Tag Archives: Graham Harding

‘When will France learn…?’: champagne as a dinner wine, 1850-1900

By Graham Harding (Oxford)

This post is part of the European Institute for the History and Cultures of Food (IEHCA) series “Summer University on Food and Drink Studies”

‘When will France […] learn that champagne should be drunk with roast meat and not introduced as an incubus after dinner’ demanded a letter in The Times in September 1860. The writer was reflecting the growing trend amongst middle and upper-class households in Britain to serve champagne not as a sweet wine to start or end the meal but as an increasingly dry wine that was taken either between courses or with the main meat dishes. Advertisements in the British press for ‘dinner champagne’ rose from around twenty in 1850-59 to nearly 400 in the decade 1870-79. By the mid-1880s a French wine merchant was complaining of the ‘tendency of men of the new generation to make champagne […] their sole drink at every meal. Fifteen years later in 1899, the wine writer Louis Feuerheerd reiterated his objections to this ‘fashionable’ practice on the grounds that ‘champagne does not go with everything’.

Wachter ad and label. The Globe, 5 August 1880, p. 8

So what drove this change and what were the implications for the dinner table? In essence, the pursuit of status drove the change and the consequence was a decided shift in the style of nineteenth-century champagne that was unique to Britain.

The habit of drinking a heavily fortified, dry still white wine from the Champagne region of Sillery was common amongst aristocratic men in the 1820s and 1830s. The new-fangled sparkling champagne was taken up by younger elite men in the 1850s as the fashionable drink in London clubs and military messes. Then middle-class households aspiring to gentility took up the champagne habit to demonstrate their wealth and sophistication. As the gourmandizing barrister A. V. Kirwan observed in 1864, ‘everyone in England tries to ape the class two or three degrees above him in point of rank and fortune, in style of living, and manner of receiving his friends’. Champagne became a dinner table must, even if it meant eking out one bottle round a crowded dinner table. The press publicity given to the Prince of Wales’ taste for dry champagne in the 1860s and his habit of champagne-only dinners in 1886 only strengthened the social value in serving branded dry champagnes.

Champagne’s role at the dinner table was further enhanced with the switch from service à la française to service à la russe that took place between 1850 and 1880. The à la russe style prioritised diners as ‘audience’ for a pre-conceived meal orchestrated by the hostess’ servants, rather than as ‘participants’ (to use Cathy Kaufman’s terminology) who chose their own meal from a range of possible dishes. This shift contributed both to the increasingly ordered matching of wine to food. Sweet champagne simply did not work with meat dishes and ‘sour sauces’. The British taste for champagne moved decisively to drier wines. By the late 1860s, premium brands such as Pol Roger and Pommery were shipping wines with only 2-4 grams of sugar per litre into the British market compared with 20-40 grams in wines for France, Germany and Russia.

Not all hosts succumbed to the allure of champagne. Some continued to match the soup with a glass of sherry and the fish course with German white wine before offering a choice of Burgundy or champagne with the roast dishes. Crucially, of these, champagne was the only wine that was not decanted and thus the only wine whose brand name could be seen by the guests and whose price was therefore generally known.

Champagne proclaimed status and sophistication. The Victorians believed that to like – even to tolerate very dry champagne – demanded that the drinker start young and drink often. That meant those born to wealth and privilege. Merchants, who made their money later in life, were assumed to prefer slightly sweeter wine. But the British taste for very dry wine was vaunted as a rare marker of British culinary superiority. As a contributor to the influential Saturday Review put it in 1879, ‘for once the English have been more intelligent in a matter relating to the table than the French, and […] it is in their appreciation of champagne that they have achieved this solitary triumph’. Not a bad triumph…

Graham Harding returned to the study of history after a career spent in publishing, advertising and marketing. Having completed an M Phil in Cambridge, he is now a final-year D Phil student at St Cross College, Oxford. He has written several books including The Wine Miscellany (2005). More recently he has published on champagne, on the nature of connoisseurship in wine in the nineteenth century and on the nineteenth-century wine trade.

Introducing the Summer University on Food and Drink Studies

Graham Harding (Oxford) and Beat Kümin (Warwick)

Founded in 2001, the European Institute for the History and Cultures of Food (IEHCA) has become a major research and public engagement hub. It runs an annual open convention, thematic colloquia and numerous outreach and heritage activities. Based at Tours in France, it collaborates with the city, region, François Rabelais University and other partners to raise the profile of food studies world-wide. Resources include meeting / exhibition rooms and a specialized library – at the Villa Rabelais in the town centre – as well as an ever-expanding searchable network of currently over 400 members.

Since 2003, the Institute has also run a ‘summer university’ dedicated to food and drink studies. The first eleven editions were led by food history pioneers Allen Grieco (Harvard/Florence) and Peter Scholliers (Brussels), the last four years by Isabelle Bianquis (Tours), Antonella Campanini (Bra Pollenzo) and Beat Kümin (Warwick). On each occasion, fifteen-twenty masters / doctoral students and around ten senior scholars meet at the Croix Montoire residential centre overlooking Tours for an intensive week of student presentations, faculty lectures, inter-disciplinary exchange (the official language is English) and – given the location’s distinction as one of France’s official Cités de la Gastronomie – excellent hospitality. Alongside, participants have the opportunity for independent work in the IEHCA’s collection of over 9,000 books / dedicated periodicals and to gain formal study credits, while also honing their debating, chairing and commenting skills.

Participants of the 2017 Université d’Eté at Villa Rabelais in Tours. Picture: Olivier Rollin.

 

In 2017, ‘all of us’ meant seventeen students from thirteen different countries ranging in age from 22 to 69 and nine faculty members from Italy, France and the UK. The disciplinary spectrum of the week’s programme included archaeologists and anthropologists, historians, historians of art, sociologists, medical doctors and literary scholars, while the chronological scope ranged from early Bronze Age Europe to modern day Asia. Alongside their academic endeavours, participants attended a cinema evening (watching the 1996 movie Big Night inspired discussions on gastronomic stereotypes and the relationship between food and migration), a trip to a Loire château and two hands-on ateliers: a visit to the buzzing Saturday market and the chance to taste specialities from the Touraine region. Quite a few were also spotted engaging in field studies at the lively guingette on the nearby river shore and the ever-packed cafés lining the central Place Plumereau.

Open-air food and wine-tasting atelier at Croix Montoire in 2014. Picture: Beat Kümin.

The great advantage of food and drinks studies is that – regardless of personal, regional and academic backgrounds – there are always points of common ground and numerous intersections between apparently diverse topics. Our discussions ranged over the nature of evidence, the importance of empathy in interpreting the testimony of our subjects (be they real or imagined, living or dead), the necessity (and risks) of engaging with the wider world / public around us, techniques of ‘close reading’, the utility of ‘big data’ analysis, and the trajectory and future of food studies. In particular we engaged with the challenge of ‘fragmentation’. Informed by a presentation from Professor Jean-Pierre Poulain (author of The Sociology of Food, Bloomsbury 2017), we assessed the approaches and implications of different models for ‘Food Studies’ and how we as individuals could reach out across geographical, personal and disciplinary boundaries. Registrations for the next gathering will open early in the new year, with full details published on the website. The co-directors are always happy to answer any questions and would be delighted to welcome you in 2018.

Our posts to the Recipes Project over the next few weeks draw on the summer university proceedings to highlight the extraordinary variety of work that food and drink scholars are now generating. The series starts with a posting from Graham Harding of the University of Oxford on how champagne shaped and was shaped by its role as the central (even the only) ‘dinner wine’ in at the formal meals of the nineteenth-century British elite. Then, in no particular order (as yet), there will be posts on cookbooks and nationalism in Latvia, Poland and contemporary Catalonia; on the drinking landscape of early modern Britain; on ‘osh palov’, the dish that defines the Uzbek diaspora worldwide; and the food habits of modern Malaysia. Bon appétit!

Graham Harding returned to the study of history after a career spent in publishing, advertising and marketing. Having completed an M Phil in Cambridge, he is now a final-year D Phil student at St Cross College, Oxford. He has written several books including The Wine Miscellany (2005). More recently he has published on champagne, on the nature of connoisseurship in wine in the nineteenth century and on the nineteenth-century wine trade.

Beat Kümin is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Warwick (U.K.) and co-director of the IEHCA Summer University on Food and Drink Studies in Tours. His research focuses on social exchange in local communities, particularly in parish churches and drinking houses. Publications include the monograph Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe (2007), the co-edited source collection Public Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the Tavern 1500-1800, vols 2-3: The Holy Roman Empire (2011) and the edited anthology A Cultural History of Food in the Early Modern Age (2012).