With the sad news of Anthony Barton’s death this week, I’m posting something I wrote a few years ago for the Wine Society on the old Anglophone families who used to dominate the wine trade in Bordeaux, Oporto, Jerez, Madeira and Marsala.
Last year my wife and I were fortunate enough to have lunch with Anthony Barton (below) and his wife Eva at Chateau Langoa-Barton. As we ate the wonderfully old-fashioned French food served to us by a silent retainer and drank the impeccable wine (1982 and 1986 Leoville-Barton just to make readers extra jealous) I imagined that this is what the wine business used to be like. It was a glimpse into a time before publicity campaigns and multinationals when the Bordeaux trade was run by a small clique of English-speaking families.
It wasn’t just in Bordeaux, at one time there were British merchant colonies all over Europe, in Jerez, Malaga, Madeira and Porto, wherever good wine could be easily shipped to Britain the the Empire. These merchants created a distinct communities, neither British nor entirely of the place where they lived. In Marsala in Sicily, British merchants intermarried with local aristocrats to form a colourful hybrid community. They lived a life of lavish balls in marble palazzos as in the novel The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (memorably made into a film starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon). In the case of the merchants of Bordeaux, the majority weren’t actually British, they were Irish, Danish and German, and yet they created an English-speaking community who played cricket, and set up English-style gentleman’s clubs.
The old British families sold up in Marsala in the 1920s and in Jerez in the 1980s. In Bordeaux the Bartons are among the last of their their kind. They’re continuing a business founded by Tom ‘French Tom’ Barton who arrived in 1722 from Enniskillen. Despite this long history in France, the family have always kept a foot on the other side of the Channel. And with good reason: during the Second World War, the Germans tried to confiscate Langoa-Barton but the cook stopped them by insisting that it was owned by an Irishman, Ronald Barton, a neutral. The cook herself was Irish and waved her passport at the Germans and amazingly they went away. In fact Ronald Barton had a British passport and was a liaison office with the Free French at the time.
His nephew, Anthony Barton, who now runs the business is an Irishman though most mistake him for a pukka Englishman. Nephews like him play an important role in keeping family businesses going. Benjamin Ingham built his mighty Marsala wine business on the back of his nephews. There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that when one of these nephews, William Whitaker, died in 1818, Ingham wrote to the boy’s mother saying ‘your son is dead, send me another.’ The letter, if it ever did, no longer exists. Anthony too didn’t have the easiest relationship with his uncle when he joined the family firm in 1948. He told me that for most of the time he was paid next to nothing until he demanded a raise because he wanted to get married. The estates, Langoa and Leoville, had become rather dilapidated so when Anthony eventually took over in 1984 he made a great deal of improvements to the cellars and vineyards.
Change is often slow in the wine business. Often work instigated by one generation will only be reaped by the next. Vines need time to become productive and wine needs to mature. Madeira wine can mature for centuries. The Blandy family have been on the island since 1811. The story goes that John Blandy was sent to the island with General Beresford’s army to help defend it against Napoleon though new evidence suggests that he was actually there, like so many modern British tourists who travel to the island, for a rest cure. He evidently liked the place, decided to stay and moved into the wine business. The Blandy family now own the Madeira Wine Company who are responsible for a quarter of the island’s production. Just as with the Bartons, their business has been reinvigorated in recent years. The current chairman Chris Blandy told me “in 2011, the year of our bicentenary, the family took the decision to invest back into the wine company and it is the first time, since the 80s, we have a Blandy family member leading the company.”
It was the Symingtons of Oporto who the Blandy’s bought out to regain control of their family business. Oporto more than anywhere else in the wine world has preserved the old British atmosphere. The Factory House, the British club, is still only open to shippers from British houses. But things have changed. Whereas in the past the British, with a few honourable exceptions, led a quasi-colonial existence speaking atrocious Portuguese, now they are now far more integrated. Paul Symington, chairman of the company that owns those great names, Cockburn’s, Graham’s, Warre’s and Dow’s, is keen to stress that his home is in Portugal. Indeed he didn’t visit England until he was 13 because the family didn’t have the money to travel. Chris Blandy too thinks of himself as Madeiran rather than British.
There’s something reassuring in an age of global corporations and venture capital that families such as the Blandys, Bartons and Symingtons not only exist but are thriving. One gets the impression that stewardship and preservation are as important to them as the bottom line. It hasn’t been an easy ride. Running a family business requires tremendous diplomacy. There are always those tempting offers to sell out to multinationals. The Blandys and Symingtons are blessed with strength in depth. Paul Symington runs the business with his cousins Rupert and Johnny. His brother Dominic and cousin Charles are also involved. The Barton legacy is more fragile resting as it does with Antony and Eva’s daughter, Lilian Barton-Sartorius. Fortunately she struck me as a formidable personality, utterly committed to continuing her father’s work. When you open a bottle from Langoa-Barton or Blandy’s, or indeed the Society’s Exhibition Vintage Port, you are tasting a little bit of history. Long may their producers remain family concerns.
Henry's World of Booze 