The First Modern Wine Guide Was Written by a Journalist, Not a Merchant

By the This Day in Wine History Editorial Team · Researched, fact-checked & verified by the TDIWH Editorial Team.

Every sweeping “world of wine” book — the kind that marches region by region through the vineyards of the earth — descends from a single volume published in London in 1833. Its author was not a wine merchant, a vineyard owner, or a titled connoisseur. He was a jobbing Cornish newspaperman named Cyrus Redding, who happened to have spent years in Paris and to write clean, confident prose about anything he turned his hand to. The modern wine guide was invented by a journalist.

A newspaperman’s education

Cyrus Redding was born in Penryn, Cornwall, in 1785, and made his living with a pen. He edited a string of newspapers and magazines across a long career — the West Briton in Cornwall, later the New Monthly Magazine in London — and, crucially for a wine book, he spent the years around 1815 to 1818 in Paris, editing the English-language Galignani’s Messenger.

Living in France gave him what most English wine writers of the day lacked: firsthand acquaintance with the regions, the growers, and the trade. He tasted where the wine was made and talked to the people who made it. But he came to the subject as a reporter — curious, skeptical, and used to explaining a complicated world to ordinary readers — rather than as a man with barrels to sell.

The person who taught the English-speaking world how to read the map of wine did it, characteristically, on deadline.

The book that set the template

In 1833 Redding published A History and Description of Modern Wines. What made it new was not that it mentioned foreign wines — learned books had done that — but that it took the living wine world as its subject and organized it the way we still do: region by region, wine by wine, described for a general reader who wanted to understand what was in the glass.

The wine world agrees on its importance. Hugh Johnson calls Redding “the first English author to have a go at something so comprehensive.” The great wine bibliographer André Simon went further, judging that no English book on wine “has ever been more popular nor so copiously copied from by later writers.” Redding, in other words, wrote the book that every later survey quietly cribbed from — the ancestor of the modern wine guide.

He was also a reformer at heart. A working journalist’s nose for a scandal made him fierce about the fraud and adulteration of his day, especially the English habit of beefing up wines with extra spirit. He wanted readers to know their wine so they could not be cheated.

Giving credit carefully

It is worth being precise, because “first” is a dangerous word. An earlier English volume, Alexander Henderson’s History of Ancient and Modern Wines, had appeared in 1824 — nine years before Redding. But Henderson was a physician writing a learned history weighted toward the wines of the classical past; the clue is in his title. Redding’s achievement was different: he swung the whole enterprise around to face the present, and wrote for the general reader rather than the scholar.

So the fair claim is not that Redding wrote the first book ever to discuss wine, but that he wrote the first comprehensive modern survey of the world’s wines aimed at everyday readers — the template the genre has followed ever since. And he did it as a newspaperman, two decades before the famous 1855 Bordeaux Classification codified the hierarchy of the great growths. The person who taught the English-speaking world how to read the map of wine did it, characteristically, on deadline.

This day in wine history

• 1785 — Cyrus Redding is born in Penryn, Cornwall.
• c. 1815–1818 — Redding edits Galignani’s Messenger in Paris, gaining firsthand knowledge of French wine.
• 1833 — A History and Description of Modern Wines is published, launching the modern wine survey.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

Discover more of wine’s literary history in Wine Poems in History, or browse our Turning Points in Wine History collection.

Further reading

As an Amazon Associate, This Day in Wine History earns from qualifying purchases. Book links are affiliate links; cover images are used for identification.

A History and Description of Modern Wines
Cyrus Redding
Redding’s pioneering 1833 survey, the first modern global account of wines.

Inventing Wine: A New History of One of the World’s Most Ancient Pleasures
Paul Lukacs
Cultural history of how wine was reinvented across the centuries.

Sources

1. Cyrus Redding, A History and Description of Modern Wines (1851 ed.) — the primary book, full text. archive.org
2. Hugh Johnson, in Decanter — “the first English author to have a go at something so comprehensive.” decanter.com
3. Jackson Bibliography of Romantic Poetry, University of Toronto Libraries — scholarly record of Redding’s journalistic career. utoronto.ca
4. André Simon, quoted in the antiquarian description of Modern Wines — on the book’s influence. betweenthecovers.com
5. Wellcome Collection / University of Leeds catalogue — bibliographic record of the 1836 second edition. wellcomecollection.org
6. Alexander Henderson, The History of Ancient and Modern Wines (1824) — the earlier English volume, for comparison. archive.org

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