Books About Port and Other Stuff

Data, quotations, and other non-conversational posts containing reference materials.
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DRT
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by DRT »

Recollections of Old Country Life
Author: John Kersley Fowler
First Published: 1894
Edition: 1894
Code/Source: ASIN: B000XSYU8M
Pages: 235
Comments: Not yet read.

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"The first duty of Port is to be red"
Ernest H. Cockburn
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

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The History of Champagne
Author: André L. Simon
First Published: 1962
Edition: 1962
Code/Source: ASIN: B0007J8T5M
Pages: 195
Comments: Not yet read.

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"The first duty of Port is to be red"
Ernest H. Cockburn
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DRT
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by DRT »

The Noble Grapes and the Great Wines of France
Author: André L. Simon
First Published: 1957
Edition: 1957
Code/Source: 0
Pages: 180
Comments: Not yet read.

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"The first duty of Port is to be red"
Ernest H. Cockburn
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DRT
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by DRT »

The Story of Our Inns of Court
Author: Dunbar Plunket Barton, Charles Benham and Francis Watt
First Published: 1924
Edition: 1924
Code/Source: ASIN: B000WFL3NG
Pages: 320
Comments: Not yet read.

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"The first duty of Port is to be red"
Ernest H. Cockburn
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by DRT »

Portuguese Panorama
Author: Iris Merle
First Published: 1958
Edition: 1958
Code/Source: ASIN: B0000CJWDL
Pages: 224
Comments: Not yet read.

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"The first duty of Port is to be red"
Ernest H. Cockburn
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by DRT »

The Story of Dow's Port 1798-1998
Author: Richard Mayson
First Published: 1998
Edition: 1998
Code/Source: ASIN: B000JUEZWU
Pages: 71
Comments: Not yet read.

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Ernest H. Cockburn
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by DRT »

A Wine Day's Work: The London House of Deinhard 1835-1985
Author: George Bruce
First Published: 1985
Edition: 1985
Code/Source: ISBN-13: 978-0950947501
Pages: 160
Comments: Deinhard were once the UK importer of Taylor, Fladgate & Yeatman.

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"The first duty of Port is to be red"
Ernest H. Cockburn
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by DRT »

The Wine Trade (The Merchant Adventurers)
Author: Alan David Francis
First Published: 1972
Edition: 1972
Code/Source: ISBN-13: 978-0713613087
Pages: 359
Comments: Not yet read.

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"The first duty of Port is to be red"
Ernest H. Cockburn
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by DRT »

A Treatise on the Culture of the Vine
Author: William Speechly
First Published: 1790
Edition: 2009
Code/Source: ISBN-13: 978-1120133755
Pages: 262
Comments: Full title: A Treatise on the Culture of the Vine, exhibiting new and advantageous methods of propagating, cultivating, and training that plant, so as to render it abundantly fruitful. Together with new hints on the formation of vineyards in England. By William Speechly, Gardener to the Duke of Portland.

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"The first duty of Port is to be red"
Ernest H. Cockburn
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by DRT »

As my collection of books continued to grow this thread became quite a burden to maintain and therefore fell into disuse.

I recently purchased some software that I now use to catalogue my books and it enabled me to publish details of my collection to the web.

Details of my library and my comments on each of the books I own are now accessible from www.BooksAboutPort.com.

I have no plans to continue adding to this thread so if you are looking for books about port or wine please feel free to browse my collection on the new website.

DRT
"The first duty of Port is to be red"
Ernest H. Cockburn
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Alex Bridgeman
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by Alex Bridgeman »

I've just bought a little pamphlet printed, I would estimate, in the mid-sixties that gives some of the history of Dirty Dick's in Bishopsgate.
Top Ports in 2023: Taylor 1896 Colheita, b. 2021. A perfect Port.

2024: Niepoort 1900 Colheita, b.1971. A near perfect Port.
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djewesbury
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by djewesbury »

Was ist Portwein?

Image

An entertaining booklet published for the German market in 1938 (conveniently, this had recently been unified into a single trading area..) Unsurprisingly, given the political climate, it says rather little about the importance of English houses in developing the trade.

I bought this two minutes after leaving Weingalerie on my recent trip to Berlin, from a small antiques shop around the corner. Two old ladies were in the shop, one working and one chatting. The chatter looked at the book and read the title: "Was ist Portwein?" to which her friend behind the counter explained that it was a dessert wine. "Nein, das ist die Frage an die Buch!" she replied.

How we laughed.

Nicely illustrated throughout.

Image
Daniel J.
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djewesbury
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by djewesbury »

I've lately been doing some research on the broader economic history of the Port trade (and, in passing, on links with slavery). With great assistance from AW77, and with thanks to Paul Duguid at the University of California, I've come across the following books and articles, most of the latter from various academic journals. I'm posting full bibliographic records for the moment and will include further comments as I get through the texts themselves. Copyright regulations expressly forbid circulating these here, but if you have an academic or educational interest, and no institutional access to the materials, I can possibly assist with getting hold of some of these. Where the authors have made the texts available themselves, links are given.

Much of this material is fascinating as it's based on close reading of the Portuguese account-books and records, which are often passed over by the Anglophone writers. As a consequence we are able to get an insight into the extremely important range of roles played by the Portuguese in the development of the early industry. It's amazing how much a one-sided view of the history of the trade still shapes tastes today.
  • Norman R. Bennett (1990) 'The Golden Age of the Port Wine System, 1781-1807', The International History Review, vol. 12, 221-248.

    -- (1992) 'The Vignerons of the Douro and the Peninsular War', The Journal of European Economic History, vol. 21, 7-29.

    -- (1993) 'The Wine Growers of the Upper Douro, 1780-1800', Portuguese Studies Review,vol. 2, no. 1, 28-45.

    -- (1994) 'The Port Wine System in the 1890s', The International History Review, vol. 16, 251-266.

    -- (1995) 'Port Wine Merchants: Sandeman in Porto, 1813-1831', The Journal of European Economic History, vol. 24, 239-269.

    Paul Duguid (2007) 'The Changing of the Guard: British Firms in the Port Trade 1777-1840' (English translation of a chapter published in Gaspar Martins Pereira, ed. (2011) A História do Douro e do Vinho do Porto, vol 4: Crise e Reconstrucão, O Douro e do Vinho do Porto no Século XIX, (Porto: Afrontamento)*

    -- (2007) 'The Douro and Its Wine In the English Imagination', in Gaspar Martins Pereira & Paula Montes Leal, eds., O Douro Contemporaneo (Porto: GEHVID)**

    -- (2005) 'Networks and Knowledge: The Beginning and End of the Port Commodity Chain, 1703-1860', Business History Review, vol. 79, no. 3, 493-526 (comment)

    -- (2003) 'Developing the Brand: The Case of Alcohol, 1800-1880', Enterprise & Society, vol. 4, no. 3, 405-441.

    Paul Duguid & Teresa da Silva Lopes (1999) 'Ambiguous Company: Institutions and Organizations in the Port Wine Trade, 1814-1834', Scandinavian Economic History Review, vol. 47, no. 1, 84-102.

    H. E. S. Fisher (1971) The Portugal Trade: A Study of Anglo-Portuguese Commerce, 1700-1770 (London: Methuen)
* This is a book I'm going to order separately and attempt to plough through in the future when my Portuguese is at a sufficient standard...!

** This book seems to have gone out of print.
Last edited by djewesbury on 14:48 Sun 06 Apr 2014, edited 1 time in total.
Daniel J.
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by DRT »

djewesbury wrote:if you have an academic or educational interest, and no institutional access to the materials
I might qualify as such.

Everything here is at your disposal if you think it would be useful to your research.
"The first duty of Port is to be red"
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by djewesbury »

Paul Duguid (2005) 'Networks and Knowledge: The Beginning and End of the Port Commodity Chain, 1703-1860', Business History Review, vol. 79, no. 3, 493-526

This is an fascinating history of the development of the separate parts of the 'commodity chain' of Port, from the beginnings of the trade, through regulation by the Companhia Geral, and on to the later nineteenth century after the Napoleonic wars, the Companhia's abolition and the eventual domination of vertically-integrated shippers, particularly Sandeman and Cockburn. Duguid spent a great deal of time researching in the records of the Companhia, and in various account- and letter-books belonging to Hunt & Co., Offley & Co., and Sandeman & Co. The article brings to life the various conflicting interests which shaped the Port trade over the course of nearly two hundred years.

A commodity chain is a 'network of labour and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity'. The development of the chain in the Douro and in Porto was very slow owing obviously to the remoteness and inaccessibility of the wine country, but also to the specialisation and uneven development of different links in the chain. From 1756, the Companhia (why does Mayson call it a 'Real Companhia'? It was not a royal initiative) began regulating the production and sale of the lavradores' wine, but they specified that wine lotes could only be tasted and sold once a year, at a fair that was held in the Douro, and that it had to be sold at a preset price, or taxa. No pre-sale contracts were permitted, and the grower had to accept the first offer to buy. Breaches of the regulations were harshly punished, if discovered. English merchants in Porto had little experience of the Douro, did not know whose wines might be worth buying, and did not want to be bound by the Companhia. A class of comissários, local intermediaries who could give their local expertise to the buyers, therefore gee up, and deals were often made before the fair on their advice. Buyers also wanted to secure the best lotes, and thus offered to pay above the taxa to be certain of getting the best wines for their blends. Interestingly, when the Companhia did occasionally uncover practices of this kind, the comissários kept the English buyers out of the story, but gave lavradores' names to the investigators. Unsurprisingly, this made the growers think a little dimly of the practices they were bound by! The buyers, however, only bought consistently from a very few growers (many of them, coincidentally, their own comissários). The bulk of the trade was very insecure, and growers often had unsold pipes, which the Companhia would buy up, or which would have to remain on the quinta.

Early shippers were general merchants and importers, often with only small interests in wine, and by the time of the English return to Porto after the Peninsular Wars, they discovered that their business practices were being challenged. George Sandeman had opened in Porto and integrated his business there with his house in London, quickly focusing only on wine. Duguid is especially good on the way in which Sandeman's brand presence led to their dominating other links in the chain - the wine merchants in England who had previously bottled the wines under their own name, as well as the growers whose own wines were largely anonymous in the production of a Sandeman wine. By the mid-nineteenth century English houses had started to buy property in the Douro and the lavradores' role changed from being skilled winemakers to being simply growers employed by the English, who often managed their estates remotely, at first via their former comissários, but increasingly via specialised managers. The eventual end of the commodity chain, as Port production became a far more vertically-integrated operation involved a further relocation of power, from Porto to London, and the importance of new telecommunications such as the telegraph in crossing the distances between the various links.

"Most port traders saw their old, extended commodity chain collapse following the profound shift of power to those who had projected their names into the British market … In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the lavradores made small batches of wine that port exporters blended for individual retailers. As they gained skill in branding and blending, exporters abandoned the latter practice. Rather than divide the wine finely according to individual clients' tastes, they apportioned it into broad classifications to suit the volume of their business. In the process, the wines inevitably became more of a generic commodity than a carefully crafted, individualized product, as it had once been." (524)

Along the way, Duguid touches on such issues as fortification, categorisation (Forrester's testimony to the House of Commons committee on duty in 1852 is cited here), early disputes between the shippers and British merchants regarding the 'quality' of the wine, and, of course, the changing fortunes of the Portuguese involved in the Port trade. Most importantly, from the perspective of economic history, he emphasises the importance of local knowledges, and the 'socially embedded' nature of the early networks that helped to develop the many links in the chain.

This is a very good piece of work - a great deal of information from the account-books has been digested and made sense of, and the fine workings and very slow development of the trade over a long period are finely drawn out. Recommended.
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by djewesbury »

DRT wrote:
djewesbury wrote:if you have an academic or educational interest, and no institutional access to the materials
I might qualify as such.

Everything here is at your disposal if you think it would be useful to your research.
Thanks Derek - I have been browsing through your site already.
Do you have the 1836 edition of Cyrus Redding's book? Duguid describes the unfashionable nature of port in the mid-nineteenth century - Disraeli and Trollope both thought it was old-fashioned. But he says 'See also the fierce animosity of Cyrus Redding, A History and Description of Modern Wines […] London, 1836.' What does Redding say..??
Would love to have a a look at the book by Shaw, Wine, the Vine and the Cellar, too....
I am putting some interesting bits and pieces together for you.. Something might accompany your Forrester maps back to Chesterfield.
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AW77
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by AW77 »

djewesbury wrote: Paul Duguid (2007) 'The Changing of the Guard: British Firms in the Port Trade 1777-1840' (English translation of a chapter published in Gaspar Martins Pereira, ed. (2011) A História do Douro e do Vinho do Porto, vol 4: Crise e Reconstrucão, O Douro e do Vinho do Porto no Século XIX, (Porto: Afrontamento)*

-- (2007) 'The Douro and Its Wine In the English Imagination', in Gaspar Martins Pereira & Paula Montes Leal, eds., O Douro Contemporaneo (Porto: GEHVID)**

** This book seems to have gone out of print.
Here are the bibliographic records for this one.
O Douro contemporâneo : actas do / Encontro O Douro Contemporâneo / coord. Gaspar Martins Pereira, Paula Montes Leal

AUTOR(ES):
Encontro "O Douro Contemporâneo", Porto, 2006; Leal, Paula Montes, ed. lit.; Pereira, Gaspar Martins, 1956-, ed. lit.
PUBLICAÇÃO:
[S.l.] : GEHVID, 2006
DESCR. FÍSICA:
303 p. : il. ; 23 cm
ISBN:
978-972-98969-3-4
DEP. LEGAL:
PT -- 250320/06
ASSUNTOS:
Região Demarcada do Douro (Portugal) -- Congressos -- [Actas]

It's only avaiable in Portugal. So either you do an international interlibrary loan or you contact the publisher (which seems to be a society for the study of the history of viticulture in the Douro) and ask them if you still can get a copy from them:
http://web.letras.up.pt/GEHVID/all2.html

PS: In this book there is also another interesting article by Duguid:
Paul Duguid
The struggle to keep Port «the Englishman's wine»: the shipping price of Port wine, 1750s to 1908
http://web.letras.up.pt/GEHVID/publicac ... blic_0.htm
The Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt know thy Port
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by AW77 »

djewesbury wrote: Do you have the 1836 edition of Cyrus Redding's book?
You can find the complete e-book here:
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433009384300

You can also download the whole book as a pdf if you want.
The Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt know thy Port
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by djewesbury »

AW77 wrote:
djewesbury wrote: Paul Duguid (2007) 'The Changing of the Guard: British Firms in the Port Trade 1777-1840' (English translation of a chapter published in Gaspar Martins Pereira, ed. (2011) A História do Douro e do Vinho do Porto, vol 4: Crise e Reconstrucão, O Douro e do Vinho do Porto no Século XIX, (Porto: Afrontamento)*

-- (2007) 'The Douro and Its Wine In the English Imagination', in Gaspar Martins Pereira & Paula Montes Leal, eds., O Douro Contemporaneo (Porto: GEHVID)**

** This book seems to have gone out of print.
Here are the bibliographic records for this one.
I emailed Duguid about this book. Apparently GEHVID had a bit of a meltdown a few years back and the book never properly saw the light of day. I emailed them but they never replied.
AW77 wrote:PS: In this book there is also another interesting article by Duguid:
Paul Duguid
The struggle to keep Port «the Englishman's wine»: the shipping price of Port wine, 1750s to 1908
http://web.letras.up.pt/GEHVID/publicac ... blic_0.htm
You are reading the wrong line - that is the article by Bennett. It would be good to get a hold of this book (Duguid only has one) but it seems to be hard to find. Next time I'm in Porto I'll make enquiries.
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by djewesbury »

AW77 wrote:
djewesbury wrote: Do you have the 1836 edition of Cyrus Redding's book?
You can find the complete e-book here:
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433009384300

You can also download the whole book as a pdf if you want.
Download is only available to users of American universities through HathiTrust, unfortunately.
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by DRT »

I will get Redding and Shaw to you shortly :wink:
"The first duty of Port is to be red"
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djewesbury
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by djewesbury »

DRT wrote:I will get Redding and Shaw to you shortly :wink:
Thank you. *usual bow, but a little deeper*
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by mpij »

Was looking at Books About Riiculous Ideas. I do not allow such books in my house, such ideas have, however, managed to seek in through the back door in the form of verse. From the pen of Sir William Topaz McGonagall poet and Tragedian Knight of the White Elephant of Burmah I offer:
The Destroying Angel, Or The Poet's Dream
The Troubles of Matthew Mahoney.
A Tribute to Mr Murphy and the Blue Ribbon Army.
The Demon Drink.
I doubt I would find any of the books as amusing.
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Re: Books About Port and Other Stuff

Post by mpij »

Admins, if my last post of this thread makes a mess
Feel free to move it to Meaningless DRivel in the full knowledge that you can do so without causing me the least bit of ditress.
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