‘The most perfect of all known wines’: Burgundy in Britain from 1730s to 1930s
Graham Harding
Burgundy has always been a wine for and of the elite. In the 18th century it was positioned as the ‘definition of luxury’ (1768). It was the ‘wine of princes’, the gift of kings, and was priced accordingly. Regardless of its place on the ladder of quality – from Clos Vougeot to ‘wine of Beaune’ it was priced as high or higher than champagne and Hermitage and consistently more expensive than claret. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, its market share was limited. Those writing about wine in the daily press and in wine books characterised Burgundy as a poor traveller’; ‘deteriorated’ even by the short Channel crossing. It was consistently greatly outsold by port and claret. Unlike claret it failed to benefit from Gladstonian ‘revolution’ of lowered duties on light wine in the 1860s. But those who could afford it appreciated Burgundy both for its ‘exquisite flavour and perfume’ and – in a persistent echo of humoral theory – for its capacity to lift the spirits of the melancholic and stimulate the mind and the senses.
In the later 19th century, not inconsequentially, doctors began to endorse its ‘blood-making’ quality. Producers of Australian ‘Burgundy’ – usually made from grapes other than Pinot – seized upon this nascent belief and by the 1920s heavily advertised brands such as Keystone, Big Tree far outsold French Burgundy. They were positioned on a dual health and taste platform and targeted British middle-class consumers to great effect, contributing to Australian wines outselling French in the late 1930s. In this market, the Pinot Noir grape was almost invisible. The names ‘Pineau’ and ‘Noirien’ had some currency in the 19th century when this high quality but hard-to-grow grape was differentiated from the far lower quality ‘Gammai’ but the Australian wines broke this link. Connoisseurs of the great Burgundy domaines may have been aware of ‘La Paulée’ but it had little if any public impact. ‘Pinot Noir’ – like most other grape names – was almost invisible in the British market until the late 1960s when the image of Burgundy had to be refashioned and re-differentiated.
Graham Harding is