Wine was the drink of choice for members of society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While beer was also prevalent and the introduction of gin would threaten to upend the social order and infuse the streets with chaos in the early eighteenth century, wine was the preference of the cultured and ever present at the dinner parties and gatherings of the haute ton. Wine was purchased by the pipe in genteel households, and sack, sherry, and claret were essential mentions in any literary ‘silver fork’ novel of the nineteenth century. A pipe of wine, sometimes called a butt, was a barrel containing 105 imperial gallons. Hosts never wanted to run out when entertaining!
Wine purchased in pipes necessitated a decanter in which to serve it. Eighteenth-century blown glass decanters from the Low Countries were sometimes made in colored glass and had organic shapes-an extant example resembles a squash. Those toward the end of the century were gracefully tapered and often made of clear glass, etched with patterns. English cut glass had not yet reached the zenith it would in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; etchings were lightly done. Glassworks had become important drivers of local economies and the envies of towns across Europe and England by the eighteenth century. Extant glass decanters in museums attest to the diversity of production locations and styles. Ireland, France, Bohemia, Venice, and London were all associated with glassware of the first water. Famous names established in Ireland and the Continent in the eighteenth century include Waterford and Baccarat, while the famed Venetian house of Barovier and Toso could claim a solid reputation dating from 1295.
Jugs were also used to serve wine at table. Made of blown or cut glass and adorned with silver fittings, or simply glass or silver, claret jugs became important markers of social stratification and status. Claret was one of the most expensive wines, and the jug that held it was also suitably refined. Famously, since 1872, the silver claret jug has been the trophy for the British Open. Made by Mackay Cunningham & Company of Edinburgh, it has become one of the most famous logos and is associated by most of the globe with golf instead of fine wine.
As for the pleasure of drinking, the poet John Keats expressed the joys of claret eloquently in a letter in 1819, “Now I like claret, whenever I can have claret I must drink it…it fills the mouth with a gushing freshness-then goes down cool and feverless–then you do not feel it quarrelling with your liver…then it is as fragrant as the queen bee; and the more ethereal part of it mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments like a bully in a bad house looking for his trull,,,” For centuries, claret has earned its reputation as a a pleasure to drink, though too much of anything will certainly assault one’s ‘cerebral apartments.’