From Cork to Claret: what a 19C journey to the Médoc tells us about women and wine writing in the Victorian Age

by Jane Sevastopulo, Dublin Gastronomy Symposium
Illustration by Abigail Hicks

In the Vine Country was written by cousins Edith Somerville (1858-1949), and Violet Florence Martin (1862-1915, writing as Martin Ross) in the autumn of 1891, and published in The Lady’s Pictorial weekly, on Saturdays, in twelve parts from October 1, 1892 to December 17, 1892. It was published in book form in 1893. In the opening chapter it is established that the cousins had been summoned by letter to London from Castletownshend, Co. Cork.

The letter said majestically,

‘You are to go to the vineyards of the Médoc, and must start at once in order to be in time for the vintage;’ and in spite of a grand and complete ignorance of Médoc, its vintages, and wines in general, we accepted the position with calm, even with satisfaction’.

When I consulted the cousins’ diaries, held at Special Collections in Queen’s University Belfast, this is corroborated by Somerville, who writes on Saturday August 22, 1891, that she “heard from Lady’s Pic. [sic] we are to go to Médoc and all will be arranged for us. The cousins felt a secret scepticism as to our fitness for this large and yet delicate mission – what did we know of a Château Lafite or Mouton Rothschild, except that a glass and a half of the former had once compelled my second cousin to untimely slumber at dessert.

Within the first few pages, the mission is laid out, and the qualifications (or lack thereof) of the authors are established. It was with some amazement that I read of their travels; firstly to London, leaving on a foggy morning, they drive by horse carriage to the train station in Skibbereen, a train to Dublin, steamboat to Holyhead, and then a further train to Euston station, London, where they arrive the following morning.

In London, Alfred Gibbons, the editor of The Lady’s Pictorial tells them that in the Médoc they are to enjoy themselves, they were to taste claret if they liked, and to speak bad French to the makers of it if it amused them. What they were relieved that they were not to do, having read a pamphlet about the wines of the Médoc that they had been lent, was to try to “improve other people’s minds by figures and able disquisitions on viticulture and the treatment of the phylloxera.”

In reality, The Lady’s Pictorial had instructed them to treat events in a “pleasant” humorous way. In a later article, “A Record of Holiday,” Somerville and Ross reflect on the “actual time of holiday, and [are] struck by the fact that its more salient features are misfortunes. From a literary point of view this has its advantages; the happy traveller has no history.”

We get an insight here on their method of writing and their use of pathos to engage the reader. To get to Bordeaux, they travel by train from Victoria to Dover, boat from Dover to Calais, train to Paris, a brief sojourn in Paris, followed by an eleven-hour train journey to Bordeaux. In the twenty-first century I am exhausted even thinking about this. It is recorded in Edith Somerville’s diary for October 7, 1891 that they wanted to call their adventure “From Cork to Claret,” but this was rejected by the publishers as being too subtle for the public.

Intrigued, I wondered who they wrote this book for, and why? How did two Irish single women writers get commissioned to travel to the Médoc to “enjoy themselves” and drink wine? McConnell and Ludington have explored the historical role of Bordeaux and the consumption of claret throughout Georgian and Victorian Ireland. That fine red wines were drunk and enjoyed by the ascendancy in Ireland is not unusual. What is unusual, however, is the place of In the Vine Country.

The Victorian Period, 1837-1901, saw a burgeoning of print culture in the British Isles, and periodicals for an increasingly diverse audience of women readers became available. An increase in city dwellers, particularly in London, produced a boom in mass-produced entertainment, which served an audience with more free time and money than previously. This period was also significant in women’s history; public debate was dominated by the “Woman Question,” concerning the place of women in society.

The Lady’s Pictorial: A Newspaper for the Home was an illustrated weekly paper, founded by the Ingram Brothers in 1880, “aimed squarely at middle class women.” It mixed conventional feminine subject matter with debates on gender issues. Other papers in the Ingram Brothers house featured actresses and celebrities in their women’s columns, with controversial women’s topics contained within an admixture of cookery and fashion. The Lady’s Pictorial, however, depicted women “out in the world […] enjoying the London social season, attending charitable events, participating in sports, and engaging in amateur drama.” Using both text and illustrations, it defined a new brand of “modern mobile womanhood”.

It transpires later in my research that the expedition to the Médoc was proposed by Sir Walter Gilbey, the proprietor of Chateau Loudenne, purchased by him in 1875. Sir Walter Gilbey was one half of “Gilbey’s,” a British firm of wine merchants credited with “transforming light wine from the drink of a moneyed elite into a pleasure accessible to millions.” This firm developed innovative and highly professional systems for retail and consumer communication from the 1860s. It is through this lens that we can interpret the purpose of the trip to the Médoc by Somerville and Ross, as a sophisticated means of reaching middle-class women to promote sales of Gilbey’s claret.

It could be said that Somerville and Ross were employed as “influencers;” they mention Chateau Loudenne a number of times within the text of In the Vine Country in a complimentary light. They are guests at the Chateau, where “afternoon tea of the English kind stood ready” upon their arrival. Somerville reflects later that although their tour of the Médoc was a very interesting expedition, and they gained a “pleasing insight into the charm of French hospitality, and [they] acquired—and this was the tour’s only drawback—a taste for the very best claret that [they] have since found unfortunately superfluous”.

Writing for the Senses
The narrative in the book is brought to life through the drawings by F. H. Townsend, based on Somerville’s sketches. The characters of the vineyards, comprising the peasants, the hotel owners, and the wine-makers are vividly rendered, both through words and illustration.

It has been suggested that Ross may have had synaesthesia, the involuntary transposing of sensory images, and this transmits in In the Vine Country for example, as descriptions of smell as “painful deliciousness.” It is in St. Lambert (Saint Lambert is the commune of Pauillac where Château Latour is located – JA) that their most complete description of the wine making process occurs, including the splashing of feet in the pressoir and their tasting of the moût.

It is this moût that generates abject disgust in both women that they would be expected to drink a “turgid magenta” juice, “deadly, deadly sweet, and had a faint and dreadful warmth.” This disgust is amplified in the diary entries of both women for that day – Martin records that, she “had to taste the awful sickly juice,” and Somerville “had to taste the sweet filthy juice, called ‘moue’ [sic].”

A bottle of Grand St. Lambert 1885 plays a cameo role in the book, being first mentioned as a promissory note to the proprietor of a restaurant in Bordeaux, from the producer. This they redeem:

It was a large bottle, with a beautiful white-and-gold label, and after we had scientifically smelt its bouquet, and slowly absorbed as much as we thought becoming, morally and physically, there was still two-thirds of the bottle left, far too much either to squander upon the waiter or to finish ourselves. The waiter had left a mound of grapes in front of us, and had decorously retired; on a buffet behind us were a number of old newspapers; the hand-basket was on the floor at our feet; all was as perfect as if it had occurred in a romance of detective life. My second cousin stealthily abstracted an Intransigéant of a responsible age from the buffet, wrapped up the bottle in its woolly folds, and forced it diagonally into the basket.

It makes a reappearance as a half-bottle on page 135: we drew forth the half bottle of Grand St. Lambert that had for the last few days been carried perilously about in a bonnet-box, and with grapes and croissants began a repast that continued through stages of bovril, tea, and gingerbread biscuits till we neared Paris.

The denouement of the Grand St. Lambert 1885 occurs in the closing passage of the book: We took a last look out of the train window at the electric star of the Eiffel Tower, perched among the elder stars in the sky behind us, and my cousin opened her bonnet-box and drew forth for the last time that widow’s cruse, the bottle of Grand St. Lambert. There was about a wine-glassful left, and out of a thick green Pauillac mug we solemnly drank success to our first vintage.

**

This is an extract from Reclaiming Lost and Disregarded Voices: In the Vine Country, Memory, Female Independence and Wine Writing in the Victorian Age – for the whole, fascinating article, please go to the original post on the website of the Technological University, Dublin.

And you can read the book In The Vine Country by Somerville and Ross for yourselves – it was reprinted recently by Academie du Vin Library. We’ve managed to get you a 10% discount on the purchase price, just use the code VINE10 on checkout.

Images below from the original editions of The Lady’s Pictorial, accessed by Jane Sevastopulo in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh