“A good and most particular taste”

Abstract

Political authority needs many props, and in early eighteenth-century England luxury claret was among them. As in the seventeenth century, wine represented the court, the church, the landed classes, and the ruling elite more generally. In short, wine was still affiliated with all the pillars of political power, and since the Restoration era, claret had been the most politically potent of all wines. As we have seen, between the Exclusion Crisis and the end of Queen Anne’s reign, claret had become a well-established symbol of Tory interests and Whig fears. Nevertheless, the most prominent claret drinkers of the early eighteenth century were politically powerful Whigs.