Life as an 18th century wine apprentice

by Charlie Leary

In the 1700s, becoming a French wine merchant must have seemed highly enticing – simply buy some Bordeaux claret and sell it to Britain’s insatiable market. But the reality was more demanding.

In fact, an apprenticeship was required. The young David Hume, philosophical prodigy and future author of A Treatise of Human Nature, rejected his mother’s insistence that he become a lawyer. Instead, in 1734, he apprenticed with Michael Miller, a Bristol trader in wine and sugar, hoping for a life of global adventure. He quit in less than six months. Why? The reality of his first posting, the counting house—where apprentices totted up balances, calculated exchange rates, and logged bills of exchange—consisted of boring and mind-numbing travails.

Fellow Scot Caleb Whitefoord’s father, an army colonel, insisted that he join the clergy based on his “uncommon proficiency in classical knowledge”; but like Hume, Caleb was having nothing of tedious study. A later biography detailed: “To the clerical profession he entertained such strong objections that the Colonel was obliged to relinquish his intentions, and to send him to London, where he was placed in the counting-house of his friend, Mr. Archibald Stewart, an eminent wine-merchant in York-buildings, where Caleb remained about four years, and then went over to France, and staid there near two years more, until he became of age.”

This meant six-plus years of apprenticeship, heading overseas only after four years of training, as was quite standard in the Bordeaux wine trade in which Stewart specialised.

Starting young
Apprentices generally started at a young age. In 1736, at ten years old, for example, William Bell started in Stewart’s Edinburgh counting house, “and occasionally attended the wine vaults at Leith.” At 16, in 1742, he moved to Boulogne to work in the wine vaults for two years, just like Caleb Whitefoord.

Luckily, Whitefoord left behind some correspondence, which provides a rare glimpse into both what a Bordeaux wine trader’s apprenticeship entailed and the related business environment in the 1750s. “Archie” Stewart was also, by chance, one of Hume’s great friends. And, as fate would have it, all became well acquainted with another sojourning wine-loving wit, Benjamin Franklin, who once tried to teach Americans to make wine as good as “sprightly Claret,” his favourite style.

Stewart, a Berwickshire Scot, inherited the business his grandfather founded in the 1670s after completing his own Bordeaux apprenticeship. Unlike Scots and Irish who settled in Bordeaux’s Chartrons district, Stewart bought wines directly from producers and transported them elsewhere for ageing and sale. By 1754, Stewart’s business empire included his family’s vast cellars in Leith, next to Edinburgh; superb ageing vaults in Boulogne-Sur-Mer, strategically located for the trade to Scotland and London; a grand wine store at Buckingham Street, York Buildings, London, conveniently next to the Thames; and a large establishment at Saint Peter Port on the Isle of Guernsey, a tax-free haven.

Winemaking work
Traders like Stewart bought young wine, usually commissioned in the Fall and picked up in the Spring from Bordeaux. It was transported to someplace like the Boulogne or Saint Peters Port vaults for the ageing and blending required to suit the elite markets of Edinburgh and especially London.

Trader William Ballantyne recalled “Mr. Stewart of York Buildings” sold “the first growth claret, properly prepared and of proper age,” which “came to England from Boulogne.” Ballantyne emphasized that Boulogne’s “excellent conditions” made the Boulogne claret superior to that coming from Chartrons. One contemporary reported that the merchants “find the cellars of Boulogne excellent; they are very deep and have very expensive rent.”

Thus, Caleb reported to his banker friend James Coutts regarding all the steps involved: “loading,  unloading,  racking,  vault  rent, and  cooperage.” Another advanced apprentice, Thomas Brown, reported to Whitefoord that William Burnet had no time to write letters and “apologises for his silence owing  to ‘continual racking,’  &c.”

Backbreaking work, racking involved transferring wine from one barrel to another, leaving sediment and lees behind while also briefly aerating the wine. “Continual racking” points to the large volume that Stewart handled before the 1756 Seven Years’ War put a stop to the trade.

It was a hard life, and his boss Archie Stewart wrote to Whitefoord about the workday: “from six in the morning the time I presume you rise, till ten that you go to bed.” Stewart, however, allowed that “I won’t think there’s any thing wrong, in seeing some hours  there, every day, in company with french Ladies.” Writing from personal experience, Stewart warned that such intimacy should never result in an unwanted pregnancy: “tho’ not so much so, as to find there was anything conceal’d.”

Indeed, by 1754, Caleb was a senior apprentice and had Stewart’s trust; the Scot was also overjoyed to be in France after four years in London. Stewart wrote to Caleb: “I am glad you seem so happy in your present situation. I take it for granted, you are in love with your business so long as you are in love with  your situation.”

Stewart did not, however, leave details in Boulogne unattended. “I am to be over at Boulogne sometime next month, and as I have your doing well much at heart, you’ll oblige me much if  you’l write me a honest Journal of your life,” including reporting the minutiae of his everyday work.

Learning the business side
Before finishing his apprenticeship in Boulogne, which would have included voyages to Bordeaux, Caleb passed through Guernsey in 1753. His description of the business environment there is worth quoting at length:

“There are an incredible number of vaults and magazines all about the town and a vast quantity of clarets, ports and other wines sent there by different merchants of which Mr Stewart has a very considerable share. This must no doubt be of vast advantage to the island, as (to use their own words) every pipe of wine that is first imported and then exported from the island leaves two guineas behind it, and this will appear to be a very moderate computation . . .”

“[T]he advantages of carrying on the wine trade from this island are very great, not to mention how much it adds to a merchant’s reputation to have a great assortment there. In the first place labour is much cheaper there than in London. Vaults are easier to be got and for the most part better. A merchant may buy his wines immediately from the wine countries and let them lay there and ripen, by which he saves the interest on the duty and interest on leakage which he would lose by importing them to London directly and letting them lay some years till fit for use.”

Whitefoord’s letter captures the shrewd financial calculus of the Bordeaux trade. Guernsey was not simply a warehousing hub; it offered deep cellars, low costs, and duty deferment. Above all, it enabled merchants to age and blend wine strategically before it reached demanding London imbibers.

Ageing and exporting
Indeed, Stewart’s business depended on his expertise in ageing Bordeaux claret, preparing it for immediate commerce. During the 1750s and 1760s he increasingly bottled Bordeaux red wines in Boulogne for export to England, transported on fast sloops for ready sale to wealthy London elites through the Buckingham Street outlet.

By July 1754 in Boulogne, Stewart began entrusting Caleb with wine sales, but only in the company of his French business associate Jean Barbe. He was a Boulogne armateur, someone who owned and stocked ships for international trade. Barbe came from a long line of ship owners and counted among the city’s bourgeois.

An important business skill that Stewart would not let Whitefoord forget was mastery of French. And Archie demanded proof: “I think Willy Burnet used to write in French by the time he had been so long at Boulogne  as you have been. I shall expect such a letter from you soon.”

In addition, a big sales opportunity lay on the immediate horizon. “You are to have Mr Kenneth, and Mr Rowles over soon,” wrote Stewart. James Rowles can be identified as a “coffeeman and vintner,” who since 1747 owned St. James’s Coffee House and an adjacent tavern in London. They were likely in the market for numerous barrels of claret.

An astute and experienced businessman, Stewart warned: “Then I shall see how far you’re a man of address, by the Business they do with you, for ’tis by  an  insinuating obliging behaviour, and not by an indiscreet importunity that Customers are gained;  for you must find the way to the heart and head of a man of sense, before you get at his purse.”

A delicate approach to customer relations was key. Stewart continued:

“One thing I must caution you against, which is, that when Mr Barbe and you are in the cellar at the same time, you will allow him to direct who is to speak to the person you are to deal with, for if you both speak, you may chance to differ, which will have a very bad effect. If he desire you to do it, concert with him first, what you are to say, that you may strengthen what one another has said, when spoke to differently”.

Learning the skills of negotiation, would, we will see, prove very useful to Whitefoord in his future dealings with Ben Franklin. Of note here is that Caleb and Jean met with customers “in the cellar,” doubtlessly for tastings of finished — aged and blended — wine. This was the ultimate test, tasting the fruit of two years or more of hard, skilful work.

Whitefoord, Claret, and Franklin
While in Boulogne, Caleb’s father died, leaving him a respectable inheritance. With his apprenticeship complete, Caleb partnered with Thomas Browne to open a wine business on Craven Street — just a three-minute walk from Mr. Stewart’s wine store on Buckingham Street. The two ventures coexisted, strongly suggesting cooperation more than competition. Back in Edinburgh in 1759, Stewart’s friend David Hume met the American philosopher Benjamin Franklin, who shared both his love of Enlightenment ideals and good claret.

The two later reunited in London, where Hume’ pied-a-terre was with Stewart at Buckingham Street. Franklin, no doubt happy with having friends nearby alongside a steady supply of quality wine, had rented an apartment on Craven Street, next door to Whitefoord.

In the 1760s, Hume also befriended Lord Shelburne, a government minister and prominent advocate of free trade, especially in French wine. This small coterie — Hume, Stewart, Franklin, Shelburne, and Whitefoord — bound by claret and a shared commitment to liberal commerce, would prove consequential. Though Hume died in 1776, Shelburne recalled Whitefoord’s friendship with Franklin during Britain’s peace negotiations with the new United States — represented, remarkably, by Franklin himself. The result was Britain’s recognition of American independence and the rekindling of friendly commerce, including in that most civilising of commodities: Bordeaux claret.