WINE OF THE TIMES

What was it like to be a wine lover 200 years ago?

- CHARLIE LEARY

A dinner scene in HG Wells’ The Time Machine depicts the sombre Time Traveller making ‘a motion towards the wine’. Offered ‘a glass of Champagne’, he drinks. ‘It seemed to do him good,’ writes Wells, ‘and the ghost of his old smile flickered across his face.’ Boarding the time machine to Wells’ 19th-century Britain, what would today’s wine lover encounter? And would it make you smile?

Innovations of the 19th century included bottles instead of casks, wine available at the grocer’s shop (in addition to the wine merchant), and expanding opportunities for women to partake in wine tasting amid polite society. Overall, wine quality improved, and some trends seem uncannily familiar, such as the natural wine movement, investing in wine, and steadily increasing diversity of wine styles, with myriad food pairings. So, was the world of wine really so different in the 19th century?

GROCERY, WINE & WOMEN 

…In many ways, yes. Popping into the equivalent of Tesco or Sainsbury’s to buy a few bottles alongside some bread and cheese wasn’t so easy. Shopping involved visiting ‘the baker, the grocer, the wine merchant over the way’, according to the 1861 Temple Bar: A London Magazine for Town and Country Readers. In fact, the latest fad of allowing grocers to sell individual bottles of wine provoked great controversy in 1870s Britain. ‘This retail sale of wine is opposed,’ noted one commentary, ‘by the wine merchants and by the publicans’ afraid of losing business, but not only that.