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The English have always had a fondness for
eccentrics. Prime Minister William
Gladstone, who presided over Parliament during much of the 1880’s certainly
ranked among these. A man of many quirks and strange habits, Gladstone once
observed, “I have made it a rule to give every tooth of mine a chance, and when
I eat, to chew every bite thirty two times.
To this rule I owe much of my success in life.”
Whatever the reason for Gladstone’s
success, some speculate that his most important accomplishments may have been
lowering the tariff on French wines and permitting grocers to stock and sell
wine. For the first time, the many
varieties of French wines, together with German Rhines and Moselles, became
widely available in England.
By the late nineteenth century, a variety
of wines were supposed to be set out for a proper dinner party: sherry with soup and fish, hock or claret
with roast meat, punch with turtle, champagne with whitebait, port with
venison, port or burgundy with game, sparkling wines with the
confectionary, and for dessert port,
tokay, madeira or sherry.
Although the Victorian’s enjoyed a variety
of wines, they did not indulge in the excesses in quantity known in earlier
times. It had been the custom in
Georgian times, for example, to drink a bottle, per person, after dinner. Indeed, King William IV expected his
governmental ministers to be two bottle men, if only to keep level with the
typical Anglican cleric.
Sherry came into fashion when the Prince Regent
announced that he would drink nothing but sherry. The Prince’s sudden conversion came about
after a British privateer captured a French merchantman sailing between Cadiz
and Le Havre. In the ship’s cargo were
two butts of a remarkably fine brown sherry destined for the table of the
Emperor Napoleon. Presented to the
Prince Regent instead, sherry won an immediate and passionate convert.
Edward VII, while still Prince of Wales,
is credited with having popularized champagne in England. Edward preferred light Chablis and extra dry
champagne, and these were produced specially for the English market, with
spectacular results. In 1861, some
three million bottles of
champagne were exported from France to England.
By 1890, England was importing over nine million bottles of French
champagne annually, almost half of all of the champagne being produced.
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