Trade, Trust and Madeira

An age of commerce and civility was how many eighteenth-century thinkers, including the Scots Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson and Frenchmen such as Turgot, saw their own time. Unlike previous ages of savagery when humans survived by hunting, barbarism when they followed their flocks, and civilization when they turned to farming, trade had issued in a whole new stage of human history.

How did the civility and sociability of the new society manifest itself? In the drinking of Madeira wine.

[By 1800], Madeira the luxury drink was served the parson came to visit in backcountry Ohio, during dinner on Jamaican and Curaçao plantations, in Army messes and hospitals throughout India, to patrons of London clubs and taverns, and at country houses and ceildhs in Scotland.

 

Peter Manigault, scion of an old Charleston Huguenot family, merchant, banker and plantation owner, richest man in the American colonies, entertaining his friends. George Roupell, ca. 1760. In the Winterthur Museum but public domain.

How Madeira wine, produced on the tiny Portuguese island of Madeira way out in the middle of the Atlantic, became the luxury drink throughout the English-speaking world and well beyond it is the subject of David Hancock’s fascinating book Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (Yale, 2009).  I have nothing to add to his excellent study.

Position of Madeira in the Atlantic. From Hancock, Ocean of Wine.

Rather I just want to highlight how trade, trust, sociability, and Madeira reinforced each other.  The wine became Madeira’s most important export around 1700.  By then, sugar, which had been the main export for over a hundred years, the forerunner of the sugar plantations of the New World, had exhausted the soils. For the next two hundred years, Madeira flourished.

Contemporary vineyards in Madeira. Wikimedia Commons

Producing and trading Madeira was no easy game. Complex irrigation projects were put in place. The wine was fortified with spirits to survive the long sea journeys. In an extraordinary turn of events, wine that had been shipped to India and for some reason made the return journey instead of being ruined, tasted particularly “mellow.”  Because it was so prized, the wine was sent on the long trip and back before being sold until, in the nineteenth century, the heating was carried out in island, a variety of methods being tried.

The Americans, who in spite of their most determined efforts, failed to establish a wine industry in the Colonies, were particularly eager traders and consumers, though far from the only ones.

Here’s the thing. Living in the United States, where Amazon deliveries arrive on time and are left on doorsteps, we happily get on the internet, commit our money, secure in the expectation that the strangers who pack the goods, debit the cards, fly the planes, and drive the trucks will all act responsibly. My neighbors are shocked if packages left on the porch disappear. Yet I’ve lived in plenty of places where no one commits any important documents to the mail or orders anything to be delivered.  That chain of trust just does not exist.

Chains of trust have been built up over time. There’s lots of interesting historical work going on now about how merchants built trust along huge networks, the role of families and tightly knit religious or ethnic groups, the types of contracts, and the importance of correspondence.  Wine, like other valuables, had always been shipped long distances (the Romans sent wine to eager drinkers in northern Europe, for example), with Madeira the distances and cultures involved were on a whole new scale, stretching around the Cape to India and Southeast Asia, up to Scotland, across to the Caribbean and the American Colonies.

Part of that trust was building shared customs, civility, ways of comporting yourself among strangers. Drinking Madeira was one of these customs. Along with the wine itself went barrels, labelled bottles (a novelty because not stoneware), delicate glasses and decanters which, as Hancock puts it, “dripped both wealth and politesse.”

Jefferson’s Madeira decanter.https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/madeira-decanter

Passed from hand to hand, they helped bond political factions, merchant networks, and intellectual circles in gatherings in the home, in taverns, in messes, in clubs around the world. In short, trade needed trust, trust was built in part by shared social behavior, a preferred social behavior was the drinking of Madeira, Madeira itself was a prime example of the expanded eighteenth-century world of commerce.

Rhode Island merchants in Surinam (South America) taking a bit too much Madeira. John Greenwood. Mid 18th century. St Louis Art Museum.

The commerce-trust-sociability-Madeira complex was one that was built up by long distance, trans ocean, and trans continental ties. Much of the work on the history of commodities is framed in terms of peripheries producing goods to be consumed in metropolitan centers, sugar being a prime example.  It’s not the whole story, though, as the trade in Madeira wine shows.

A mid 19th century depiction (George Thompson after James Doyle) of a literary party hosted by the painter Joshua Reynolds, including the statesman Edmund Burke, the poet Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, and the actor David Garrick. Original owned by Mary Hyde and part of the Hyde Collection in Someville, N.J. Public domain.

Madeira began loosing ground in India in the mid 19th century, too much associated with the old East India Company Days, and less modern and healthful than gin and tonic. It continued to slide:  phylloxera destroyed the traditional vines, the Russian Revolution cut off one large market and Prohibition killed the American market.

Other sources for the history of Madeira wine

Aaron Nix-Gomez has a series of great posts Madeira on Hogshead: A Wine Blog

The British tried to grow it outside Bath in England.

The Portuguese, one of the major immigrant groups in Hawaii, produced Madeira there for a while.

It was tried in Australia.

On Madeira in India by Vikram Doctor.

And if you want to drip wealth and politesse at a bargain price, you can buy a knock off of Jefferson’s decanter at Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Madeira and me

Madeira cast a long shadow. Madeira was a standard teatime cake in my youth.  It was not flavored with Madeira but traditionally served with the wine if it were consumed in the home.

Anyone of my generation in England grew up with the twosome, Flanders and Swan, performing “Have Some Madeira, M’Dear.”  I can’t resist linking.

She was young, she was pure,
She was new, she was nice,
She was fair, she was sweet seventeen.

He was old, he was vile,
And no stranger to vice,
He was base, he was bad, he was mean.

He had slyly inveigled her up to his flat,
To view his collection of stamps;
And he said as he hastened to put out the cat,
The wine, his cigar, and the lamps:

“Have some madeira, m’dear,
You really have nothing to fear;
I’m not trying to tempt you, that wouldn’t be right,
You shouldn’t drink spirits at this time of night.
Have some madeira, m’dear,
It’s so very much nicer than beer.
I don’t care for sherry, one cannot drink stout,
And port is a wine I can well do without.
It’s simply a case of chacun á son gout.
Have some madeira, m’dear!”

. . .

Then there flashed through her mind what her mother had said
With her ante-penultimate breath:
“Oh my child should you look at the wine that is red
Be prepared for a fate worse than death!”

She let go her glass with a shrill little cry,
Crash! Tinkle! it fell to the floor.
When he asked, “What in heaven?” she made no reply
But put in a dash for the door.

“Have some madeira, m’dear!”
Rang out down the hall loud and clear,
A tremulous cry that was filled with despair,
As she paused to take breath in the cool midnight air.

“Have some madeira, m’dear!”
The words seemed to ring in her ear…
Until the next morning she woke up in bed,
With a smile on her lips and an ache in her head,
And a beard in her earhole that tickled and said:
“Have some madeira, m’dear!”

Although I’d heard of Madeira, I’d never tasted it until I read Hancock’s Oceans of Wine.  I’m sure that any of you who follow wine will have done so, but every time I think I will up my wine appreciation, I realize that the habit does not do well for the free lance writer and it’s back to the jugs or the lower end of the Costco selection.

Reading Oceans of Wine, though, sent me off to the local wine store. If ever there was a chance to get a taste of the past, this was it.  

Googling “Madeira” for this post, I discovered that it’s now hip again.  May be on the coasts. This is Texas and the local wine store is Texas-sized, about 40,000 square feet, is packed with wines from everywhere from Argentina to Australia, Spain to South Africa. I enquired after Madeira. The assistant wrinkled her brow, asked for help, and eventually located half a dozen bottles of three different brands lurking in a back corner. 

Anyway, I left with a bottle of Blandy’s Rainwater Medium Dry Madeira.  There’s lots of fakelore out there about the name Rainwater (rare rainfall on the Island, leaking into barrels when transported, but nobody really knows).

It’s really lovely stuff. Its sweetness is balanced by a touch of acidity, it’s rich and full.  For a special occasion, I’d take it over champagne any day.

Your Madeira stories? Your favorite Madeira?  Or if you haven’t tried it, please do and let me know what you think about this taste of the past.

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