"Honest Claret"

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to the many people who assisted and encouraged me while I was researching and writing this book. I was able to consult a wide range of archival material thanks to the kind courtesy and aid of librarians and archivists at the following institutions in Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, and the United States: the National Archives of Ireland; the National Library of Ireland; Park House Grangegorman Library, TU Dublin; the Library of Trinity College Dublin; Special Collections and Library Services, Boole Library, University College Cork; the Irish Architectural Archive; the Grand Lodge of Freemason's of Ireland Library; the Carlow County Library; the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland; the British Library; the Derbyshire Record Office; the Kent Archives and Local History Service; the Staffordshire Record Office; and the Winterthur Library. My thanks also to Cathal Dowd Smith, curator at Newbridge House and Malahide Castle, and to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam for permission to use the illustration on the cover of this book.

I must single out a few specific individuals for special thanks. I wish to thank Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire for inspiring my studies in food history in general, and for supporting this research in particular. I gratefully acknowledge the crucial support of my wonderful friends, Dorothy Cashman and Beverly J. Bell. I am indebted to each of them for their careful review of my manuscript and their thoughtful suggestions. I am very grateful for the timely encouragement I received from Grace Neville, Louis Cullen, Alison Fitzgerald, Rhona Richman Kenneally and Chad Ludington. I am deeply appreciative of the invaluable support I have received from the following friends: Evelyn Jones and Gerry Gaffney; the Cashman/Sheehan family; Bernard, Susan, Aoife and Shane O'Reilly; Terry O'Neill and Michael Murphy; Noel McCann; Marie-Françoise, Jeannette and Louis Ruiz; and Gilbert and Janine Miller and family. I also wish to express my thanks to ←vii | viii→Eamon Maher, Series Editor of the Reimagining Ireland series, and Anthony Mason and the staff at Peter Lang for their support.

Abbreviations

Introduction

When people think about the alcoholic drinks most closely associated with Ireland, Guinness stout, Irish whiskey, and poitín are the first to come to mind. Wine, an imported beverage that attracts high excise duties, is nevertheless the second most popular alcoholic drink in Ireland. A recent report on Ireland’s wine market states that, as of 2020, the past decade had seen excise charges on wine sales generate over 3.4 billion euros for the Irish Exchequer.¹ Today’s Irish consumers clearly enjoy wine; however, few are aware of the historical significance of wine in Ireland. Moreover, they are even less likely to know that in the Georgian era, claret – the red wine of Bordeaux – was the recognized genteel tipple by both those who could afford to drink it and those who could only aspire to do so.²

The history of food and drink is a growing area of interest for today’s media-hungry public. People have an inexhaustible appetite for magazines, books, blogs, podcasts, television series, and films that focus on the production, preparation, presentation, and critique of food and drink. Social media sources such as Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram have given rise to professional food and drink influencers. Certain companies now act as ‘influencer marketing platform[s] that help brands and influencers collaborate’.³ In short, talking or writing about food and drink has been commoditized in the twenty-first century in ways that were previously unimaginable. Books that delve into the histories of specific foods such as ←1 | 2→sugar, cod, and butter have proved popular not only with academics but also with general readers. The anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s seminal work on the history of sugar, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, first published in 1985, set the bar for subsequent studies that are not only scholarly but also accessible to non-academic readers.4

The wealth of print and visual material devoted to Ireland’s food history reflects the growing public interest in this field of research, which has developed rapidly over the past couple of decades. For example, Irish cookbooks increasingly seek to connect readers with ingredients, skills, and traditions that are new to twenty-first-century Ireland’s consumers. Darina Allen’s Irish Traditional Cooking, Colman Andrews’ The Country Cooking of Ireland, and Jp McMahon’s The Irish Cookbook are three high-profile cookbooks that thread historical context through their recipes – an approach that has been mirrored in recent televised Irish cooking programmes like TG4’s Blasta, in which food historian Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire explored traditional dishes throughout Ireland, often introducing them to local participants in the series and to Blasta’s viewers alike.⁵

Food history has burgeoned as an academic field in Ireland ever since Louis M. Cullen first delved into the history of food and diet in Ireland in the early 1980s.⁶ Gastronomy as a field of study and research in Ireland has progressed from being a discrete element of the syllabus for a primary degree in culinary arts in 1999 to forming the curricular core of a Master of Arts in Gastronomy and Food Studies programme, which was first offered by the Dublin Institute of Technology (now Technological University ←2 | 3→Dublin) in 2017.7 Since 2010, a number of PhD candidates in Ireland have successfully defended theses on a range of subjects that fall within the parameters of food studies in general, and food history in particular.⁸ The biennial Dublin Gastronomy Symposium, inaugurated in 2012, attracts a cohort of scholars and independent researchers from global destinations and highlights the contribution of Irish food studies to this stimulating field.

The highly respected and wide-ranging Reimagining Ireland series, devoted to ‘interrogat[ing] Ireland’s past and present’ through the lenses of literature, culture, and history, explores the historical and contemporary impact and role of gastronomy in Irish literature and culture in the series’ best-selling volume to date, ‘Tickling the Palate’: Gastronomy in Irish Literature and Culture (Volume 57).⁹ The success of this compilation of scholarly essays testifies to the broad appeal of topics related to food studies. As the American author and academic Darra Goldstein observes in the book’s Foreword, the strength of the collection lies not only in its overdue ‘corrective to the false impression that Irish foodways are unworthy of attention’ but also in its multidisciplinary approach to the topic of Irish gastronomy.¹⁰ Multidisciplinarity is a hallmark of the research that takes place under the rubric of Irish food studies, with current research in the field featuring in special issues of publications such as the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies/Revue Canadienne d’Études Irlandaises (CJIS/RCÉI) and ←3 | 4→Folk Life: Journal of Ethnological Studies. The strictly open-access European Journal of Food, Drink and Society is a recent Irish addition to the canon of international academic journals exclusively promoting research in food studies. The European Research Council (ERC)–funded research project, FoodCult, highlights the interdisciplinary nature of current research into early modern Ireland’s food history specifically.11

In 2015, the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) published a special issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy devoted to the topic of food and drink in Ireland.¹² Two of the fourteen essays featured in the publication focus on the topic of alcoholic beverages, and one of these articles discusses the consumption of alcohol in general across social groups in eighteenth-century Ireland. Researching Irish food history in the Georgian era over the past decade, I was aware that claret – not port – was the favoured wine in Ireland at this time. This fact piqued my interest as a historian for a number of reasons. First, Ireland’s divergence from England’s preference for port wine in the period could be viewed as anomalous because Ireland has long been portrayed – in academic and popular literature, in the media, and in the popular imagination – as taking its gastronomic cues from Britain. In addition, though recent work by Irish historians has highlighted the fact that, as in other cultural domains, indigenous traditions were influenced by cycles of both immigration and emigration throughout Ireland’s history, the myth dies hard. In terms of Irish food history, while acknowledging the similarities with the cuisine of the island’s nearest geographical neighbours, it does not follow that all outside culinary influences and tastes flowed either directly from or through Britain.¹³ As the history of wine in ←4 | 5→Ireland will show, geographic location, domination, and diaspora affected food trends and tastes in the Emerald Isle.

Second, the enduring taste for claret in Georgian Ireland contrasts sharply with the switch in allegiance that most British wine drinkers contemporaneously made from claret to port. That shift began in the late seventeenth century and moved from the middling ranks of wine drinkers up through higher ranks of society as the eighteenth century progressed. Certainly, the unfavourable tariffs placed on French wines and the very advantageous ones extended to Portuguese wines by the Methuen Treaty of 1703 offer some explanation for changing tastes in England.14 Port wine – lightly taxed in comparison to French wine – was not only significantly less expensive, but, at the time of the Wars of the Spanish Succession, it was promoted by a Francophobe Whig government as a patriotic drinking choice. On the other side of the Irish Sea, Ireland’s claret-loving parliamentarians ensured tariffs on French wines remained relatively low for most of the eighteenth century.¹⁵ Nor did Ireland’s denizens, as citizens of the kingdom of Ireland, perceive claret drinking as unpatriotic.¹⁶ However, ←5 | 6→these facts alone do not fully explain the dominance of claret as the preferred wine in Georgian Ireland.

The purpose of this book is threefold. First, it aims to explain why and how the historical preference for the red wine of Bordeaux developed in Ireland. Second, it examines why claret reached its apex of popularity amongst the island’s elite in the Georgian era. Third, it explores the diverse social meanings that were attached to this specific wine in the context of elite lives. The fact that Jonathan Swift referred to claret as ‘Irish wine’ indicates that this product of France was an integral element of elite life in Ireland in this period. A wide range of academics and scholars writing on diverse aspects of Irish history in the eighteenth century frequently allude to the relish for claret that the kingdom’s Georgian elite displayed. In an exploration of the consumption and use of alcoholic beverages across social groups in eighteenth-century Ireland, James Kelly observed that wine was ‘the alcohol of choice of the gentry and aristocracy’ and that the island’s wine drinkers ‘favoured French over Portuguese and Spanish wine, and claret over port’.17 References to the elite’s predilection for claret at this time abound in memoirs, personal correspondence, journals, and novels, underscoring the wine’s perceived necessity as an element of the group’s hospitality, sociability, commensality, status, and diet.¹⁸ It was in this period ←6 | 7→that claret became the totemic drink of the ‘Irish gentleman’. In contrast, throughout approximately the same period, port developed into the totemic drink of Britain’s male wine drinkers. Meanwhile, Madeira was the wine most closely associated with Colonial America’s gentlemen, who continued to favour it after the American Revolution and into the early nineteenth century.19

Within this context, to date, no single comprehensive academic work has been devoted exclusively to contextualizing and exploring the ←7 | 8→significance of claret in the social lives of elite wine consumers in Ireland, from the earliest persuasive evidence of wine’s consumption on the island in the early Christian era to the apogee of its use in the modern era – specifically, over the course of the long eighteenth century. This book addresses this lacuna in the historiography of Ireland’s food history. It does so by, first, charting the course of the use of wine in Ireland from as early as the mid-fifth century up to the late seventeenth century. This preliminary history underscores the prominent role that claret played in the social lives of Ireland’s eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century elite. Second, taking a biographical approach to the social life of claret as it flows through the lives of the Georgian elite highlights the discourses, practices, and materiality associated with this specific wine in the period.20 In turn, the narrative of claret that develops sheds light on its social meaning and provides insights into the lives of its consumers. In this book, those consumers, whom I broadly refer to as ‘the elite’, fall more specifically into two categories. The first of these is the small minority of predominately Anglican land-holding aristocrats, nobles, and high-ranking Anglican ecclesiastics who held most of the wealth and political power in the kingdom. The second category is more fluid, consisting of lower-ranked Anglican churchmen, members of the professional classes, successful merchants, and urban and rural gentry. The disparity in wealth among those in this second category – the wider elite – could be substantial, and many who fell within its ambit struggled to maintain their social and financial positions.

This book explores the historical significance of a specific food in liquid form, wine, within the framework of food history generally, and the field of drinking studies specifically.21 My approach to methodology is, to borrow a phrase from Simon Schama, marked by ‘shameless eclecticism’.²² It is almost impossible to pursue research in the rapidly developing fields of food history and drinking studies without gambolling from one disciplinary field to the next and drawing on a variety of methodologies. Working within the fields of food history and drinking studies has enabled me to draw upon the theoretical and methodological rigour of scholars involved in a wide range of disciplines – from philosophy to literary criticism and from anthropology to classical studies. All of these resources, and more, have been devoted to the mining of ‘a highly condensed social fact’ – a descriptor that Arjun Appadurai applied to food generally, but, in this study, is applied to wine specifically.²³

I am particularly indebted to Deborah Toner and Mark Hailwood, whose ‘Biographies of Drink’ methodological pathway frames the approach I take in this book to explore the social meaning of claret in the lives of Ireland’s Georgian elite.²⁴ That pathway addresses the diversity of subject matter that falls under the drinking studies rubric. Rooted largely in the work of Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff, the ‘Biographies of Drink’ approach, as articulated by Toner and Hailwood, ‘mobilizes a […] framework ←9 | 10→of analysis, focused on the biographies of particular things, moments and ideas in the history of alcohol’.25 This approach led me to present the story of claret in Georgian Ireland as a cultural biography. Applying this conceit to this specific wine highlights the changing values ascribed to it over time and the diversity of its social meanings in the period. As Kopytoff observes, things, like people, must necessarily have ‘many biographies […] each of which selects some aspects of the life history [of the thing] and discards others’.²⁶ This assertion is illustrated by taking the biography of a car as an example, highlighting the fact that the physical, technical, and economic biographies of a car will each be different. Kopytoff also suggests a number of social biographies for a car, one of which ‘may concentrate on [the car’s] place in the owner family’s economy, another may relate the history of its ownership to the society’s class structure, and a third may focus on its role in the sociology of the family’s kin relations, such as loosening family ties in America or strengthening them in Africa’.²⁷ For the biography of a thing to be culturally informed – to be, in fact, a cultural biography – it is necessary to look at an object or thing ‘as a culturally constructed entity’. Societies, Kopytoff concluded, ‘[construct] objects as they construct people’.²⁸ An example of the construction Kopytoff describes is provided in Jan Paul Crielaard’s explication of a cultural biography of a modern wine:

In this example, the metaphor of biography draws our attention to ‘the accumulation of meanings’ that can be attributed to an object – in this case, a bottle of wine. Clearly, if we follow the fate of a bottled wine ←10 | 11→further, say, to a romantic dinner or as a gift to a business colleague, then its symbolic value will vary according to the nature of the ‘episodes’ that are part of its biography.30

The fundamentally ‘reconstructive and narrative’ approach of the biographical methodology discussed has helped me to interrogate the way in which a specific luxury beverage, claret, was imbued with particular meanings through its reflexive engagement with a minority social group at a specific time in Irish history.³¹ This methodological approach has also shown how following the story of claret – and the objects and activities associated with its consumption – sheds light on the everyday lives of a largely privileged minority in the Georgian era.

The book takes the form of narrative history, interpreting narrative as ‘the organization of material in a chronologically sequential order focus[ing][…]the content into a single coherent story […] with sub-plots’.³² However, I have not ignored Eric Hobsbawm’s warning about the demerits of narrative history without synthesis.³³ Finally, period literary sources have served as the main data bank for the research presented herein. In both manuscript and printed form, these invaluable troves of historical knowledge have been interpreted with a view to Gabrielle Spiegel’s conception of the ‘social logic of the text’ – specifically, a given text’s ‘social site’ has been considered in relation to ‘the social space it occupie[d][…] as a product of a particular social world’.³⁴ Evaluating text in this way was an important consideration in terms of analysing primary sources – particularly those from the long eighteenth century. This is because confessional and class bias invariably colour the social commentary and literature of the periods encompassed in the study of wine in Ireland.

Chapter 2 presents an overview of the world of Georgian Ireland’s elite, focussing on the Protestant Ascendancy. However, this social group is not considered in splendid isolation. Regarding the elite – and the non-elite – I reject the notion of ‘a kind of behavioural segregation’ in which the ←12 | 13→members of a given society ‘arbitrarily inhabit the same space but pass by each other like ships in the night’.35 The non-elite are not the focus of this book because wine was never sold cheaply enough to become a common drink amongst those who could not afford it. Nevertheless, their interactions with elite members of society – sometimes oblique, sometimes direct – occasionally bring their less-well-documented world into focus.

With Ireland’s idiosyncratic complexities in terms of both ethnicity and confessional predilection, historians have had difficulty assigning nuanced labels to social groups in the periods dealt with in Chapters 1, 2, and 3. The result is that discourses on the subject have often reverted to contrapuntal adjectival expedients, most of which were frequently subsumed under the Protestant/Catholic and Anglo-Irish/Irish headings. For instance, as Marc Caball notes, the labels applied to different ethnic groups in seventeenth-century Ireland, such as Gaelic Irish, Old English, and New English, misleadingly suggest an early modern Ireland where three ethnically circumscribed groups, respectively, exercised control ‘within specific territorial, cultural, and linguistic spheres’ scarcely ever interacting with one another.³⁶ Defining Ireland’s population exclusively in terms of confessional labels is likewise unsatisfactory; as Toby Barnard has observed of eighteenth-century Ireland, ‘[n]either Protestant nor Catholic Ireland constituted a homogenous unit’.³⁷ The historical linguistic divide poses a particular problem for historians of modern Ireland who are unable to investigate extant period sources written in the vernacular or to whom only the limited number of such resources that have been translated into English is available. Vincent Morley has pointed out that using ‘an exclusively anglophone methodology cannot fail to privilege the elite over the popular, the colonial over the native, the Protestant over the Catholic, the loyal [to the British crown] over the disaffected, the urban over the rural, and the eastern seaboard over the rest of the island’.³⁸

Another important point that Morley adverts to in relation to Irish-language sources is that they, like English language sources in the period, were generated primarily by men. He notes that ‘the creators of Irish literature in the eighteenth century were a heterogenous set of “new men” […] most of [whom] belonged to the middling sort’, most of whom were Catholic, and only ‘a handful’ were women. The apparent historical ‘paucity of women’s writing in Irish’ is perhaps, at least to some degree, a case of ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’: Gaelic manuscripts numbered amongst the devastating archival losses that occurred in 1922 when Ireland’s chief archival repository, the Public Records Office of Ireland, was destroyed, which means that only a partial record of the historical Irish-language literary canon remains in Ireland.39 In the mid-1990s, scholars suspected that even if it were true that women did not contribute much ←14 | 15→to the early Irish literary canon, that whatever they may have contributed probably was either considered unworthy of transcription or it was composed under men’s names.40 Subsequent research confirms that the record of women’s writing in early modern Ireland is ‘patchy’ in general and the product of women from elite society. In the poetry-rich literary tradition of ‘Gaelic and Gaelicised Irish society’, women figure predominately as ‘subjects, not authors’.⁴¹ The contribution of women to Ireland’s ‘“mainstream” history and literature’ appeared to gain acceptance in the early 2000s with the publication of two literary anthologies devoted to women’s writing in Ireland, from the medieval period to the modern day.⁴² Although Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha has noted the dearth of ‘extant poems and fragments of poems’ that can reasonably be attributed to Irish women prior to the seventeenth century, it is nevertheless encouraging to observe that contemporary research in this area highlights the fact that women, and not exclusively women poets, played an active role in influencing the style and form of literary and oral works in the period.⁴³

I was fortunate to find a wealth of references to wine in medieval and Tudor Ireland in the excellent English translations that I consulted. These sources suggest to me, however, that there is an untapped trove of information which could help to further develop and enrich our knowledge of Ireland’s food history that is currently only accessible to scholars with reading proficiency in Irish. Nonetheless, almost all of the literature that informs my research was generated by and for the elite, and most of it was produced by English-speaking men. However, I have remained alert to the faint whispers of the illiterate poor, and the somewhat more ←15 | 16→audible, if frequently oblique, articulations of the men and women of the labouring classes. Often these voices are filtered through the testimony of elite sources. Nevertheless, even when non-elite individuals are deprived of written forms of direct address, centuries later it is still possible to perceive glimpses of distinctive personalities through second-hand accounts of an individual’s consumption preferences – such as a maidservant’s acquisition of tea for her own use – and, occasionally, through direct quotation of non-elite sources. As the following chapters will show, one can gain unexpected insights into the lives of people from a wide cross-section of society when following the social course of a luxury product like wine.

Chapter 2 delves into the world of the elite after the conclusion of the Williamite Wars in Ireland. The Protestant interest was truly in the ascendant as the eighteenth century dawned, and its power was centred in Dublin. Improving societies, particularly the Dublin Society,44 emphasized the importance of the kingdom’s economic development.⁴⁵ Ireland’s wealthy minority set about improving their own standards of living with a vengeance, taking their cue from social peers in Europe and the Atlantic World by acquiring the luxury goods that would set the standards for Georgian elegance.⁴⁶ In terms of worldly goods and leisure pursuits, the motto for Ireland’s Ascendancy could well have been ‘and we shall all our pleasures prove’ – and prove them they did to a degree that some foreigners found astonishing.⁴⁷

Gastronomic extravagances and les arts de la table excited great interest amongst the elite as the dining room gained prominence in Ireland’s eighteenth-century grand houses. David Dickson observed of Ireland’s gentry class in this period that, as they became a distinct cultural entity, they ‘attempted to model themselves on their English counterparts […] usually with some Hibernian modification’.48 In the context of hospitality, the Anglo-Irish adopted native Gaelic standards as opposed to imposing or modifying English ones.⁴⁹ The degree to which Gaelic largesse was assimilated and emulated by the Anglo-Irish can be adduced from the often censorious commentary of English visitors. John Bush, a peevish critic, adjudged the Irish to be misguided in ‘piqu[ing] themselves much on their hospitality in all parts of the kingdom’, sourly noting his belief ‘that too much of their boasted hospitality in every province has a greater right to be denominated ostentation’.⁵⁰

Through the narrative that develops in Chapter 3, the social meaning of claret and insights into the lives of those who consumed it are revealed. After the ‘New Clarets’ of the early eighteenth century found favour with elite wine drinkers in England, their place of honour on the tables and in the cellars of the nobility in England, Ireland, and Scotland was assured.⁵¹ The origin and gastronomic and social significance of these wines is discussed in this chapter. Considering Ireland’s historical links with Bordeaux, it is not surprising that merchants based there, either natives of Ireland or people of Irish descent, were influential in the development of these luxury wines. A review of evidence from primary and secondary sources in the period highlights the pole position that claret held as a social signifier ←17 | 18→relative to other wines available in Georgian Ireland. Whether they drank in a humble inn or at the viceroy’s table at Dublin Castle, Ireland’s wine drinkers demanded quality claret. Period critiques of ‘Dublin’ and ‘Irish’ claret indicate that this demand was largely satisfied since Ireland’s reputation for fine claret in the Georgian era was still being recollected and written about late into the Victorian Age.