Tovey, Charles
Wine and Wine Countries
1862, London, Hamilton, Adams & Co.
First Edition
This first edition belongs to a precise historical moment in British wine culture: the early 1860s, when questions of import, taste, taxation, national supply, and commercial knowledge had acquired new urgency. Set against the disrupted post–Cobden–Chevalier wine market, it is not simply a gentleman’s appreciation of wine, nor merely a merchant’s handbook, but a living Victorian attempt to describe the wine world as a connected commercial, geographical, and chemical system. The combination of trade manual, historical record, vintage register, and statistical document makes it a compact witness to how Victorian Britain sought to order the wine-producing world (geographically, commercially, and culturally) at a moment when consumers and merchants alike were being asked to think internationally about what they drank.
The book opens with a lightly Homeric epigraph on the title page: “The weary find new strength in generous wine.” The chapters proceed geographically through the wines consumed in England, then Port and Portugal, Spain, France, Germany and Hungary, Italy and Sicily, Greece, Crimea, America, and the British Colonies. It continues with an inquiry into the chemistry of wine and the practical question of what wines to drink, and when. The appendix gathers bottle sizes, wine tables, measures, vintages, and alcoholic tint, together with tables of consumption from 1791 to 1861. It includes a folded statistical table between pp. 360–361, “Consumption of Wine from 1701 to June 30, 1861,” as well as a vintage table for Port, Claret, Rhenish, and Hungarian wines from 1800 to 1861 within the text. The work treats wine adulteration with notable directness and bears upon the emerging Australian wine industry, with material connected to James Busby.
A Victorian mind mapping wine across the world to teach Britain how to drink globally: trade, taste, chemistry entwined, with data quietly educating the palate.
Pp. [1] f.e., [2], xiv, 365; 1 folding table b/w p.360-361; [2] r.e.)
Original green blind-stamped cloth with gilt-lettered spine; edges and spine slightly worn. Pages with minor toning and minor foxing. Signature in pencil on the title page (S. Wilson?) and probable notes by the same hand at the rear endpaper, including a short wine bibliography. Stamp of F.W. Needham, bookseller, on the front paste-down, together with a large ex libris of Max Lake, with an image of a vineyard. Folded table in perfect condition. Overall, a very good copy.
Dimensions (inches): 7 x 4 1/2 x 1 1/4
Charles Tovey (1812-1888) was a Bristol wine merchant and Victorian writer on wine and the international wine trade.
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