“Port is all I pretend to”

Abstract

If a new commodity does not obviously solve a problem or make an aspect of life manifestly easier through its use, its popularity will depend upon a complex conjunction of events and trends with which the commodity intersects as it comes upon the market. Happily for early eighteenth-century producers, shippers and vendors of port wine, such a conjunction occurred. As we have seen, port began its life as the favored child of the Whig party and was nurtured into adolescence by a treaty that kept its cost lower than that of French wine. But fiscal favoritism could not guarantee that port would remain popular. After all, the Methuen Treaty said nothing about Spanish, German, or Italian wines, nor did it stipulate which wine or wines from Portugal were to be imported into England, and Portugal produced many different types of wine. Thus, the story of port’s rise to pre-eminence on the English market is far from straightforward. Despite its favored fiscal position and reputation as a patriotic wine among Whig consumers, port’s capture of the English market was neither uninterrupted nor inevitable. But ultimately, along with its reputation as a patriotic wine, cost, availability, and strength made port not simply the most common English tavern wine, but a symbol of middle-ranking Englishmen, precisely the group for whom port was originally intended.