Pass the Port to the Left — and “Do You Know the Bishop of Norwich?”

At a formal British dinner, when the meal is over and the cloth is drawn, someone brings out the port. And with it comes a small, precise body of unwritten law — a set of rules governing the movement of a single decanter around the table, complete with a coded phrase for correcting anyone who breaks them without ever appearing to correct them at all.¹

The rules are simple to state and, in the right company, taken entirely seriously. The port is passed to the left, and it does not stop. If it does stop — if some guest, deep in conversation, lets the decanter come to rest at his elbow — the correct response is not to ask for it back, but to lean over and enquire, with perfect courtesy, whether he happens to know the Bishop of Norwich.

The rule: always to the left

The central rule of port is direction. Once the decanter is on the table, it travels one way only: to the left, which is to say clockwise as seen from above.¹ You pour a glass for the neighbour on your right, then fill your own, and then send the decanter onward to the person on your left, who does the same. It circles the table in a single unbroken direction, never passed back or reversed, and never lifted across the table to a friend who has run dry.

The point of all this is practical, though it can look like fussiness. A single decanter shared among a dozen people needs some agreed choreography, or it will end up stranded halfway down the table while everyone waits and no one likes to ask. Fixing the direction, and the expectation that the decanter keeps moving, is simply the most efficient way to make sure a shared bottle reaches everyone without anyone having to make a request.

Why to the left?

Ask why the direction is leftward, and the answer most often given is a naval one. On a ship, the left-hand side, facing forward, is the port side; passing the port to the left is passing the port to port, and the custom is said to descend from the dining traditions of the Royal Navy’s officers.²

It is a satisfying story, and it may even be partly true, but it should be treated with some caution; a great deal of drinking lore is invented after the fact to explain a custom whose real origins are lost. What is not in doubt is the practical effect: a rule that everyone knows, pointing the same way every time, keeps the decanter moving smoothly around a crowded table.

The problem of the stranded decanter

All of the etiquette exists to solve one very human problem. Dinners are for talking, and a guest absorbed in conversation with the person beside him can quite easily rest the decanter on the cloth, turn away, and forget it entirely. Meanwhile the four or five people downstream of him sit with empty glasses, watching the port sit motionless, growing thirstier and more resentful by the minute.¹

To point this out directly (“you are hogging the port; kindly pass it on”) would be a serious breach of manners, far worse than the original offence. The English solution was indirect. Instead of confronting the culprit, they devised a way to remind him of his duty that let everyone, including him, pretend that no rebuke had been delivered.

To ask directly for the port would be a graver breach of manners than hogging it. So the English built a coded phrase that corrects a man without admitting he is being corrected.

“Do you know the Bishop of Norwich?”

The phrase is the heart of the whole tradition. When the decanter has stalled beside a forgetful guest, the host or a neighbour asks him, apparently out of nowhere, “Do you know the Bishop of Norwich?”¹

The question only looks like small talk. It carries a fixed meaning that everyone at a certain kind of table is expected to know: he is a very good fellow, but he never passes the port. A guest who understands will apologise, laugh, and set the decanter moving again. If the hint sails clean over his head, there is a blunter follow-up held in reserve, a solicitous enquiry as to whether his passport is in order, which usually does the trick, because by then the pun is impossible to miss.¹ At no point has anyone actually accused anyone of anything.

The real Bishop of Norwich

There was a real bishop behind the phrase, though the tradition has grown a little hazy about exactly which one. The name usually attached to it is Henry Bathurst, who was Bishop of Norwich from 1805 to 1837 and lived to the age of ninety-three.³ By his later years Bathurst was said to be very short of sight and inclined to doze at the dinner table, with the natural result that the port decanter would arrive beside him and simply stay there, sometimes joined by a second, while the old man nodded and the rest of the table went dry.

Not everyone agrees on the culprit; some accounts pin the habit on a later holder of the see, and the phrase’s exact origin cannot be proved.³ But an elderly, half-blind bishop who kept falling asleep over the decanter is too good an explanation to give up, and it is Bathurst’s name that the custom has kept.

Why port, and why a decanter

The ritual attaches to port for reasons of both practicality and custom. Vintage port throws a heavy sediment as it ages, so it is decanted off its lees into a clean glass vessel before serving — which is why the port on the table is almost always in a decanter rather than its bottle.⁴ That decanter, handsome and shared, became the centrepiece of the stretch of the evening after the meal proper, when the cloth was drawn and the company settled in to talk over their glasses.

Port suited that moment: a strong, sweet wine made to be sipped slowly over a long conversation rather than gulped with the food. The single decanter making its slow circuit of the table became part of the ritual of that hour, and the rules of passing grew up around it because it was the shared object everyone depended on in turn.

A code for saving face

Behind all the ceremony is a single practical aim: to keep one shared decanter moving around a crowded table, and to nudge a forgetful guest back into line without an open rebuke. That is the work the Bishop of Norwich does: correcting a man while letting him keep his dignity, and keeping the port on its way round the table.

Related dates

Wine has always come wrapped in ritual, from the temple to the dinner table. Explore what else happened on this article’s date below.

Read more

The rituals around the bottle have a history of their own: read the history of wine decanters and decanting, discover Taylor’s, a port house trading since 1692, and see how port became a British staple through trade and treaty.

References

1. On the British custom of passing the port to the left and keeping the decanter moving, the impropriety of asking for it directly, and the coded phrase “Do you know the Bishop of Norwich?” (with the follow-up about a “passport”) used to prompt a guest who has stalled it: accounts of port and dining tradition, including Taylor’s Port. ↩
2. On the commonly cited naval explanation for the leftward direction — “port” as the left side of a ship — and the caution that such origin stories are often invented after the fact: accounts of drinking and naval tradition. ↩
3. On Henry Bathurst, Bishop of Norwich (1805–1837), his great age and reputation for dozing at dinner and letting port decanters accumulate beside him, and the uncertainty over whether the phrase truly originates with him or a later bishop: histories of the tradition, including Taylor’s Port. ↩
4. On vintage port’s heavy sediment and the need to decant it off its lees before serving, and the decanter as the shared centrepiece of the after-dinner hour: standard accounts of port and decanting. ↩

Books worth reading

As an Amazon Associate, This Day in Wine History earns from qualifying purchases. Book links are affiliate links.

Port and the Douro
Richard Mayson
The standard modern history of port and the valley that makes it, from the vineyards to the decanter.

The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
A global history that sets the English love of port, and its rituals, in their long context.