Drink (28 page)

Parisians were obsessed with novelty. The obsession was a side effect of living under an absolute monarch whose whims counted for more in the formation of public policy than the laws by which he was, by definition, above. Moreover, the medieval notions of showing rank through magnificence in dress persisted, and the French aristocracy distinguished themselves with theatrical and constantly changing costumes and hairstyles. Smollett found such modishness repellent and compared the Parisian ladies of quality, with their painted faces and hair stiffened by “an abominable paste of hog’s grease, tallow, and white powder,” unfavorably with the Indian chiefs of America, whose makeup he justified on the basis that it was worn to make them look frightening, instead of beautiful. The royal court was the fountainhead of every new trend, including fashions in drinking. Giacomo Casanova, the Venetian man of letters now best remembered for his philandering, provided an example of one such fad in his memoirs:

While Parisians might choose, depending on what was in fashion, between ratafia, a toxic spirit flavored with the kernels of cherries, other species of eau-de-vie, “very good small beer,” and brandy, wine was the mainstay of French drinking culture. Notwithstanding the handicaps of being weak and bad, it was plentiful and cheap. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, a “fury of planting” had taken place all over France, with more and more land being laid out to vines. The consequent surge in production had alarmed the court, which feared there would be a corresponding shortage in grain, and in 1731 the king decreed that no one could plant new vines in France without his express permission. His motive was not merely to prevent famine but also to protect the value of his own and his courtiers’ vineyards. The decree was unevenly enforced. In some regions new vines were uprooted; in others, where they had been set in the soil under the protection of the aristocracy, they were allowed to flourish, as was the case in Bordeaux.

In Bordeaux, the fury of planting was concentrated in the Médoc, whose
terroir
had a similar composition to that of established vineyards in Graves. The similarity, it was hoped, would enable the production of wines of comparable quality, which might command equal prices overseas. In the event, the hope was borne out, as is apparent in the comments of Nicolas Bidet (later cellarer to Marie Antionette), writing in 1759: “The Médoc is a canton in favor: The wine which is gathered there is very much in fashion and to the English taste. The proprietors in our Graves have looked with jealousy at the favor the Médoc wines have enjoyed during the last thirty or forty years.” The opinion of the English was all-important to the quality producers in Bordeaux. While the bulk of the region’s wines still went to Holland, the prestige vintages were aimed at the British market, whose significance was acknowledged by the French commercial council, as was its insistence on excellence and its indifference to price: “It is a generally recognized truth that in all places where the British land they make a great many purchases, raising the price of goods and merchandise and seeking out those which are the most expensive and most perfect. This method is in contrast to that of the Dutch, who spend frugally . . . and are less attentive to the quality of what they buy than to its low price.” The vintners of Bordeaux continued to shape their product to British tastes even during the numerous eighteenth-century wars with Britain, and the British continued to buy despite often punitive import duties.

The demand for Bordeaux wine in Britain derived not just from the cellars of its aristocracy and politicians, and the taverns of London, but also from Scotland, where claret was considered
the
patriotic drink, more so than whisky. When Jacobite rebels, in the first half of the eighteenth century, toasted “The king o’er the water,”
²³
their cups were usually filled with claret. This preference was celebrated in verse. Whereas, according to William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, whisky was a “duff-draff drink” that made him liable to “bark and yowff,” claret gave wings to his muse. The elevating qualities of claret were likewise applauded by the poet Allan Ramsay:

A love of Bordeaux wines and a penchant for fighting Englishmen were not the only links between Scotland and France in the eighteenth century. Both made substantial contributions to the
Enlightenment,
a coherent cultural movement, whose aim was to provide secular explanations, and scientific solutions, to issues ranging from the place of man in creation to the efficient manufacture of needles. It had been born in England in the second half of the seventeenth century. In the space of forty years the English had killed one king, dethroned another, and experimented with republicanism, before settling on a constitutional monarchy with an impartial legal system and a free press. The various forms of government, and interim anarchy, had resulted in a secular reformation. British thinkers examined the nature of the pact between rulers and their subjects and, while they were at it, the relationship between humanity and God. They concluded that the universe was governed by mechanical principles, and that society should be run on rational ones.

The practical influence of the Enlightenment movement was evident in science, health, education, and agriculture. In all four areas there were consequences for the production of alcoholic drinks and for the culture of drinking. Science was of obvious benefit to the art of brewing, caveat that brewers were a superstitious lot and slow to take advantage of innovations that might assist them in their trade. Although control of temperature is vital to the brewing process, few manufacturers used the newly invented thermometer to help them to improve the consistency of their product. When, for example, an enlightened Hampshire brewer advised Samuel Whitbread, the largest brewer in London, that thermometers were useful, and Whitbread suggested to his directors that they invest in one, he was told to “go home and not engage in such visionary pursuits.” However, and despite their disdain for science, the brewers were natural aficionados of Adam Smith and his new discipline of
oeconomics,
and when their technical competitors gained market share with better and more reliable brews, they reconfigured their breweries and their methods.

Breweries also served as laboratories for those in love with progress. In 1771, the philosopher, chemist, and dissenting clergyman Joseph Priestley conducted experiments in a brewhouse in Leeds, whose aim was to isolate the gas given off in fermentation. He succeeded and called it
fixed air
.
²⁴
Further research revealed that the gas was soluble in water, to which it imparted fizz and a faintly acidic taste. After testing the resulting beverage on his friends, who declared themselves enchanted, he wrote a paper,
Impregnating Water with Fixed Air
(1772), which set out a process for making soda water, and suggested that it might be used onboard ships to fight scurvy. Priestley also noted that other liquors might likewise be improved by impregnation with fixed air, thus establishing the basis for artificially carbonated drinks.

Advances in medicine during the Enlightenment era resulted in a diminished role for alcohol in the field of health. The four great London teaching hospitals were established during the latter years of the gin craze, and much of their work involved curing people from booze rather than with it. The folk remedies that had relied on alcohol as a vehicle to distribute various herbal and animal essences through the bodies of patients were consigned to the dustbin of history. The hospitals, however, still considered both beer and wine to have useful therapeutic properties, and provided them to their patients in order to help them to rebuild their strength. Similarly, doctors still prescribed drink to patients for a variety of ailments. When, for instance, the Scottish philosopher David Hume had a nervous breakdown, the prognosis of his doctor was that he had “fairly got the Disease of the Learned,” and he was put on a diet of claret and told to take some exercise in order to cure himself.

Medicine also peered into the state of drunkenness. Surely this condition was as susceptible to a scientific explanation as had been blindness or the circulation of the blood? A number of confident theses were advanced. The definition in Ephraim Chambers’s
Cyclopaedia
(1728), which aimed to sum up all ancient and modern learning in two volumes, may be taken as typical of the efforts of the time: “DRUNKENNESS, physically consider’d, consists in a praeternatural Compression of the Brain, and a Discomposure of its Fibres, occasioned by the fumes, or spirituous Parts of Liquors.” The definition was followed by a description of the mechanics of intoxication: As soon as it had slid down the drinker’s throat, liquor underwent “a Kind of Effervescence” in the stomach, whereupon its “finer parts” shot “through the Veins to the Brain,” or were “convey’d through the Veins to the Heart,” and thereafter to the brain via the arteries. Moreover, not every kind of liquor was capable of making people drunk. Only those beverages with an excess of sulphur might discompose the drinker. Clearly, there was still progress to be made in unlocking the secrets of Bacchus.

The issue of education attracted the attention of some of the finest minds of the Enlightenment. If children were not to be indoctrinated via catechism and similar forms of superstition and prejudice, then what should they learn and how should they be taught? Should they be allowed to drink? The last question was answered in the affirmative by John Locke’s
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
(1693), perhaps the most influential work on the subject for much of the eighteenth century. According to Locke, there was to be no platonic minimum drinking age. Children should be given small beer, but not between meals, indeed only with food, as soon as they could walk. Parents were, however, warned that their offspring should “seldom, if ever, taste any wine or strong drink . . . but when they need it as a cordial, and the doctor prescribes it.” They were also advised to watch their servants, for “those mean sort of people, placing a great part of their happiness in strong drink, are always forward to make court to my young master by offering him that which they love best themselves: and finding themselves made merry by it, they foolishly think ’twill do the child no harm. This you are carefully to have your eye upon, and restrain with all the skill and industry you can, there being nothing that lays a surer foundation of mischief, both to body and mind, than children’s being us’d to strong drink.”

Whereas enlightened educational methods preserved the ancient British habit of giving alcohol to children, when the same spirit of improvement was applied to agriculture, it had a negative impact on traditional drinking practices. Nature was perceived of as a resource “for the being and service and contemplation of man,” and the Enlightened farmer was “like a god on earth” who “commands this species of animal to live and that to die.” Numerous technical manuals, such as
The Gentleman Farmer; Being an Attempt to Improve Agriculture by Subjecting It to the Test of Rational Principles,
by the Scottish Lord Kames (1776), were published, and with the assistance of the Enclosure Acts, vast quantities of common lands were rationalized and improved, displacing large numbers of common people. Many rural settlements were turned into pasture or sown with grain. Crofts and houses were abandoned, gardens and village greens were plowed under. With them went numerous rustic alehouses, some of which had existed since the days of
Piers Plowman,
and each of which had been the secular heart of its community. A variety of pastoral drinking practices perished with the alehouses, and the demise of both was lamented by Oliver Goldsmith in his poem “The Deserted Village” (1770). The village of the title had an alehouse, whose ruin Goldsmith brings back to life, in order to show what had been lost:

Subsequent stanzas highlighted the social cost to the little community, and the local traditions that had perished with the building itself:

Perhaps the most important influence on British drinking habits during the rush to modernize, secularize, and improve in general was the rise of a beverage that had been associated for millennia past with enlightenment, albeit in Asia. The drink in question was tea, which seemed to possess all the qualities European philosophers most admired: It was both refreshing and stimulating, yet too much of it did not render its drinker tongue-tied and insensible. Tea had been introducedto Europe by the Dutch, who had started drinking it in the 1660s, shortly after they had displaced the Portuguese from their Asian possessions. At first it was an expensive and exotic beverage, which only the very rich could drink. However, increasing trade with the Far East soon brought down the price sufficiently for its use to spread. Those who could afford tea drank it in prodigious quantities. They were urged on by their doctors, who blessed the infusion with medicinal properties. Dr. Cornelis Bontekoe of Amsterdam prescribed a minimum of eight to ten cups each day to his patients and advised them that if they wished to go further, “fifty to two hundred cups” were “perfectly reasonable.” Unsurprisingly, it earned the reputation of being a diuretic: