Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World by Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre

Abstract

Academic monographs about commodities generally distinguish themselves from the commercial genre by offering more than entertainment for the curious. Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014) and Erika Rappaport’s A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, 2017) wielded the might of significant economic and political research within their pages, even if the footnotes were neatly stowed out of sight at the back of thick volumes. Wine achieved scholarly recognition as an agent of historical development in David Hancock’s Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (New Haven, 2009) and as a social marker in Charles Luddington’s The Politics of Wine in Britain: A New Cultural History (New York, 2013), which is mainly about fortified wines. In her study of British involvement in the production and sale of wine in its settler colonies, Regan-Lefebvre looks at unfortified wine and seeks to show how British imperial vineyards had wide-ranging implications for the future of the metropole and its colonies. Wine became imbricated in colonial claims for legitimacy abroad and within gentrifying modes of consumption at home in Britain. If wine could speak, it would name innumerable aggressive entrepreneurs whose ambitions fueled an important surge in activity outside of Continental Europe.Regan-Lefebvre’s account shows how the modern consumer’s choice of an alcoholic beverage rested on centuries of canny merchant schemes, land grabs, and exploitation of Indigenous peoples. In five initial chapters, she sketches the large framework for her study, beginning with two key assumptions: The argument for making wine rested on a vision of civilizing the frontiers of empire, constituting the very foundation of British claims to legitimacy in lands occupied by Indigenous people; the simple fact of British attachment to alcoholic drinks made wine production a potent driver of commerce. Three principal arenas of action demonstrate these points early in the game, beginning with the Dutch invasion of South Africa, British settlement of Australia, and British cultivation of New Zealand grapes. Regan-Lefebvre gives passing attention to wine in India, Cyprus, Malta, and Canada. She manages to keep every thread of argument in view, showing how wine drinking (as opposed to the consumption of just port or claret) signified an elite but significant activity with a bright, if distant future.In truth, early wines from these places failed to satisfy knowing consumers. The most important off-stage player in this book is France, supplier of the finest wines to a tiny fraction of British consumers. Readers interested in this crucial point regarding Britain will appreciate Regan-Lefebvre’s careful inclusion of tariff legislation across the centuries. The determination to avoid commercial surrender to French supremacy in wine inspired a great deal of colonial entrepreneurial swashbuckling and ambition. Over time, the most knowledgeable vineyard owners grappled with learning more about French methods.Regan-Lefebvre recognizes the arrival of widespread middle-class wine drinking in the Victorian period as a major milestone and contemplates the long arc of commercial effort that made it possible. When tariffs were removed in 1860, she points out, the boost to wine drinking was part of a larger plan of “social engineering” (95). Encouraging the working classes (two-thirds of the British population at the time) to shift from spirits and beer to wine pointed to a new era of gentility, or so the planners hoped. As part of the sociological landscape of alcohol, Regan-Lefebvre reveals the serendipitous convergences leading to broad-based off-license distribution of wine, even if debatable quality earned it the name of “plonk.” She argues that without the boost of such imports, wine drinking could not have become a distinctly British activity, let alone compete with the ubiquitous and sizable consumption of beer.Regan-Lefebvre’s final three chapters about Britain after World War II and modern consumer culture could alone have countenanced a book-length study, particularly since fluctuations in quantity and quality suggest that this period witnessed a true turn to popular wine-drinking. Yet her larger and longer framework is devoted to exposing the power and importance of economic structures. Regan-Lefebvre showcases triumphant twentieth-century capitalism carrying New World wines into a twenty-first century of global mass consumerism. The existence of “affordable and approachable” New World wines is the shared product of imperialism, capitalism, and cultural gentrification (234). This book clearly proves that good commercial wine is one of the ways that the system convinces players that the game is worth playing, another form of the people’s opium that society is loathe to lose.