A Taste of Spain: Images of Rioja Wine in Britain and America (1890-1960)

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Rioja wine that we drink today was invented in the 1860s. By the late nineteenth century, it had become widely recognized as Spain’s best red wine. One way to analyze what this success meant during the first half of the twentieth century is to look to foreign accounts. This article examines the English-language narrative that was constructed about Rioja wine between 1890 and 1960. Utilizing travelogues, food and drink guides, reference books, and other texts as sources, we find that the manner in which Rioja was depicted remained fairly constant over this time span. During these seventy-odd years, it was generally recognized as Spain’s best red wine; a wine that was available to American and British consumers at a better price than Bordeaux, after which it was patterned. As Rioja came to be known and accepted as the Spanish table wine, we argue it was often also incorporated into the ways Spain and Spaniards were imagined or entwined with broader social and cultural developments. In particular, we observe that Rioja’s story was tied to perceptions of Spain’s “backwardness,” that it played a role in the Pure Foods movement as a product that was advertised as unadulterated, that it formed part of the Lost Generation’s escapism and desire to find meaning, including Ernest Hemingway’s exploration of masculinity in The Sun Also Rises, and that it was present as a middle-class commodity in 1950s and 1960s America, arguably the height of the country’s postwar preoccupation with good living.