“What’s become of rich Burdeaux claret, who knows?”

Abstract

The embargo on French wines that was passed by an angry Parliament in 1678 was repealed in 1685, but another embargo on French goods was imposed from 1689 to 1697, during the course of an actual war against France. Both of these embargoes, along with a series of tariff hikes meant to burden French wine, ultimately caused wines from Spain, and to a lesser degree Portugal, to replace claret as the Englishman’s “common draught” by the turn of the eighteenth century. In other words, contrary to popular wine lore, claret’s decline and port’s rise on the English market occurred before, not because of, the so-called Methuen Treaty with Portugal in 1703. But if the popular turn away from claret and the rise of Iberian wines were the most noticeable result of the politics of wine in the two decades following the Exclusion Crisis, it should not blind us to an equally dramatic development, and that is the prevalence of fraud in many forms.