Peter Jackson column

Jun 22 2006 By Peter Jackson, The Journal

Whitbread's shares were up earlier in the week, valuing the company at £2.88bn.

Once, success for Whitbread, a name practically synonymous with beer, would have signalled success for the whole brewing industry.

But not now the company no longer brews beer or runs pubs, but rather derives its profits from budget hotels and coffee bars.

And if that were not enough to have 18th Century founder Samuel Whitbread spinning in his grave, then the news from Majestic Wine might, when, on the same day, it reported a 10% rise in pre-tax profits to £14.3m.

Last year the UK wine market grew 4.3% and that followed growth rates of 5% or 6% in preceding years.

As a nation, we may not yet be like the poet Betjeman, who wrote:

"Until I feel a filthy swine/For loathing beer and liking wine", but we are rapidly getting there.

This represents a cultural revolution for the British, who have, with bulldog determination until recent years, remained stubbornly resistant to the foreign attractions of wine. William Winch Hughes, the founder of Victoria Wine, told a House of Commons Select Committee in 1879 how he had tried to encourage working class people in London's East End to acquire a taste for wine by offering it for sale at a penny a glass.

But, as he testified, the experiment was a failure and after some initial success people went back to the beer and spirits they knew and loved.

Then, only a few decades later, hundreds of thousands of British working class men serving on the Continent in the First World War drank hundreds of thousands of gallons of wine.

But look what happened to the import of French wines in the years following the Great War.

The level fell from 3.7 million gallons in 1920 to 1.9 million gallons in 1938, which was the lowest level since the duty had been lowered more than 75 years earlier.

Admittedly, this was compensated for by increases in imports from Australia and South Africa, but these were sweet wines, not the wines troops drank in Flanders, nor the kind Majestic Wine sells today.

There seems to have been a sea change in our drinking habits that indicates we may finally be becoming true Europeans.