What are the big themes in wine today? High rates of duty loom large, as does their impact on prices. There are some concerns for consumption, but no one seems too keen to keep a lid on it (not least among the Fourth Estate).
Discovering the next big thing becomes ever more competitive as the wine world expands too; and we are (rightly) living through a fetish for rare grape varieties. The bravura new Spectator Archive, cataloguing every magazine from 1828 till 2008, tells us little has changed. Wine duty was a hot topic in Victorian times. In March 1860, a correspondent wrote:
‘Of all the articles in the long lists of Customs and Excise, there is not one which has so often, and to such a degree, been experimented upon, as the single item of wine.’
That year William Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, reduced the duty on foreign wine. ‘The duties,’ he claimed, ‘stood like a wall of brass between the poor man and a glass of wine.’
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