they were “unadulterated” prominently in its advertisements.⁷¹ Gilbey’s was even more successful, being responsible in 1875 for 5 percent of all wine, six times the share of its nearest rival.⁷² Taking advantage of the lower duties and especially the Single Bottle Act, it sold all its wine in sealed and labeled bottles.⁷³ The firm’s success was achieved by importing wines in bulk directly from the country of origin, and by the use of its “Castle” brand and some 2,000 carefully monitored agents throughout the country. These agents were often already well-established grocers and were stocked with a selection from Gilbey’s list of two hundred different drinks. Finally, the importer Peter Burgoyne claimed to have spent £300,000 to sell his brand of Australian table wines by the turn of the twentieth century (see chapter 10).

Yet these companies were unable to halt the decline in wine sales from the mid-1870s. A number of problems can be identified. First, large-scale retailers had few advantages over smaller ones unless they could achieve buying-and-selling economies and introduce standardization and stock control.⁷⁴ The fact that wine quality varied greatly not just from one harvest to the next, but even on an individual vineyard in the same year, made it very difficult to create standardized products to brand. Gilbey’s, for example, depended on leading shippers in Jerez and Porto to select its wines to be sold under its own brand. When this firm integrated backward and purchased Château Loudenne in the Médoc in 1875, it was done as much to reduce information costs in its search to buy suitable wines from local growers as to cut production costs.⁷⁵ As an investment, the purchase of Château Loudenne occurred at perhaps the worst moment possible because of phylloxera and was a drain on company resources, but it did allow Gilbey to market itself as a wine producer. Retailing was more complicated than with most other foods and beverages, even when the retailers did not have to bottle the wine themselves, as Ridley’s noted:

One has only to go about Town and Country with one’s eyes open, to see what is offered in the shops of certain small Grocers and other Dealers, and the manner of so offering Wines which, perhaps may once upon a time have been sound and good, are found standing upright in the window in the full glare of the sun, till they must have entered on the last stage of degeneration, but nevertheless ready to be supplied to the guileless customer whose knowledge in buying is about on a par with that of the Vendor in selling. It is when the purchaser gets his bargain home, however, that the dénouement takes place. He may not be much of a judge, but his palate is sufficiently sensitive to know sound Wine from bad, and it tells him that it is not the former which he has got. He, therefore, not only eschews that particular Wine for the future, but in many cases tars the entire genus with the same brush, discarding the juice of the grape for Spirits and Beer.⁷⁶

Yet even Ridley’s had to agree that when chain stores used retailers who were both responsible and knowledgeable, the consumer was likely to be better served than by the “small and inexperienced” dealers who bottled their own wines. In particular Ridley’s noted that the Civil Service and the Army and Navy Cooperative Societies, which at their commencement were “extremely unpopular with the distributive Trade, owing to the severe competition which they brought about,” conducted their business professionally and the reputation of wine did not suffer, unlike “other stores.”⁷⁷

The problems in the wine market contrast strongly with the beer and spirits industries, where growing economies of scale in the production and the producers’ ability to create a standardized product made it much more susceptible to branding. According to Gourvish and Wilson, with beer “dilution and adulteration, the old resort of distressed publicans, seem to have been increasingly stamped out after the mid-1880s, as analysis became common, and brewers fought long and hard to remove the practice of the ‘long pull.’ ”⁷⁸ Markets were guaranteed by the forward integration of the leading breweries into distribution, through their purchase of retail outlets (public houses). Ridley’s contrasted these improvements with the problems of wine in 1901:

It cannot be denied that the quality of Beer—if we mean by quality, condition, attractive appearance and taste—has greatly improved in the last thirty years. When one recalls the turbid slop which was called fourpenny Ale, and compares it with the bright, brisk and light beverages now sold in most places at the same figure, we shall realise, apart from the low price, how, if in the lowest grade of Beer such an improvement has taken place, the palatability and attractiveness to all classes in the higher grades of Beer have increased. What improvement has taken place in the manner of selling or the style and quality in Wine as an article of consumption? The answer must be none whatever.⁷⁹

Yet the decline in consumption from the 1870s cannot be explained by a switch to other alcoholic beverages, as the movement in demand for both spirits and beer was similar to that of wine. Rather than the temperance movement, which before 1900, according to one historian “had promised much and delivered little,” the shift away from alcohol needs to be explained by the appearance of new forms of consumer goods and leisure activities.⁸⁰ Although Gladstone’s “wine revolution” failed to take off, the retail trade in Britain was changed. Traditionally, considerable amounts of port, sherry and claret had been drunk in rural areas, and contemporaries noted a weakening in this trade, especially with the onset of the agrarian crisis and the fall in land rents after 1873.⁸¹ Rural consumers had often purchased their port and sherry in barrels and bottled them on their own premises, but urban consumers had limited space for a wine cellar and preferred to buy their wines already bottled.⁸² Public as opposed to private drinking grew in importance, and brewers from the turn of the century entered into the wine trade at the cheap end of the market, not just supplying their publicans, but also purchasing wine merchants’ businesses.⁸³

There was also a growing demand from hotel and restaurants as eating out became fashionable, which again encouraged the growth in proprietary brands.⁸⁴ While as late as 1875 John Cordy Jeafferson noted that “there is no Continental capital so poorly provided as London with establishments were the stranger may obtain a fairly good dinner for a small sum, or an excellent dinner for a great price,” by the turn of the century a complete “revolution” had taken place, and now it was claimed that there was a greater variety of hotels, restaurants, and eating houses to suit “all tastes and all purses” than anywhere.⁸⁵ A bottle of Pommery 1893 in 1905 might cost “a gentleman” 8s. a bottle at “his club,” but the price at a fashionable hotel for the same wine was 25s. or 27s. 6d., although this had the consolation in that it helped to “keep the vulgar out.”⁸⁶ Smaller and more modest hotels sold much cheaper wines, but markups were often of a similar magnitude, and the wines often “execrably bad,” adding just one more perceived injustice to the retail merchant.⁸⁷

The evidence suggests that Gladstone’s desire to extend wine drinking to new social classes had had only limited success by 1914. In the early 1870s a very rough estimate by Leone Levi claimed that members of the working class purchased 75 percent of all beer and spirits, but they consumed just 10 percent of wine.⁸⁸ Taking the average annual per capita consumption of wine in the early 1880s as two and a half bottles, this implies that 70 percent of the population drank on average just a third of a bottle, compared to nine bottles for the rest of society.⁸⁹ A more detailed attempt at measuring wine consumption for the years 1913–14 (table 4.4) found that those enjoying annual incomes of £150–200 consumed four times more wine than those with £50–£100.⁹⁰ Feinstein gives the average earnings in 1911 for Britain’s 15.88 million wage earners as £58.6, with the police top earners at £96 followed by coal miners with £85.6.⁹¹ A further 4.5 million, or 22 percent of the total, were considered as “nonmanual.” As about a third of imports were still fortified wines in 1913, which paid the highest rate of duty, and assuming an average family size of five, the nature of per capita consumption was probably similar to that of the early 1880s. Ridley’s had come to a similar conclusion a few years earlier:

Wine worth drinking in this Country does not come within the means of the masses. It may not be generally recognised that the number of persons with incomes of over £200 a year are, judging from the Income Tax Returns, considerably under one million, whilst not half that number have £500 per annum, and it is to these latter that the Wine Trade has to look for its customers. With a clientèle limited to about a million individuals, it is useless to anticipate an unlimited extension of the Trade.⁹²

TABLE 4.4
Estimates of Duty Paid on Alcoholic Beverages by Income Levels, 1913–14

The fine wines imported into Britain prior to 1860 were expensive because of high production costs (caused by the labor intensive nature of viticulture, the low yields, and the capital needed for making and maturing wines for the British taste); the high marketing costs (long credit, slow turnover, and a limited number of consumers); and elevated import duties. The reduction in duties brought about by the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty saw wine imports double from slightly less than 350,000 hectoliters in 1860 to 700,000 in 1870. Over the next three decades they stagnated before dropping by almost a third, even though wine duties remained virtually unchanged. By 1913 per capita consumption was no greater than it had been in 1815, despite the retail price of the cheapest wines being one-fifth of that in Wellington’s time, and, as Ridley’s noted in 1901, stagnant demand for wines after the 1870s occurred during a period of rapid economic change.⁹³

This chapter has argued that import duties were not a major obstacle to selling wine in the British market after 1860. This is suggested by the experiences of different types of wine, which all saw rapid increases in consumption at one moment or the other during the mid-nineteenth century, but this was followed by a steep drop in their popularity. For sherry, this decline can be dated from the early 1870s; fine claret, from the early 1880s; ordinary claret, from the late 1880s; and champagne, from about 1900. Although imports of port avoided the sharp downturn prior to the First World War, the wine also experienced major fluctuations in demand over the century. A significant decline in the quality and reputation of individual wines precipitated these changes in consumer behavior. The heterogeneity of wines made it much harder for department stores or retail chains to sell wines as they did other foods, such as breakfast cereals or canned soup. Despite this, virtually all the fine sherry and port continued to be sold to the British market, and it also remained the largest for bottled claret.⁹⁴ Only with champagne did others of any size exist.

TABLE 4.5
Production and Trade in Wines in Selected Countries, 1909–13 (millions of hectoliters)

As shown in previous chapters, the production of artificial wines and the practice of adulteration were as widespread in producer countries as in Britain. Annual per capita wine consumption also declined in France, from an average of 145 liters per person in the decade 1869–78 to 98 liters in 1883–92, because of high prices and adulteration, but this then recovered from the 1890s, and by the 1900s annual consumption had reached over 150 liters per person. Crucially, while wine-producing countries legislated against the making and marketing of artificial wines using raisins and other products, this did not happen in Britain, and in 1912 “British” wines were equivalent to 8 percent of the total market.⁹⁵

TABLE 4.6
Tariffs on Commodity Wine Imports in Selected Countries, 1898 (francs per hectoliter)

Finally, the poor export performance of the sector was not limited to Britain, as only 12 percent of the world’s wine production was exported in 1909–13, and if Algeria—which sold virtually all its wines to France—is excluded, the figure declines to 8 percent (table 4.5). Even more striking was the fact that imports to countries other than France were equivalent to just 6 percent of world production. Although the flow of new ideas and technology was increasing across national frontiers after 1900, the international trade in cheap commodity wines was limited, especially as tariffs were often higher than domestic prices. This was because taxes on alcohol were an important source of national revenue, and most countries protected producers from foreign competition, in exchange for high excise taxes on domestic output of beer, spirits, and wine (table 4.6).

¹ Average French consumption, calculated by adding imports to production and subtracting exports, was 45.9 million hectoliters between 1891 and 1900 (Direction Générale 1934:177).

² W. & A. Gilbey, letter to The Times, October 14, 1891, p. 14.

³ Law (2003:1116).

⁴ Pinney (1989:5–10).

⁵ Unwin (1991:242).

⁶ 6 William and Mary, c. 34., cited in Briggs (1985:24).

⁷ Francis (1972:106, 130). Wine duties therefore were based on volume, rather than being an ad valorem tariff or one based on alcohol content. A similar duty might have been signed with Spain, but it was considered at this time to have no textile industry that threatened the sale of English cloth.

⁸ From an average of 21,000 hectoliters in the eight years between 1823 and 1830, to 15,000 between 1831 and 1838. Calculated from Redding (1851:384).

⁹ Nye (1991:37) suggests, using French sources, that Portuguese wines were valued about five times more than French ones. However, wines were especially difficult to value, which explains why suggestions to introduce an ad valorem tariff were rejected in the nineteenth century.

¹⁰ In 1789 England and Ireland accounted for just 1 percent production in the Gironde but 6 percent of the value (Dictionnaire du Commerce, cited in Cocks and Féret 1908:86).

¹¹ Porter (1847:570).

¹² United Kingdom. Parliamentary Papers (1852), James, p. 380. My calculations.

¹³ The figure for duty comes from Simpson (2010, table 2); for wages, Bowley (1900, appendix 1).

¹⁴ Taxes from alcohol were collected by duties on spirits, wines, and beer, and from selling licenses for alcoholic drinks, although the greatest burden of taxation fell on the production or import of drinks by brewers, distillers, and wine merchants, rather than the retailers (Wilson 1940, chap. 18).

¹⁵ Nye (2007:100).

¹⁶ Tennent (1855:28).

¹⁷ United Kingdom. Parliamentary Papers (1852), Tennent, p. 350.

¹⁸ McCulloch (1845), Wine, p. 1416, cited in Tennent (1855:148).

¹⁹ United Kingdom. Parliamentary Papers (1852); Shaw (1864:182–83); and Redding (1851: 659–60).

²⁰ United Kingdom. Parliamentary Papers (1852), Forrester, p. 448.

²¹ Ibid., Dover, p. 648. The drawback involved the mixing of Cape wines (which paid half duty) with port, for example, and then exporting it as port and reclaiming the full duty.

²² Shaw (1864:20).

²³ As the shipper A. G. Sandeman noted:

You have the merchants connected with Spain and Portugal who wish to have their strong wines introduced on the most favourable terms. You have the dealers in light wines who wish to have a monopoly, as it were, and have the duty kept high on the strong wines. . . . Then you have those connected with the spirit trade who look with great jealousy upon a reduction of the duty upon strong wines as likely to affect their interests; so that really it is most difficult to reconcile every interest in the trade (United Kingdom. Parliamentary Papers 1878/79, Sandeman, pp. 142–43).

²⁴ Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates (1860:clvi), February 10, p. 847.

²⁵ Ibid., 849–50.

²⁶ Ibid., 845. The quote continues, “By that means you will not only effectually bar access of the poor man to it, but will reserve to yourself the proud satisfaction of saying with literal truth, ‘Our indirect taxes are paid by the rich; none are levied upon articles consumed by the poor.’ ”

²⁷ Tennent (1855:81–83).

²⁸ As one wine broker noted, “take John Bull in the aggregate, and he only knows those two wines, Port and Sherry” (United Kingdom. Parliamentary Papers 1852, Tuke, p. 165).

²⁹ Ibid., Forrester, p. 18. Harvest size and annual shipments differed significantly, as most port was not exported for several years.

³⁰ Ibid., Tuke, p. 146. The supposedly inelastic supply of port and sherry, especially the better qualities, led Sir James Tennent (1855:22) to argue that “any great augmentation of the demand even for the lowest class of wines—the supply of which is assumed unlimited—is pretty certain to be followed by a considerable enhancement of their costs at the places of their growth and shipment.”

³¹ Tennent (1855:67). Emphasis in the original. One importer noted that “the public certainly want a cheap wine, but it must be Port, and my opinion is, that neither Masdeu, Figueira, which is a Portugal wine also, nor red Sicilian wines, however low the price may be, will ever come into competition with genuine Port wine” (United Kingdom. Parliamentary Papers 1852, J. C. Gassiot, p. 127).

³² Rates changed in both 1860 and 1861. Those of 1862 lasted until 1886, when the lower rates were extended to wines of up to 17 degrees. In 1899 the duty was increased to 1s. 3d. for wines of less than 17 degrees, and 3s. for those above it. For sparkling wines an additional duty was imposed in 1888 of 2s. 6d. per imperial gallon, or 1s. 3d. if the value of the wine did not exceed 15s. This was reduced to 2s. irrespective of value in 1893, and 2s. 6d. from 1899. Finally, ordinary bottled wines paid an additional 1s. a gallon after 1899.

³³ The license fee was between £2 10s. and £10, depending on the value of the premises. By 1880, 3,895 licenses had been granted to sell wine. Wine dealers, who could not sell wine in quantities of less then 2 gallons (twelve bottles), paid £5 5s. In 1866 the distinctive rates of tax on wine imported in barrels and bottles was abolished (Wilson (1940:322–23 and table 25; Briggs 1985:37–38).

³⁴ For fortified wines this was an average tax reduction of 57 percent, and for the cheapest unfortified ones it represented 83 percent.

³⁵ Revenue for the Treasury consequently fell from its peak in 1857, when it represented about 10 percent of total revenue from liquor. It then declined during the rest of the century, although the fall was partly offset by growing revenue from licenses.

³⁶ From 0.56 to 0.26 gallon (Wilson 1940:332–33).

³⁷ United Kingdom. Parliamentary Papers (1878/79), pp. 315–17; and Ridley’s, June 1894, pp. 361, 363).

³⁸ For example, 38 percent in 1893 and 36 percent in 1914 (Ridley’s, June 1894, p. 362; June 1915, p. 418). As wines were often subsequently blended, this does not in itself imply a switch in consumption habits.

³⁹ The new duties in 1886 implied that by 1893 only 37 percent of Spanish wines paid the higher rates compared to 79 percent in 1882. However, the total consumption of Spanish wines declined by 160,000 hectoliters gallons (22 percent) over the 1882–93 period, and this decline can be attributed almost entirely to the drop in imports of the higher-strength wines, as imports of the lower-strength wines remained constant in absolute terms.

⁴⁰ Quoted in Ridley’s, Mach 8, 1905, p. 210. The Parfait Vigneron was less polite: “It should also be added that, as few, if any, English cellarmen have knowledge or experience of the management of any but strong brandied kinds, which scarcely anything can hurt, and only of our ripe wellfermented qualities, merchants who desire to purchase new wines, and to rear them themselves, will find it absolutely necessary to engage experienced French cellarmen.” Quoted in Shaw (1864:101).

⁴¹ Ridley’s, various years.

⁴² There is no distinction between champagne and French sparkling wines in the UK statistics before 1894.

⁴³ Jeffreys (1954:2).

⁴⁴ The blending of wines held in bond in British ports was strictly controlled in the 1850s, and it was illegal, for example, to blend French wines with Portuguese wines for home consumption, although this was allowed if the wine was then reexported. These measures were not an attempt to protect consumers, but rather to avoid the mixing of wines that paid different rates of duty (United Kingdom. Parliamentary Papers 1852, Reay, p. 485).

⁴⁵ Ibid., Bushell, p. 764.

⁴⁶ Ibid., Dover, p. 649.

⁴⁷ Redding (1833:321; 1851:345).

⁴⁸ Klein and Leffler (1981).

⁴⁹ Francis (1972:300). He continues, “Good wines could only be brought from high-class merchants and they were apt to confine their dealings to a distinguished and discerning clientele” (p. 306). It did not imply that wine merchants were averse to using modern sales techniques, as Shaw (1864:23) noted:

more means and instruments are used to make sales then is generally supposed; for it is not seldom that a finely-booted and spurred independent-looking gentleman in the hunting-field is, in reality, sub rosâ, a wine merchant’s “help”; and, by “incidental” hints, there and at table, about Château this and Château that, he earns money for his employer and commissions for himself. However good a stock may be, there is so much competition that the merchant’s sales will be very slow indeed, if he imagines that the excellence of his cellar will absolve him from practising solicitations; with much, besides, very repugnant to the feelings of a gentleman. Not the least of these is the payment to servants of money which, properly, should be given to their masters, and favours of various kinds to persons of influence in clubs, &c.

⁵⁰ Alsberg (1931).

⁵¹ United Kingdom. Parliamentary Papers (1852), Lancaster, p. 108.

⁵² Redding (1833:191).

⁵³ Ibid., 322.

⁵⁴ Cited in Duguid (2003:413).

⁵⁵ Burnett (1999) and United Kingdom. Parliamentary Papers (1854–55), First Report, pp. 1–45. This report claimed that wine adulteration in Britain was equivalent to 20 percent of wine imports (ibid., Second Report, p. 35).

⁵⁶ United Kingdom. Parliamentary Papers (1872), pp. 206, 213. However, the British consul and others in Jerez argued that local producers were also producing artificial wines.

⁵⁷ Wine Trade Review, January 15, 1864, p. 2, cited in Duguid (2003:425).

⁵⁸ Duguid (2003:431). Hence the origin of the word “brand.”

⁵⁹ Ibid., 419.

⁶⁰ French and Phillips (2000:36–37). The act allowed local authorities to inspect retail outlets, but not manufacturers. The three acts of Parliament between 1860 and 1872 had failed to provide an efficient legal basis to combat adulteration of food and drink.

⁶¹ Ibid., 4. The major problem appears to have been the addition of potato spirit. United Kingdom. Parliamentary Papers (1872), p. 207.

⁶² Casson (1997:10–11).

⁶³ Shaw (1864:235); Simpson (2005).

⁶⁴ Ridley’s, July 1907, p. 514.

⁶⁵ Ibid., January 1881, p. 5. A hogshead (hhd) was equivalent to between 220 and 225 liters.

⁶⁶ Akerlof (1970).

⁶⁷ Ridley’s used this expression as early as January 1870 (p. 5) with respect to claret. It was not the only factor, however, as the false rumors over the supposed health safety of sherry and the quality of claret from the leading châteaux declined substantially in the late nineteenth century. See chapters 5 and 8.

⁶⁸ Ridley’s, July 1907, p. 514.

⁶⁹ Ibid., August 1869, p. 2, emphasis in the original. Ridley’s noted that merchants would have to accept the lower status of being a shopkeeper or give up, and “already, Wholesale Dealers, with certain pretensions, are opening retail branches in prominent thoroughfares.”

⁷⁰ Briggs (1985:9).

⁷¹ The Illustrated London News, December 13, 1873, cited in ibid., 48. By 1880 the company was listing sixteen sherries, together with fourteen ports, eight clarets, and “sundry wines,” including a Hambro sherry (ibid., 53).

⁷² Faith (1983:12).

⁷³ United Kingdom. Parliamentary Papers (1878/79), p. 157.

⁷⁴ Jeffreys (1954).

⁷⁵ Gilbey first bought wines directly in France in 1863 (Maxwell 1907:18). For Château Loudenne, see especially Faith (1983).

⁷⁶ Ridley’s, September 1899, p. 620.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 621–22.

⁷⁸ Beer prices remained stable in the second half of the nineteenth century at between 3.5d. and 6d. a quart (Gourvish and Wilson 1994:207–8).

⁷⁹ Ridley’s, April 1901, p. 258. My emphasis.

⁸⁰ Weir (1984:96); Simpson (2004:84). For the temperance movement, see especially Harrison (1971).

⁸¹ Sherry imports peaked in 1873 in part because of the rumors that duties were to be raised (Pan-Montojo 1994:106). Thudichum’s infamous letter to The Times was also published that year. See chapter 8.

⁸² Ridley’s, April 1903, p. 241; September 1904, p. 639; and September 1899, p. 621.

⁸³ See, e.g., ibid., September 1899, p. 622; January 1900, p. 8). According to Samuel (1919:170), “A very large proportion of wine—it has been estimated that it may be, perhaps, 70 percent.—is consumed at wine bars and in public-houses and cheap restaurants, though this would not represent 70 percent. of the taxation, owing to the higher duties on sparking wines and better quality port.”

⁸⁴ Ridley’s, October 1915, p. 661.

⁸⁵ Simon (1905:154, 156).

⁸⁶ Ibid., 157.

⁸⁷ Ridley’s, August 1869, p. 16.

⁸⁸ Levi (1872).

⁸⁹ The working class is taken as 70 percent. See Rowntree and Sherwell (1900:9).

⁹⁰ United Kingdom. Parliamentary Papers (1927), xi, p. 92, cited in Burnett (1999:142).

⁹¹ Feinstein (1990:603).

⁹² Ridley’s, 1908, p. 1081.

⁹³ Ibid., April 1901, p. 258.

⁹⁴ Britain accounted for about a fifth of Bordeaux’s exports in bottles in 1909–11.

⁹⁵ Prest (1954:83).