1703 · England and Portugal
The Methuen Treaty redirects British drinking
A trade treaty gave Portuguese wine a duty advantage over French, and built the British taste for Port.
What happened
The Methuen Treaty of 1703 admitted Portuguese wines to England at two-thirds the duty charged on French wines, in exchange for Portugal admitting English woollens.
The context was war. England and France were repeatedly at war through this period, and French wine was subject to prohibitive duties or outright embargo for long stretches.
The commercial effect was durable. Portuguese wine, and specifically the wine of the Douro, became the default for the British market, and the British shippers who established themselves in Oporto built the trade that became Port.
It is one of the clearest cases in wine history of a national taste being created by tariff policy rather than by preference.
How firmly this is dated
Documented. Recorded contemporaneously. The date is not in question.
The treaty text survives, as do subsequent customs records showing the shift in import volumes.
What this follows from, and leads to
A timeline is a list; these are the links between its entries.
Sources
Sources consulted
- Instituto dos Vinhos do Douro e do Porto (IVDP) — IVDP, Portugal
- The Oxford Companion to Wine — Oxford University Press
Along the timeline
Before · 17th–18th century
Madeira and the accidental discovery of heat ageing
Wine shipped as ballast through the tropics arrived improved, and the effect was then reproduced deliberately.
After · 1737
The Tokaj classification
Tokaj received a royal classification of its vineyards, predating the more famous French systems.