There are newspapers, and then there is that old, trench‑coated beast squatting on the Thames, muttering in received pronunciation and ink fumes. For more than a century it has been quietly committing acts of vinous subversion between the obituaries and the cricket scores—smuggling fermented fruit and French heresy onto the breakfast tables of the British middle class. I’m talking about the wine columns, those polite little dispatches that look tame on the page but, read in sequence, form a long, spiraling psychodrama of Empire, class, booze, and the slow, sticky collapse of certainty.

Line them up—decades of them, yellowed and brittle—and what you have is not just a record of what claret cost in 1937, but a running X‑ray of the British psyche under the influence of alcohol. A historical anthology of these columns is less “wine writing” and more a controlled experiment in national intoxication. The lab rats can conjugate Latin, quote T.S. Eliot, and know the exact year Lafite went sideways, but they’re still rats in the maze, chasing the same sugar‑high in different vintages.

Let’s walk through the maze.

Ink, Empire, and the Birth of the Gentleman Taster

The early wine columns weren’t about pleasure so much as order. They were written for men who believed the world was a filing cabinet: claret under “Bordeaux,” Burgundy under “France,” and France under “Foreign—Manageable.” Wine was a matter of logistics and hierarchy. You didn’t “enjoy” it; you placed it—on the table, in the cellar, in the social pecking order.

The first regular wine pieces in the paper emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, orbiting around three obsessions:

1. Claret as class passport – Bordeaux, especially from the great châteaux, functioned as liquid heraldry. To know your vintages was to know your place in the system, and more importantly, to signal that you belonged near the top of it. The columns read like dispatches from a private club: “The 1899 is sound, if a touch austere; the 1900 remains the real thoroughbred.” Translation: “If you can’t tell the difference, you’re not one of us.”

2. The cellar as fortress – The columnists wrote for men who hoarded wine like munitions. Cases of port and claret, laid down for decades, were insurance policies against chaos—war, revolution, or, worse, the possibility of having to serve inferior drink to one’s guests. The tone was calm, clipped, and faintly martial. Wine was not yet pleasure; it was preparedness.

These columns were not wild or passionate. They were cool, almost bureaucratic. But underneath the starch and the cufflinks, you can sense the hum of something more dangerous: the recognition that this fermented juice had the power to bend reality, soften edges, and rearrange the furniture inside a man’s skull.

Between Wars and Bottles: Wine in an Age of Ruin

Then came the 20th century in full—World War I, the Depression, World War II. The wine columns didn’t stop. They adapted, like a butler calmly changing the tablecloth while the house burns.

Rationing and ruin crept into the prose. The writers still talked about claret and port, but now they did it with the brittle nostalgia of men describing a vanished continent. Whole vintages were swallowed by history—bottles bombed, cellars looted, estates bankrupt. Yet the column kept appearing, a weekly act of denial and defiance: civilization persists, because we still argue about the 1928 versus the 1929.

The tone shifted. There was more:

• Elegy – Long, sighing sentences about pre‑war vintages, as if the wines were fallen comrades.
• Practicality – Advice on how to drink decently in a world of shortages and price hikes. “If you cannot find decent claret, consider the better sherries.” You can almost hear the teeth grinding.
• Quiet radicalism – Hints that perhaps other regions, other grapes, might step into the breach. German Riesling crept into the columns. So did modest French regions, lesser‑known ports, the odd Italian curiosity. Necessity began to pry open the borders of the wine world.

The wine column became a strange psychological object: a little padded room where the reader could pretend that continuity and taste still existed, even as the rest of the front page screamed about rubble and ration books.

The Post‑War Boom: From Cellars to Supermarkets

By the 1950s and 60s, Britain was pulling itself upright, straightening its tie, and discovering that the world had changed while it was busy nearly dying. So had wine.

The columnists now had to grapple with two terrifying phenomena:

The post‑war wine column became an uneasy hybrid: half manual, half memoir. The writer was still the expert, the guide through a bewildering landscape of labels and vintages, but the audience was no longer a narrow caste. It was anyone with a few spare pounds and a thirst.

The Age of the Critic: Personalities, Palates, and Power

By the late 20th century, wine writing had become a blood sport. Critics were stars. Scores were weapons. The column in the paper was no longer just a genteel note from the cellar; it was a weekly proclamation from the bench of taste.

This era’s wine columns are different beasts entirely:

• Subjective and confessional – The writer’s palate, preferences, and prejudices moved to the center. “I have never loved this estate,” “I confess a weakness for mature Rioja,” “I find this style cloying.” The mask slipped. The critic stepped forward as a character.

• Global in scope – One week: Loire Chenin Blanc. Next week: Barossa Shiraz. Then Oregon Pinot, South African Chenin, Argentine Malbec. The map exploded. The old binary of “France vs. Not‑France” was dead. The column became a travelogue written from behind a tasting glass.

• Consumer‑driven – Prices, availability, supermarket promotions, online merchants—this was now part of the story. The reader wasn’t a collector with a butler; they were a civilian with a shopping basket and a budget. The column had to help them navigate a fluorescent‑lit battlefield of half‑truths and marketing lies.

And yet, paradoxically, the column also became more philosophical. When you have the whole world in your glass, you start asking stranger questions:

• What does “terroir” mean in an age of global logistics and stainless steel?
• Is a £10 bottle that gives joy more “authentic” than a £200 bottle that impresses your dentist?
• Are we drinking stories, or are we drinking fermented grape juice with delusions of grandeur?

Some writers leaned into the romance. Others into the science. Some turned the column into a weekly sermon about organic viticulture, biodynamics, and the ethics of farming. Others treated wine as a pure hedonistic sport: chase the best, drink the rarest, damn the consequences.

In an anthology, laid out year after year, you’d see these voices arguing with each other across time, all under the same masthead.

The Subtext: Class, Power, and the Theater of Taste

A historical sweep of these columns isn’t just about what people drank. It’s about who got to define what “good” meant.

From the early aristocratic dispatches to the later supermarket‑friendly guides, the same questions keep resurfacing:

Read across time, the anthology reveals a culture trying to talk about its own need to escape itself—politely, with decanters.

The Digital Deluge and the Fading Column

Then comes the internet—blogs, forums, Instagram sommeliers, TikTok wine hacks. Suddenly, the weekly print column looks like a telegram in an age of neural implants.

The more recent wine columns in the paper have to fight for relevance:

• They compete with thousands of independent voices, many of them loud, charismatic, and unconcerned with tradition.
• They confront a readership that can Google any bottle instantly, check reviews, and compare prices in seconds.
• They exist in a world where attention is the rarest commodity, and a 2,000‑word meditation on vintage variation in Pauillac is a hard sell against a 30‑second reel of someone sabering Prosecco on a rooftop.

And yet, the column persists. Why?

Because when done properly, it offers what the algorithm cannot:

• A coherent voice over time
• A sense of history and continuity
• A filter, however flawed, against the chaos of choice

In a full historical anthology, the late‑stage columns would read like dispatches from a besieged outpost of long‑form thinking, still trying to connect the dots between a 1961 claret and a 2021 natural wine from the Jura, still insisting that context matters, that taste is learned, that pleasure is richer when you know where it comes from.

Why This Anthology Matters: More Than Just Old Bottles

Put the whole thing together—decades of columns, from dusty claret worship to orange‑wine debates—and what you have is not just a record of wines, but a record of ways of being:

• The stiff‑upper‑lip era where wine was armor.
• The post‑war scramble where wine was consolation and curiosity.
• The consumer age where wine became a product, a lifestyle, a hobby, a trap.
• The digital age where wine is content, branding, identity, and sometimes, mercifully, still just a damn good drink.

A historical anthology of these columns is a time machine with a hangover. You watch language evolve: “cordial” and “sound” give way to “fruit‑forward” and “minerality.” You watch prejudices erode: the sneering at New World wines softens into admiration, then acceptance, then dependence. You watch the critic’s mask slip: from anonymous authority to named personality to semi‑celebrity.

Most of all, you watch a culture negotiate its relationship with intoxication, status, and pleasure—one bottle, one paragraph at a time.

In the end, the real subject of these columns is not wine. It’s control versus surrender.

• The cellar, the tasting note, the careful decanting—all control.
• The second glass, the loosened language, the feeling that maybe tomorrow can wait—that’s surrender.

The anthology shows a century‑plus of people trying to choreograph that dance, to ritualize it, to make it safe, respectable, even noble. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they just get drunk in very expensive ways.

But reading those columns in sequence, you realize something bracing: for all the changes in style, price, region, and rhetoric, the basic human project has not shifted an inch. We are still the same animals, staring into a glass of fermented grape juice and asking it to make the world a little softer, a little stranger, a little more bearable.

And every week, on that thin slab of newsprint, someone tried to explain how.