The British Empire and the Emergence of the Global Wine Industry

Britain grows almost no wine of its own, yet no nation did more to shape the wine the rest of the world drinks. For three centuries the thirsty, wealthy, sea-going British were wine’s greatest customers and middlemen — and in slaking that thirst they helped invent Port, Sherry and Marsala, carried Cape wine to a defeated emperor’s exile, planted the vine across a global empire, and, with a stroke of a Chancellor’s pen, put a bottle of claret on the ordinary family’s table. This is the story of how a rainy island became the hidden hinge of the wine world¹. (See also: our full wine-history timeline.)

The thirsty island

For centuries the British drank far more wine than they could ever grow, and their money and merchant fleets made them the most important customers in the trade. Unable to make their own, they bought, shipped, blended, aged and sold everyone else’s¹.

That buying power did something subtle: it let British taste reach into foreign vineyards and shape what they produced. Whole regions began making wine to British specifications, in British styles, for British throats. The island’s influence vastly outran its own tiny handful of vines.

Claret and the Portuguese pivot

Their oldest love was Bordeaux — “claret” — but endless wars with France kept cutting it off. So the British turned to Portugal, and the Methuen Treaty of 1703 taxed Portuguese wine far more lightly than French, steering the nation toward Port. British and Scottish merchants flocked to the Douro, which is why so many great Port houses still bear names like Graham’s, Cockburn, Warre’s and Taylor’s². (Related: Salazar-era Portuguese wine.)

“Port for men”: the Georgian cult of the bottle

In Georgian Britain, Port became a way of life. Gentlemen sat over it for hours after the ladies withdrew; hard drinkers boasted of being “three-bottle men,” and the national epidemic of gout was the price of the fashion.

Nobody caught the era’s hierarchy of drink better than Dr Samuel Johnson, whose verdict — recorded by his biographer Boswell — became one of the most quoted lines in the language³.

Claret is the liquor for boys; port, for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.— Dr Samuel Johnson, in Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791)³

Nelson’s wine: the making of Marsala

The British thirst for strong, sea-worthy wine built whole industries. In 1773 the Liverpool merchant John Woodhouse, sheltering at the Sicilian port of Marsala, tasted a local wine that reminded him of Madeira — and, fortifying it to survive the voyage, all but invented Marsala as an export⁴.

His timing was extraordinary. When Admiral Horatio Nelson’s fleet was patrolling the Mediterranean, Nelson placed a standing order — some 500 pipes, hundreds of thousands of litres — to ration his sailors with Marsala, and pronounced himself delighted with it. “Nelson’s wine” had arrived, and British firms — Woodhouse, Ingham, Whitaker and later the Florios — turned it into a boom⁵.

The wine is so good that any gentleman’s table might receive it, and it will be of real use to our seamen.— attributed to Admiral Nelson on Marsala, 1800⁵

An empire of fortified wine

Marsala was only part of a wider pattern. British firms dominated Sherry in the Spanish town of Jerez — which the English mangled into “sherris” and then “sherry” — and Madeira in the Atlantic, whose fortified wine survived tropical sea voyages and became the toast of the American colonies. Wherever the British wanted a strong, stable, shippable wine, British merchants went and built the trade to supply it⁶.

The wine that seduced an emperor: Constantia

Nothing shows the reach of the imperial wine world better than Constantia, the sweet wine of the Cape of Good Hope. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was one of the most coveted wines on earth, adored by Frederick the Great, George Washington and Marie Antoinette.

Its most famous admirer was a prisoner. Exiled to St Helena after Waterloo, Napoleon had some thirty bottles of Constantia a month shipped to his rock in the Atlantic, and is said to have called for a glass on his deathbed — South African nectar, not French Bordeaux, at the very end. Jane Austen knew its reputation too: in Sense and Sensibility, Mrs Jennings prescribes Constantia for “its healing powers on a disappointed heart”⁷.

Planting the New World

The Empire did not only buy wine — it planted it. In 1831 a Scottish-born settler named James Busby toured the great vineyards of Europe, gathered hundreds of vine cuttings, and shipped them to Sydney aboard the Camden in 1833; distributed from the Botanic Gardens, they seeded the vineyards of a continent and earned him the title “father of Australian wine”⁸.

Busby’s vines were one thread in a larger imperial weave. British settlers and capital established the wine industries of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, whose growers — mindful of the long voyage home — often made Port- and Sherry-style wines aimed squarely at the British market. The modern “New World” of wine was, in large part, an imperial creation⁹.

Gladstone and the birth of “grocers’ claret”

For most of its history, wine in Britain had been a rich man’s drink. That changed almost overnight. In his budgets of 1860–61 the Chancellor, William Gladstone, slashed and equalised the duties on wine and — through the Single Bottle Act of 1861 — for the first time let grocers sell wine by the single bottle, instead of forcing buyers to a specialist merchant for a whole case¹⁰.

The effect was seismic. Cheap Bordeaux — sniffily nicknamed “grocers’ claret” — poured into ordinary homes, and between 1859 and 1878 British sales of French wine rose roughly sixfold. Gladstone had deliberately loosened the grip of heavy Port and Sherry and made light table wine a drink for the many¹¹.

The hub of the wine world

Into the twentieth century, “imperial preference” tariffs favoured wines from the Empire, and Britain remained the great clearing-house through which the wines of every country were traded, judged and sold — with London auction houses and merchants setting reputations and prices. For a land with barely a vine of its own, Britain’s fingerprints lie on an astonishing share of the wine world¹².

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Madeira, the empire’s fortified favourite
• The Dutch merchant fleet and wine
• Sack, claret and Shakespeare’s England

References

1. VinePair — The British Paradox: How a Cold, Rainy Island Invented Modern Wine. vinepair.com ↩
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Methuen Treaty. www.britannica.com ↩
3. James Boswell — The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Project Gutenberg. www.gutenberg.org ↩
4. Gambero Rosso — The Sicilian Wine that Fuelled Nelson’s Navy. www.gamberorossointernational.com ↩
5. Cantine Florio — Florio and the British Origins of Marsala. cantineflorio.it ↩
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica — sherry. www.britannica.com ↩
7. Groot Constantia — Grand Constance (estate history). grootconstantia.co.za ↩
8. Australian Food History Timeline — James Busby Imports Vine Cuttings. australianfoodtimeline.com.au ↩
9. University of California Press — Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World. www.ucpress.edu ↩
10. History & Policy — Wine, Supermarkets and Alcohol Policy. historyandpolicy.org ↩
11. Encyclopaedia Britannica — William Ewart Gladstone. www.britannica.com ↩
12. History Today — The Bittersweet Taste of British Sicily. www.historytoday.com ↩

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
Superb on Britain’s central role in the history of the wine trade.

A Short History of Wine
Rod Phillips
Good on the commerce, treaties and empires that moved wine around the world.

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