Port and Britishness in the Eighteenth Century: What Wine Can Tell Us about British Identity

The purpose of this paper is to examine what British taste formation can tell us about British identity formation. The proliferation of studies that address the question of British identity have for the most part been written in the wake of Linda Colley’s seminal study Britons, published in 1992. In this book, Colley argues that commonly held—if not similarly practiced—Protestantism, shared pursuit of profits, and a hatred of Catholic France that was manifested in a series of bloody wars, served to remind the English, Welsh and Scottish of what they had in common, and in consequence, to see themselves as British. 

            Britons spawned a number of responses, most of which were concerned with nuancing Colley’s time-line. But among Colley’s respondents, none specifically examines her claim that the successful formation of British identity, at least among the elite and middle ranks, can be seen in the fact that they took “certain common patterns of consumerism for granted.” Certainly, if we are to take seriously the possibility of making such a connection, it must be acknowledged that shared consumption habits do not necessarily indicate a shared identity. However, the fact that claret and port had well-established political meanings in Scotland and England by the early-eighteenth century, and that these wines represented different national aspirations and identities, suggests that the taste for wine was a sensitive barometer for the questions of when, how and whether a transcendent British identity emerged.
           Indeed, the central argument of this paper is that the taste for wine can contribute to the Britishness debate, not only by confirming much of Colley’s thesis, but also by showing that the three motivating forces behind the creation of British identity, Protestantism, profits and hatred of the French, followed different temporal trajectories and should not be weighted equally in Scotland and England.