By the close of the twelfth century, the history of wine growing in Europe was being shaped to an ever increasing extent by a combination of politics and market demands in which England played the most prominent role. Vineyards had been planted in the southern part of that country during Roman times, and as noted, further developments occurred with the establishment of monasteries.
The Domesday Book recorded in excess of 40 vineyards, and over the course of the next several centuries their numbers multiplied severalfold. Most, however, seem to have been quite small, and the wine they produced never achieved any esteem. It was thin and acidic and used primarily for sacramental purposes. Thus the English had to begin looking elsewhere for the wine they were consuming in ever larger volumes. The future of wine growing in England was further dimmed by the advancing cold of the Little Ice Age. By the seventeenth century, all the English vineyards had fallen into disuse.
Much of the wine the English initially imported came from the Rhineland, but the source of supply shifted to the Loire River Valley and its hinterlands when Aquitaine was joined to England during the middle of the twelfth century. An important commercial center in Aquitaine was Bordeaux, and here a new kind of wine was encountered. Unlike the white to golden-colored wines from the Rhineland and the Loire, the wine here was red, or at least pink. Termed claret, it became the royal favorite and thus the wine in most demand among the upper classes. Yet at this time, only a very small amount of claret actually came from the Bordeaux region itself. Most of it was shipped down the streams converging on the Gironde estuary from the hauts pays of the interior, from such places as Bergerac, Gaillac, and Cahors.
In the mid-fifteenth century, following the end of the Hundred Years’ War, all of Aquitaine, including Bordeaux, was incorporated within France. This development did not end the flow of claret to England, but the supply became less regular and depended to a great extent on the state of relations between the two countries. English merchants looked for alternatives, which took them southward to Portugal, their political ally against the Spanish and French.
Some red wines were exported from the Minho region of Portugal, but they never developed much of a following. As wars and plans for war grew more frequent toward the close of the seventeenth century, the search for reliable supplies of claret substitutes intensified. Some merchants traveled up the rugged and underdeveloped Duoro Valley from their base at Porto. Only very rough reds were encountered, and their initial reception in England was not very positive.
What caught on eventually, however, was the practice of adding brandy to the still wines. At first this was done at the end of fermentation to increase alcohol content. High-alcohol wines were preferred not only because they were more quickly intoxicating, but also because they did not spoil as rapidly and thin into vinegar. Although not discovered until much later, the wine-spoiling culprits were oxidation and bacterial contamination, and the reactions they produced slowed down at higher alcohol levels.
In the eighteenth century, it was discovered that if brandy was added during fermentation, a sweet wine of much higher quality could be produced, and thus the port of today was born, named for Porto, the place where it was processed and from which it was shipped. It became a highly fashionable drink for English gentlemen, which set off a wave of vineyard plantings that transformed the upper Duoro Valley into a landscape almost totally devoted to wine.
Perhaps the most highly prized wine in England was malmsey. It arrived in Genoese and then Venetian galleys from Cyprus and other Christian-held lands in the eastern Mediterranean, where vineyards had been reestablished by monastic orders in the wake of the Crusades. These sun-drenched lands produced a sweet, golden wine naturally high in alcohol, and thus the malmsey also traveled well. However, the Ottoman advance cut off the source of supply, which once again set in motion a search for alternatives that eventually led to Spain. A wave of vineyard plantings there had accompanied the Reconquest, and the expulsion of the Jews had provided an opportunity for English merchants to set themselves up in business, particularly at the active ports of Cadiz and San-lucar. The wine exported from this southern coastal region was initially called sac, and later sherry. The latter was an English corruption of the word Jerez, the town in which most of the wine was made. Like the port wines, sherries were fortified and initially sweet. Later developments led to dry styles gaining preference, with England maintaining an almost exclusive hold on the market. A similar type of wine was produced on the island of Madeira, but because of the papal division of the world, its exports were directed mostly to the Americas.
The other major participant in the wine trade was Holland, where cool growing-season temperatures, poorly drained soils, and high winds virtually precluded the establishment of vineyards. Satisfying most of the Dutch thirst for wine were the vineyards of the Rhineland and the Mosel Valley, but the destruction wrought there by the Thirty Years’ War caused the Dutch (like the English) to turn to the Loire Valley and to Bordeaux, where they encouraged the growing of grapes to make white wines.
Dutch tastes, however, were increasingly moving in the direction of spirits, especially brandies. In addition to vineyards, ample timber supplies were required in order to fuel the distilleries, and the Dutch found this combination in two locales, the Charente (Cognac) and Armagnac, two names that have come to define the standards by which brandy is judged.
World History
