The Rest Is History - 289: Drink

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

For a festive special, Tom and Dominic are joined by author and alcohol historian Henry Jeffreys to discuss some Christmassy tipples, from sherry to port, champagne to clairet. Plus, a discussion on why certain drinks revealed your political leanings, and how one Shropshire gentleman set his furniture on fire trying to cure his hiccups after one too many bottles of wine... Read Henry Jeffreys book Empire of Booze now, available here. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. To the Mall and the Park, where we love till tis dark, then sparkling champagne puts an end to their rain, it quickly recovers, poor languishing lovers, makes us frolic and gay, and drowns all sorrow. But alas, we relapse again on the morrow. So that, Tom, is Sir George Etheridge's comedy, The Man of Mode, in 1676.

And as you will know, that is the first mention of sparkling champagne in all literature. And champagne is very much on our minds, isn't it? It is. Both because of where we are and because of when this is going out. So it's Boxing Day, if you're listening to this when it's come out, and the festive season stretches ahead. We have New Year's Eve, Hogmanay approaching. And so we thought it would be fun to look at the history of the drinks

that we particularly associate with the festive period. And Dominic, as you said, we have come to a special location so we are not talking at each other down screens are we we are literally facing each other i'm staring into your gorgeous face it's it's actually tom is a lot he's he's he's not as he appears on screens he's a lot less attractive in the flesh i have to say even more beautiful so we we've come to Berry Brothers, which was set up in 1698, I think originally as a kind of general store and is now... You were going to say a coffee shop until you were told off. That is what the Bodleian told me, but apparently it was a general store.

And it's in the heart of St. James's Clubland. So, Dominic, it's just opposite my club. Your club. Yeah, which is why I'm here in a suit. But we have a very special guest. And so the reason why when you read that out, you said that I would have read it too, is because both of us have been reading an absolutely brilliant book on the history of alcohol, which is written by Henry Jeffries.

And Henry is with us here in Berry Brothers. In fact, Henry, you suggested this as the location. Yeah, well, it's the perfect place to talk about the history of booze. And your book, Empire of Booze. I'll just read a quick couple of sentences from it. The country with the greatest influence on wine and drink in general wasn't France, Germany, or even Australia. It was Britain. Without the British influence, few of our favourite wines would even be in existence. And Dominic, we're a very patriotic podcast, aren't we?

We're very patriotic. We're the people's podcast. But we're also very much a British podcast. And so it's absolutely brilliant, Henry, that you have given us the excuse to talk about the history of alcohol and focus it very much on Britain. So could just begin, Dominic mentioned champagne as perhaps the kind of paradigmatic drink that people at Christmas use to toast the festive season. In what possible way could champagne be considered a British drink, bearing in mind that champagne is in France? Yes, it's a bit of a leap, isn't it? But in order to keep bubbles in a bottle, you need a very strong bottle,

because the pressure is huge. And bottles previously would have been like a decanter so if you, they would break very easily, they were very fragile. But in 1630 a scientist, a polymath a rogue called Sir Kenan Digby

invented or probably invented a strong glass bottle and we don't really need to go into detail about how he did that. We're not a glass-making podcast. We are a podcast that's done the gunpowder plot, however. And so he was the son of one of the conspirators, wasn't he? He was, yeah.

His father was a Catholic conspirator. So he was sort of disgraced during the Civil War time. So he had this wonderful career travelling around Europe. I think he was propositioned by marie de medici or so he claimed in his memoirs but he was also a a scientist and used to correspond with galileo and you know all the kind of big night big names at the time and he was a founder member of the royal society and he experimented with glass and one of the things that he he did was come up with a new type of furnace that could make glass much much stronger so he invented so when we think of a bottle which

is something quite strong that can hold wine or whatever you want in it we have sir ken and digby to thank for that and then so he and other scientists at the time were experimenting with making things fizz so if you think of um wine when when it ferments, it fizzes and all the carbon dioxide sort of dissipates. But if you can control that fermentation in a strong bottle and cork it, then the carbon dioxide gets dissolved into the liquid. And then you open it, voila, something very similar to champagne. So before Cam D camden b and he develops this wines were not fizzy wines would have been accidentally fizzy so that would have been kind of spoiled it would have been considered a fault so if your your barrel of champagne which

would have been a wine at the time so it's a wooden barrel a wooden barrel we would turn up and it might still be fermenting and it might have been shipped when it was very, very cold. It would stop fermenting, and then it might warm up in March, April, and it would start fermenting again. So there would be a slight fizz, what the French call pétillant, but at proper bubbles like champagne, you wouldn't have been able to do that. So the French, if they were listening to it, I mean, obviously we did once have millions of French listeners,

but we've driven them away with our Francophobia. But they would say Dom Perignon, when they invented fizzing champagne. Isn't that their claim? Yes. But you don't believe that's true? It's a complete myth. It was something invented by Moët et Chandon as a marketing tool. He did make champagne.

So when is Dom Perignon? He's after Kenan Digby. He is 18th century okay so he's a real johnny come lately he was a bit of a johnny but he would have made champagne and he was very important in the history of champagne he isolated great varieties of chardonnay pinot and made very good wine apparently but he would have not wanted fizz that would have been a fault to him all the stuff about icy stars is a 19th century adventure so the fizz are we responsible for the fizz as well the british

we are responsible for applying scientific rigor to making things fizzy before it would have been a very haphazard event yeah um and in fact over here it was mainly cider makers who were doing it so there were all these early members of the royal over here it was mainly cider makers who were doing it so there were all these early members of the royal society who were west country cider makers i love that i love them by getting kind of trashed on cider in the royal academy exactly it's so unexpected and giving and giving papers to the royal academy about sparkling cider whilst whilst off their heads on 10 cider um so there was a very brief flowering in England of wine style ciders.

So this was due to a kind of war with the French. And the idea was that cider would replace imported wine. So it was a very kind of, you know, we don't need the French anymore because we've got cider, but it never really took off. So these kind of proto champagne ciders died out, but the technology then crossed the channel

and the French started doing it. And then, you know, I hate to say it, but they actually did it better. And they turned it into a process. They turned it into a sort of semi-industrial process. But the British remain kind of obsessed by champagne. I mean, we've always been, what, the largest market for champagne?

Until very recently, we were the largest export market for champagne. And it was created for british tastes so at one point champagne would have been sweet and it would have been for the russian court who liked everything very very sweet and then with the sort of rise of the middle class in england in the sort of 19th century a taste for these gastronomic champagnes ones that you would have with food um brute dry champagne that was created for the english market and is that in your book i mean you start with champagne don't you as we've started the podcast and um it is sort of symbolic of the general trend because you talk about i mean the argument is that britain affects the booze trade because britain is the great consumer i

guess you have this wonderful line that, you know, a British wine merchant had access to more varieties of wine than the King of France did. Because in France, people just drank locally. They just drank. In fact, the French King would have probably not have had Bordeaux because Bordeaux was on a road that would have taken, it would have taken weeks to get from Bordeaux to Paris.

But from Bordeaux to paris but from bordeaux to london would have taken right taken days so it was um you know and london was the wealthiest city in the western hemisphere you say so so um britain serves as wine merchant to the world and so in a way it's a little bit like sport perhaps that um britain you know the british economy and british global reach enables britain to set standards and to kind of export its tastes around the world so that these drinks i had no idea had been shaped by british taste quite to the degree that they are yeah well these create the paradigms so sort of champagne sparkling wine claret port and they are imitated all over the world just one last question about champagne before we move on you talk in the chapter about champagne before we move on.

You talk in the chapter about champagne's prestige, about the status and therefore the high cost level. Is champagne so expensive and so prestigious merely because we think it's prestigious? In other words, is it merely a meaning that we attribute to the drink and therefore its value rather than it being particularly expensive to produce or particularly rare or any of those kinds of things yeah it's a very good question um it is more expensive to produce the the method for making the wine fizzy where you make a wine you put it in a bottle you add sugar you cork it and then you have to leave it for 18 months two years three years so that's a very capital intensive process and then you do a thing where you you open the bottle you let the the yeast out you so there's a sort of expensive industrial process um which requires a huge amount of capital but once these companies are set up then i don't think you know it is a bit more expensive per bottle to make than

a still wine but not that much more so it it is then so much about prestige and marketing stuff yeah because henry you see i mean you say you make the general point that um the intrinsic quality of the wine often is less important than the ability to ship it to to britain so you mentioned bordeaux is a kind of classic example and i suppose another um a wine that is particularly associated with the festive period is claret which comes from bordeaux and and this takes us back beyond the 17th century back to the middle ages because you know in the middle ages bordeaux was often directly under english rule so is this this is a process that is reaching right the way back to the middle ages oh right yeah yeah right right back to the middle ages bordeaux though sort of

medieval bordeaux would be very different to bordeaux that came later it would have been very pale in color it would have been more like a very dark rose so these are the kind of what the thin potations that shakespeare talks about yes claret isaret, which means a sort of, you can still buy it in Bordeaux. It's a dark rosé. So, and it would have been, it would have been like a sort of plonk. You know, it would have been shipped over and then you drank it as quickly as possible because it didn't, it would have turned to vinegar. Right. In about six months.

So claret became the claret we know in the 17th century. It became a sort of totally different thing. And is that because of Kellogg Bigby's bottles? I think partly to do with the bottles, but it would have been shipped in cask. So it could have been bottled in London, but most of the time it would have been sold in cask. And there was a chap called Arnaud de Ponta

from Chateau Aubri obrien which is a very famous bordeaux chateau and he created this new kind of wine that would sell for two or three times the price of normal wine in in london so it'd be made from very ripe grapes he'd have treated them very very carefully only picked because previously all the grapes would have gone in to make this sort of rose wine and he just picked the the best of black ones to make this very dark wine aged in new barrels be sent over to london and this is what peeps tried when he said it has a very particular taste but again is is this partly it's not just about the quality of the wine is it also about the marketing oh no god yeah yeah i mean it would have a much, much more expensive wine to make because he would have discarded grapes. He would have only used the best ones to make something not dissimilar to modern-day Bordeaux.

But yes, it was the marketing. It was also they set up a tavern in the city of London. You know, it would have all been about reaching the rich customers of London. So is it 17th century, are we saying, when Claret, as we know it, basically originated, 17th, 18th century? Yeah, it would have been sort of Restoration London peeps sort of time. So it's all Restoration London. It's all kind of massive lads going around getting drunk on champagne and Claret and stuff.

It would have been a wonderful time to be alive. If the dentistry was better. Yeah, and you didn't own a shop in the middle of the city of london obviously that would be bad but with wardo it's an interesting one because um you have wine you have the merchants in the city is that right the work the the people actually in the city who are often british or they're english speaking yeah and then you have the producers in the you know in the countryside who are french um now with champagne which we already talked about a lot of the names are german yes so it's the hide six and so on yeah exactly so with bordeaux why is it that it

didn't then go the way of portugal where you know you buy a bottle of coburn's or graham's or whatever why don't you buy a bottle of graham's from Bordeaux why did the merchants because the merchants must have lost control today at some yes well they they I mean they I wouldn't say they lost control because a lot of them controlled the trade right up until the 1970s you had like Nathaniel Johnston you had the Bartons and stuff but the the names of the Chateau became sort of brand names. So you'd have, you know, if you were a prosperous lawyer in 18th, 19th century Bordeaux, the Medoc, which is the famous bit where most of the wines come from. That's the left bank.

Left bank, yeah, just north of the city. And that had been drained by Dutch merchants, Dutch engineers in the 18th century. So it's very flat and sort of gravelly and not very pretty. And you would have all this speculative vine planting by these lawyers with a bit of money. And then they would build these ridiculous fairy tale chateaux as a way of saying, you know, we need a lot. Yeah, it's like the ones on the Loire, but totally bogus.

But totally bogus. Almost like the ones you get in China these days. Yeah. And these became brands. So you had, you know, you had, Latour and stuff are older, but like Pichon, Longville, that sort of stuff, the pictures of the Chateau became famous.

Whereas in Burgundy, for example, if you look at old bottles here, they'll just say, for Burgundy, they'll just say Bone, you know, just the name of where it comes from. Whereas with the Claret, it's got the name of the Chateau so the chateau when you say old bottles you don't mean the kind of old bottles that tom and i would buy forget to throw out well they've got sort of 19th century bottles here at berry brothers and the bordeaux ones have the name of a specific

chateau on right whereas the um the burgundy ones just have the name of where it comes from and then it would have been the merchant would have brought the wine and marketed it so even though the merchants were very powerful in bordeaux and used to do all kinds of weird stuff to the wine so they would ship it in barrel and then they would beef it up with port and brandy and stuff for for london tastes because the english were thought not to have very subtle tastes, it would then be sold by the brand name of the Chateau. So just on the English tastes, since you mentioned that, so with champagne, you said that the English basically dictated the

dryness of it, which is actually quite counter to our general instinct, which seems to have been British-liked things, very sweet and very... So, in other words, presumably people looked on the British in the 18th and 19th century, much as we in the old world now look at Americans with regard to that. That's exactly it. They like everything over-flavoured, massively sugary, too strong, and so they've lost all kind of subtlety.

I mean, is that true generally, British tastes, would you say, in the early history of booze? Yes. No, I would say that's entirely true. They used to make sherry and stuff. They would just fill it full of sweet wines and things. And they thought that's what they like in cold climates. But also there were connoisseurs as well. There were people who were – there was a fashion for dry champagne,

which sort of superseded the more robust tastes that other English people were. And Henry, on the topic of fashion, the other fascinating thing that I learned was that the taste for claret has a political dimension. It does. Yes, yes. No, it's, it was a tradition wine would have come from France. And the Stuarts were aligned with the French. And then when they were deposed, you know, the Glorious Revolution, William III and stuff, it became much harder to get hold of Claret.

Lots of duty put on Claret. And there's other things like war with the Dutch as well, who shipped a lot of wine from Bordeaux. So people went to Portugal instead, oldest ally, you know, all that kind of stuff for the wine. So people who supported the Hanoverians, you know, the sort of people who came after William III, would have enthusiastically drunk port.

Whereas the people, the Jacobites. King over the water. Yeah, the king over the water, who pined for the Stuart king, would drink claret. And the Scotsots you know that would in particular would um would drink claret as a way of the scottsdale's claret drinkers did you know i didn't do that well they have their old alliance yes of course they do and it was a way of saying you know we we don't believe in the hanoverians we we want the stewards back so

we're going to drink we're going to drink claret so so um if you've got a bottle of claret you're a tory uh and if you've got a bottle of port you have then you're a wig and dominic yes ironically yeah you're a huge enthusiast for port aren't you i like you've done two episodes so we did one on yeah the the methu in treaty which just remind just remind us what the Methuen Treaty is. So the Methuen Treaty is, I think, 1703, isn't it, Henry? John Methuen, he goes to Portugal and they negotiate a treaty. And the deal basically is, so this is during, I mean, I think at the time it's the War of the Spanish Succession. I should say, actually, Tom, we are actually drinking port right now.

Yes. If you're wondering. Very nice Grahams 30-year-old. Yes, courtesy of henry very generous courtesy of graham's so if the if the standard of questioning i was about to say over the slips over the program you'll know why so yes the sport of the spanish succession um constant sort of trade blockages and embargoes and things with the french uh portugal is henry as you said is our oldest ally we did four episodes on portugal And then we did another, we actually done five episodes on Portugal this year, Tom.

Yeah. But the Matthew and Trudy, I think that, as I remember, the deal was that they would be, the duty would be a third less on Portuguese wines than it would be. And so it massively boosted the Portuguese wine trade. The wine trade, yeah. Exactly. So I love the story of ports because it's one in which history is so obviously uppermost. And so you mentioned the British merchants who settle in northern Portugal. And Dominic Henry, in his book, The Empire of Booze, has this comment.

The British didn't mix with the Portuguese and were mocked for their terrible grasp of the local language which even the portuguese admit is extremely hard to pronounce well tom so you're saying that to make excuses for your own very poor well they have a term for us um bebado english which means english drunk english drunk yeah well it's over he gets english drunk in this podcast there's more uh did you see um this chap john mitan talking of english drunks did you see about him jack mitten yeah yeah i know all about him okay so the prize for like me the prize for rowdiest port drinker goes to a shop shops the squire called john mitten i know him well who drank between four and six bottles for most of his adult life he once set fire to his night shirt in order to cure hiccups he rode a bear it's a standard behavior isn't he yeah he did he rode a bear

and he took when he went to either oxford or cambridge he took 2 000 bottles of port with him yeah and he didn't take a degree and he didn't and he left all his wine he drank all his wine so so a role model hero a role a great man and a great representative of shropshire man shropshire better i would say than Charles Darwin Tom who you bought everybody with a few weeks ago um so Henry listen let's talk about port Portuguese wine I learned to my horror from your book was regarded as a bit rustic and a bit rubbish until what the 18th century or even then was it regarded as a little bit down market yeah well I mean the problem was is a lot of the stuff that was coming over to England

would have been quite similar to, it would have been from the Vino Verdi region, but you must have had Vino Verdi, very light, delicious white wine. Yeah. They also make a red wine, which isn't quite so delicious. It's a bit too light for me, Vino Verdi, if I'm completely honest with you.

You're a port drinker, you know? Yeah. A wig. And it would have been transported in goat skins or pig skins or something. And it wasn't, you know, it was a local wine. It shouldn't really have been shipped. And it would arrive in England

and it wouldn't be very nice. And sometimes they would beef it up with brandy, which probably made it even worse. So something like what we think of as port is this sort of beautifully smooth, rich, didn't really exist yet um and it was only when they started going up country where it was much much hotter and the grapes were yet much riper

then they would come back and they would buy the wine from the local growers but it would be a much stronger that's more stable while the duro valleys even if you have a table wine from the duro it's 14 15 you know thick thick wine henry what i also learned from your book was that the, is it the Marquis de Pombo? I think he's a bit of a friend of the show, isn't he? He's a friend of the show. Yeah. So very robust in his approach. He's very robust.

He rebuilt Lisbon after the earthquake. Yeah. So 18th century. Very nice. Yeah. He's kind of the power behind the throne in the mid 18th century. And that he is the person who demarcates the boundaries of the port growing region and that the French didn't do that with their wine regions until the 1930s.

He also forbade the planting of elderflower bushes because the elderberries would be used to beef up the colour of the wine, which was not good. So you weren't allowed to plant them, pain of death. So a fine political leader. No, he was a great man. Yeah. Very wise.

Very sage. So the port lodgers are all still there. They're English names, aren't they? Sandeman's tailors. So Sandeman logo, he wears a Portuguese student's cloak and a Spanish sombrero. Yes. That's sort of the Don, is it? That's the Don, yeah.

The Don. There is a George Sandeman who I met, who is very, very charming, speaks Spanish, English, Portuguese. But the company is now owned by a Portuguese company, so it's not a family business anymore. But are there any of, so those houses, they're what, 18th century, some of those? Yeah. And are they, are there any of them still in the family? Taylor's still has family members. Taylor, Fladgate, Yateman, there are still, are there any of them still in the family? Taylor's still has family members. Taylor, Fladgate, Yateman, there are still family members there.

Graham's is now owned by the Symington family, who are considered the Johnny Conn-latelys of the world. They're British. They're British, yeah. They come over in the 19th century. Oh, God. It's a part of the news. But they bought Graham's in 1970,

and they are sort of a force in the industry right right so I think I think we should take a break at this point charge our glasses

and then when we come back we should look at the other kind of classic British influenced Hispanic Christmas drink which is sherry

so we'll be back with sherry I'm Marina Hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack that is sir john fullstaff in shakespeare's henry the fourth plays and we've already mentioned henry that thin potations um shakespeare would have been the wines from bordeaux the sack which fullstaff goes on and on and on about is the drink that we call sherry is that right yes largely it's almost like shakespeare was being sponsored by the market isn't it because it's it's easily the most mentioned drink in his in his in his plays does that have something to do with the fact that um again as i learned from your book that francis drake sacked cadiz and as it were and um and took away a million barrels of sherry.

I think that, I mean, that's... That seems a lot. There's a true story, but I think it was already a very popular drink, and I think that probably just made it even more popular. But I think at one point, London was awash with stolen sherry. But sack wouldn't have just been sherry. Sack was a sort of generic term for wine. So you'd have canaryack from the Canary Islands.

So it would have just been a sort of strong, sweet wine from Spain, really. So it could have come from a lot of variety of places. Could be from Jerez, could be from Canary Islands. But that's where the name comes from, isn't it? Well, Sherry comes from Jerez. Sack probably comes from sacar, meaning to draw out in Spanish, but no one is quite sure where the word comes from. So people were drinking an ancestor of sherry in Shakespeare's time. So we're talking the late 16th, early 17th century.

But is it what we would call sherry? It's not yet. Is it fortified? No. It wouldn't have been fortified and it would have been young as well. So sherry, as we know it, comes from ageing wine for a long time and blending it in a thing called a Solera system. So you have this aged, consistent product. This would have just been wine that would have been from a vintage, would have been sweetened probably with raisined wine, so dried berry wine. So you can say that it's sherry simply because it comes from that region.

It's purely based on the region. It's not what we would think of as sherry. It would have been a mixture of various wines from that part of the world. So when does it start to become what we would recognise as sherry? Probably in the 18th century when they start blending between vintages. So people start, apparently it's to do with, I can't remember which war it is, but there are lots of stocks that just

sit there in Jerez and don't get sold. And then when they are sold, people get a taste for these old wines. And so in order to, obviously there's a finite supply. So they start blending the young wines with the old wines and gradually that becomes a systematic thing.

It's called a solera, which is barrels. Yeah, it's a pyramid of barrels. A pyramid of barrels is the best way to think about it. Young wine at the top, old wine at the bottom. You take off from the bottom, you add to the top, so that the wine you take off is a mixture of old and young wines. Some of them very, very old. And the people who are doing this are British or Spanish? Or who's doing it?

And in correspondence to whose tastes? Spanish or British tastes? Well, it wouldn't just be English taste or British taste. It would also be American tastes, French taste, because sherry was sort of, you know, pretty big all over the place. Most of the merchants were actually Spanish spanish or there were some french ones the domic one of the big names was french lustau another one was french most of them there weren't that many english ones apart from there's gonzalez bias and then there's who's i know there were

there were some individuals osborne which is when you see those bulls yes dotted around that's on the spanish landscape but they've been there so long that they'd become hispanophile if you will so they were all sport so the that's the thing is that in in in jerez they went native right in a way that they didn't in portugal in porto so so something that they have in common well i had always imagined before reading your book that the fortification so the adding of i don't know brandy let's say brandy yeah um was because of transport because so i had sort of read somewhere a few years ago oh because of the war of the spanish succession blah blah blah people added they fortified portuguese wine and they invented port for the british and i thought oh what a tremendous fact but it sounds

like from the examples of sherry and port that you give that the fortification is actually not to do with the transport or anything it's to do with that debased vulgar taste vulgar tastes is that is that right yeah i mean it's quite hard to know exactly when and why fortification became routine people say it's to make a you know a product that but then a wine, if it's well-made and strong enough, will travel without fortification. There's no need to fortify. People think, sort of jumping ahead to Madeira, there are letters from English merchants saying,

send some more of that strong stuff. So apparently, due to various wars, people started distilling wine because they had too much of it. So you had brandy that they didn't really know what to do with. So they started sticking it, beefing up the wine. I have a theory which goes back to a podcast that went out a few weeks ago. Because we did a podcast about roast beef, didn't we, Tom? We did, yes.

And there was always this sort of sense in the 18th century that English cooking was more robust and more simple. You know, it was kind of… Honest. But it was sort of, you'd have your roast beef, but you'd have very, very strong mustard or horseradish with it, much stronger than the… Much more pungent than the more complicated, sophisticated sauces they had in France or Italy. And I'm wondering whether people wanted very sort of robust, earthy, rich, big drinks. You're saying sherry is John Bull's tipple? Yes, I'm saying if you drink port or sherry now,

you can pat yourself on the back and say, Beef and Liberty, Rafa Dr. Johnson, all this sort of stuff, which I do all the time anyway, actually. I know you do. Is that possible? Yeah, there might be something in there. And also you could sort of link it with the way that English people took to Indian food so much,

because it was just, we like big, punchy, spicy flavours. I mean, you say that by the middle of the 19th century, roughly 40% of the wine drunk in Britain is sherry. And is that sherry as we would recognise it now? That would have been not dissimilar to your sort of Harvey's Bristol cream. So in what proportion are they drinking it? I mean... They would have drunk it just your sort of Harvey's Bristol cream. So in what proportion are they drinking it? I mean... They would have drunk it just to sort of neat.

They would have had it, you know, like you'd go to someone's house and rather than tea or coffee, you might just be off to a show. Because today, I mean, you kind of have a... Oh, have a sherry, a little cheeky sherry, and then you move on to something else. Tom, do you have a cheeky Harvey's Bristol cream every now and again? No, I have a dry sherry. I have a Fino. A Fino, yeah.

And what's the one that tastes like Christmas pudding? Pedro Jimenez? Yeah, Pedro Jimenez. Oh, that is... I mean, that's a Patriot's drink, isn't it? I like Pedro Jimenez, but Henry's just laughing

and not showing the respect that I think... No, because... Do you like Pedro Jimenez, Henry? Or do you think... I find it quite hard to drink, but in very small doses. Yeah, because in small doses, that's the thing.

I mean, you know, you might have one. I mean, you had two, but you wouldn't have more than two. But you're saying that in the Victorian period, they're just knocking it back. Bring me another bottle of Pedro Jimenez. It would have had a tiny bit of Pedro Jimenez in it. So it wouldn't be this thick and tricky. It would have been a blended sherry with a little bit of very sweet sherry in it.

You would have a decanter. And just when people came over, you would offer them a glass of sherry. Imagine Dickens drinking a lot of that. I don't see Dickens as a sherry man. I never thought Dickens was a sherry. He liked a sherry cobbler. So he liked cocktails made from sherry. Sherry cobbler.

Sherry cobbler. So just on boozing. So we've talked before about William Pitt, the younger, great friend of the rest is history yeah great foe of napoleonic france yeah and the jacobin is a great one for rolling maps up so we were very impressed by him as a three bottle man weren't we talking a man who drank three bottles of wine but the bottles were generally smaller they would be they probably would have been imperial pint bottles so they're like a pint of milk a pint of milk but but stronger

that we know full of alcohol or alcoholic milk right they probably wouldn't have been 20 like normal port they would probably been they may not have been fortified at all so they might have been 15 percent right dry wine and so you know but like having a pint of australian shiraz perhaps so henry points of those also i mean a a contemporary of Pitt's, William Wilberforce, and you say that he has this, he's a massive lad, hanging out with all the lads, all that kind of thing, and then he has this evangelical conversion and decides he's going to go off and abolish slavery.

And the marker of his kind of this pledge is that he's going to be abstemious. And he writes in his journal, from now on, I'm only going to drink six glasses of wine a day. Yeah, that's brilliant. Very abstemious. It sounds hilarious to us that this is kind of you know this is the sobriety how big is the glass i mean how how abstemious is he being and only having six glasses a day well it's hard to know isn't it but when you look at the glasses when you look at vintage port glasses they're quite little and you think of master and commander and then yes

toasting and stuff. They would have been quite... So actually, that's quite abstemious, I think, if we assume that he was having little glasses of port. That's quite healthy. And the glasses of sherry that people are having in the Victorian period. So I think of the Victorians as quite abstemious, generally. No, I don't.

Don't you? No, I think they were having sherry cobblers and blind man's buff. I mean, only if you're Scrooge in your accounting house. No, I think they drank... Buterry cobblers and blind man's buff and all that. I mean, only if you're screwed in your accounting house. No, I think they drank... But if you're off with Mr. Fezziwig. Because they used to drink just small beer. If you lived in London, that would have been rather than water.

You'd have had, you know, 3% beer. That would have just been the sort of normal thing. So beer wasn't even thought of as alcoholic. But they're not knocking back the gin like their 18th century breeders. I think there was a lot of gin. Because all those amazing gin palaces you see around London, they were all built by gin companies. Well, we mustn't talk about gin because I think we should save that for an entirely separate episode because it's such a fascinating story.

But Henry, alcohol that hasn't kind of made it through, that has gone, you know, fallen by the wayside. And I guess the one that you cite as the classic example is masala, which was apparently Nelson's favourite tipple. It was, yeah. But I don't think I've ever drunk. Have you drunk? I'm confused whether that's the same as malmsi. Malmsi is a type of Madeira. It's one made from Malvasia grape. Masala was originally created as a sort of Madeira substitute because Madeira was so popular that people used to make South African Madeira or Cyprus Madeira.

And Masala was originally sold as, well, it was sold, there was a brand called Bronte Madeira, which was named after- Which is Nelson's title that he gets given, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. So tell us exactly what Masala wine is and what the link is to Nelson

and how and why it hasn't made it through to the present day, really. Well, Masala was a type of wine that apparently dates back to Roman times called, or this is what they say, Vino Perpetuo, everlasting wine. And it would be in these huge barrels called botti, probably terrible Italian pronunciation there. And they would just be topped up. So if you were a farmer,'d have the have this sort of thing and um and it was a very very strong wine that lasted and that's what the english liked and he had a merchant called john woodhouse from liverpool and he came to masala to to trade may have been wine may have been in something else and he tried

the wine and thought i can sell this as madeira this is this is the stuff so he started buying it and then he would subject it to a bit of kind of tarting up the english market he'd add a great must you know um to sweeten it so it was more to english tastes and then nelson who was hanging around the bay of naples with lady hamilton getting up to all sorts. And he visited and he tried the wine and became quite good friends with Woodhouse. And he loved the wine and said that it should be supplied by the Royal Navy, supplied to the Royal Navy for officers. So he started buying wine from Woodhouse, what the Royal Navy started buying from Woodhouse. And it became the drink that officers drank in the Navy.

And it was just a sort of strong Madeira or sherry style sweet wine. And then other English merchants came out. There was Inghams and Whittakers and stuff. And there was this sort of brief golden age, like sort of Dallas or something, but of wine in Palermo in the 19th century. And they had balls.

And it was like the leopard and they all, you know, they had these huge palazzos. And, and if you go to Masala today, there's only one producer left now in Masala on the front, Florio, who was Italian from Calabria,

but you see the ruined Ingham and Woodhouse. Yeah. And they are massive. Yeah. And it's like two miles of harbour with these ruined essentially masala warehouses. But what went wrong? Why Sherry lasted and Port and Madeira has lasted

actually, hasn't it? Just about. It was because there was a race to the bottom, so the wines went a bit out of fashion. Whereas Sherry and madeira managed to keep their quality levels up even though the sales were declining um you know harvey's bristol cream you might mock it but it's a it's a pretty solid product whereas in masala they started doing ones that were mixed with eggs or flavored with almonds or vanilla yeah and it became something

that people just used for cooking so there's lots of italian american dishes so so is it possible is anyone making masala of the kind that nelson would have drunk i mean is it possible to experience what nelson drunk it is yes now i was very fortunate enough to stay at a hotel owned by a sort of masala historian who goes around buying up rare casks of masala and he has them all in his cellar and he took me down there and gave me some to try and these would have been a taste of the wines as they would have been before they were you know sweetened up for the british market did it fill you with a zeal for king and country after you'd drunk it um it's it's certainly there was certainly wonderful wines i wouldn't I wouldn't quite say they're the only ones.

How are you going to go to sea? So on the issue of old wines, how far back can we drink wine and think that we're drinking what people drank at the time? So in other words, there must be wines around from, I don't know,

mid 19th century or something. If I were to open one now and drink it, could I reasonably say, oh, I don't know, mid-19th century or something. If I were to open one now and drink it, could I reasonably say, oh, I'm drinking what Dickens would have tasted, let's say? Or would it have changed so much in the interim that it wouldn't be remotely what Dickens would have tasted? I mean, the only wine that would last that long, there's a few, but Madeira is the one. And Berry Brothers, I think they still sell a lot of very, very old Madeiras dating back to the 19th century.

God, I'm quite tempted to buy one. I mean, they're not as expensive as you think. So how expensive? You know, sort of £500 a bottle. Oh God, that is expensive. But considering some of them are sort of 150 years old.

But Henry, I should mention at this point that in your book you offer wines that you can buy that are not extortionate, that correspond to how you think various drinks would have tasted. And I've actually bought some of your recommendations. I bought two of your recommendations in the sherry chapter for Sadie, my wife. And so this is going out on Boxing Day. So by this time, dear listeners, we will know whether Sadie enjoyed her present or not.

So you're saying Lustau. If you buy Lustau sherry. Lustau, old India sherry, old East India sherry, is meant to be a recreation of a sweet style of sherry that would have travelled around the world on East India men. And the thing about sherry, particularly Madeira, is that they were very, very robust. And when they went through the tropics, when it got very hot,

most wines would be you know absolutely ruined but certain types of sherry and in particular madeira actually improved and one of them was one of the sherries was um lost out old india and by and large just before we move on have our tastes if we went back in time if the three of us journeyed back to 1850 or 1750. What fun that would be. What fun that would be indeed. But would the wine or the alcohol generally be much sweeter than we're used to now? Do you think? It would be sweeter and it would be less fresh. Because when we drink wine, we're used to having those wonderful fresh berry flavours like you get with a Sauvignon Blanc or a Pinot Grigio,

which almost all owe their flavours the flavors to temperature controlled fermentation so if you can keep the temperature down when when the wine is fermenting you get all those fruit flavors but in the old days you didn't have that so in spain and portugal and stuff it would get very hot when it fermented so you wouldn't get those pure fruit flavours. And people didn't understand quite as well as we do what oxygen does to a wine. So the wines would all be slightly oxidised. Well, not all of them, but your Sherries, Madeiras and stuff. So the wines would be sort of nuttier and less fresh.

So, Henry, one last drink, because we've been mainly talking about kind of festive Christmassy drinks. But of course, we've got New Year's Eve coming up. And the paradigmatic drink, particularly if you're in Scotland, that you drink New Year's Eve is whiskey. Except Dominic is pulling a face. Do people drink whiskey? Do you drink whiskey on New Year's Eve, Henry? Yes. Tom is making this claim and i just know it's true i have always drunk whiskey in new year's eve have you yeah i thought that was a thing you're maybe not the norm well maybe i'm not but it's my custom

half my podcast so i'm going to insist on it so um henry whiskey all the other drinks we've been talking about have come from the Sunkist Mediterranean. Whiskey very much doesn't. Where does it come from? How come it gets made? How does it end up becoming as popular as it has done? Yeah, it's less different to the other ones than it might at first seem. Because all the other ones were created for basically English tastes. And whisky as we know it, until very recently,

was the same, was created for English tastes. Not English, not British. No, no, no. The Scots wouldn't be making whisky for an awful long time, but it was something that stayed in Scotland. Most of it would be made illegally. You had these malt whiskies.

They would be very different to what we know as whisky today. They'd be very strongly flavoured, but they wouldn't have been aged. So they would have been almost like a sort of very strongly flavored vodka they'd be like a sort of moonshine and they generally stayed in scotland and occasionally english people would go north of the border and they would try them and they would you you have this brilliant description of that in the literature of the georgian and early victorian period it's apparent that drinking whiskey while in scotland was the

modern day equivalent of licking hallucinogenic toads while in the literature of the georgian and early victorian period it's apparent that drinking whiskey while in scotland was the modern day equivalent of licking hallucinogenic toads while in the amazon i i mean how our scottish listeners will react to three englishmen chortling at that i don't know they can't get enough of that i'm gonna be in trouble for this one but um so it was it was not something that really left scot left Scotland or even left the Highlands, these sort of proto-malt whiskeys. Right, because Burns

describes lowland whiskey as the most rascally liquor. Which, it was an industrial product. Yeah. And, you know, English people did try them

and they, you know, they did come south a bit. But, it was merchants in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Kilmarnock,

like Shivers Brothers, Johnny Walker. So who's Johnny Walker? Is he a bloke? Is he someone real? Johnny Walker of Kilmarnock. He was a shopkeeper, tea merchant. Wow. So not dissimilar to Berry Brothers.

Right. And so what they would do is they would buy Highland Whiskies, which were the high-quality ones, and they would buy Lowland Whiskies, which were the lighter, not so good quality ones. And they also sold Port, Madeira, rum. So they would have loads of barrels lying around. So they would store it in these barrels. turned this sort of quite you know this colorless liquid which we had a lot of flavor but wasn't

particularly sophisticated into something sublime and then they would they would create a consistent product which they would market under branding like john walker bells shivers brothers um but south of the border in england they drank brandy they drank cognac um and that's what you would have when you were at your gentleman's club. You'd have a brandy and soda or just a neat brandy. But then there was phylloxera, which was an aphid. Yes, which is always wiping out the vines, isn't it, in Bordeaux and so on. Exactly. Destroyed the vines in cognac.

And there was no cognac to be had. So there was a sort of panic in the gentleman's clubs of St. James'. So the sort of canny Scots merchants decided of St. James's. So the sort of canny Scots merchants decided they were going to create blends for the London market. So the Scottish blends would have been, you know, robust, powerful, peaty whiskeys that were often drunk with honey in sort of toddies. Whereas the English, they wanted lighter whiskeys that they can mix with soda for drinking in their gentlemen's clubs. So the Scottish merchants created whiskeys for the London market, which were close in flavour profile to cognac.

Crikey. So soda, you'd have whiskey and soda. I mean, people do drink whiskey and soda or brandy and soda, don't they? My grandmother's favourite drink. But soda has completely gone out of fashion, hasn't it? They're trying to bring it back. So they now call them highballs and the bar keeping fraternity are trying to bring them back.

I mean, Scottish whiskey is seen as kind of the brand leader. It's the champagne of whiskeys. Would that be, I mean, that's my perspective. Yeah,

I would say that's, you know, and especially to do with the marketing as well, because the champagne has been so brilliantly marketed and the same with Scottish whiskey. And so it's seen as part of that kind of Celts, Brigadoon,

you know, all that kind of stuff, the kind of comedy Scottishness. That sort of Walter Scott. Walter Scott. Mel Gibson. Not Mel Gibson. The kind of stuff that gets flogged on tourist shops in, you know, Prince's Street in Edinburgh.

How does that come about? How does it come to be this kind of moonshine end up coming to be marketed as part of Scotland in the way that it has done? Well, it was just a way of selling it. It was all... It's as simple as that. It's canny advertising. They sold it on Brand Scotland. there's that thing when george the fourth visited and he all got decked out in tartan yeah and it was all stage managed by by

walter scott this sort of you know and this and the sort of the cult of the highland regiments you know being screened and the royal family going to balmoral scottishness was sort of in but what about irish whiskey because the irish are also making lots of whiskey aren't they yes irish whiskey was was different because it was it was generally more robustly flavored and it was very very popular until it was actually more popular than scotch whiskey until the late 19th century so what happens it was it was pushed out well there's various reasons but basically the new blended scotch whiskeys these of light, fruity whiskey and soda whiskeys, just pushed the Irish stuff out. And the Irish stuff was seen as rather old-fashioned. It wasn't as well marketed.

It wasn't as smooth. This was how it was perceived. But at one point, Dublin was the whiskey capital of the world. There were four huge distilleries. And talking of inferior whiskeys, what's your perspective around American whiskey? Ooh, well, American whiskey is just very different because it's made out of American grains, like corn and rye is not strictly American,

but it grows very well in America. So I actually quite like American whiskey in a cocktail. So if I'm having a Manhattanhattan or an old-fashioned or something you know a nice bourbon or you wouldn't drink on his own i might yeah well whiskey's my day job so i have to i have to keep oh god you're just keeping in with the big whiskey yeah big bourbon yeah exactly see when we say i'm sure when we turn the microphones off henry will tell us what he really thinks of american drinks well but america has has basically replaced britain now it has the arbitral global drinks taste i guess well is that so is that the process then you know are we into a new phase but in other

words so much of what you you've talked about today and what you talk about in your book empire of booze is about french italian spanish producers creating products for this big, rich British market. And that defining the products. Is that now happening with the United States? Or with China? Or with China, yes. So wine being produced and the style of wine or the style of spirits changing to match those new markets. Yeah, that's a good question.

I think with America, it's already happened. Yeah, because cocktail bars, the American question um i think with america it's already happened so i think because the cocktail bars the american bar and so on so all that sort of you know jazz age cocktails the savoy all that stuff that was all america but also americans did change how wine especially how bordeaux was made so there was slightly going off topic there's a very famous american wine critic called robert parker who liked big wines yeah and the producers in bordeaux beefed up their wines to or perhaps they were changing anyway because of the climate but but there was also that is it the judgment of paris 1976 i think when they american wines beat the french wines and that seems great exactly but i think all that's already happened so i think the american influence is already

waning and what comes after that is the chinese yeah i think i think in some senses it is because a lot of whiskey companies are making whiskeys aimed at the chinese market but i'm not sure if it's about the flavor it's more about the marketing and the packaging is it i mean is there a kind of glow a kind of alcohol equivalent of global english where the distinctiveness tends to be blurred because that way you can sell it to every conceivable market no i i think you're right and everyone now makes whiskey so you can get very nice whiskey that's made in kent made in taiwan japan made in china and it's all most of it has the scotch template so it will be made often by scottish engineers using and Scottish techniques, but in Taiwan.

So, Henry, before we finish, if you could recommend for listeners one drink that would take them back to the 17th or the 18th or the 19th century that they could use to see in the new year, what would you recommend that they get? Oh, well, I just like a nice glass of port like we're having now i know it's not uh so any particular brand well we're drinking a graham's 30 year old at the moment which is aged in wood it's a tawny port it's so this is what the taste of the 18th century this would have been um well i don't know perhaps not perhaps later perhaps taste of the 19th century okay well 19 well. 19th century Portugal, Tom. See in. Fado.

Yeah. See in the political coups, revolutions. Yeah. What could be more fun? But no, but this would be drunk in a Victorian parlour, right? I mean, this is. Yeah. In England.

Yeah. You could be drinking this and chatting to Anthony Trollope. And then playing blind man's buff. Skittles, the mistress of the Duke of Cambridge. And her skin-tight riding habit. And General Gordon. What could be more fun than that? That's my dream New Year combination.

Okay. Well, Henry, thanks so much. Your book, Empire of Booze, is really, really brilliant. If you have any interest in drink or history or drink in history absolutely unmissable and you've got a new book coming out next year is that right on um uh vines in a cold climate which is about english wine and so that was my first ever job was in an english winery so i shall definitely be buying that um and we wish you all a very happy new year bye-bye thank you bye-bye

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