Swindled

by Bee Wilson

  Hardly anyone disputes that the past three decades have seen a transformation in consumer knowledge of wine. In 1976, when wine critic Robert Parker, then a young lawyer, established his famous 100-point system, wine drinking was a minority interest, an arcane pursuit, in both Britain and the United States. By 2006, new research was predicting that U.S. wine consumption would overtake that of the French within three years. Most of the wine being drunk is modest stuff, which may not rank highly on a Parker scale, but there is, nevertheless, much greater consumer awareness of how good wines should taste. Thanks to the efforts of Parker in the United States and Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson in Britain, and of films such as Sideways, you no longer have to be a “wine buff” to know that sauvignon blanc might taste of gooseberries or that shiraz (or syrah) has overtones of chocolate. This knowledge might seem useless, but it is actually very powerful. Jancis Robinson argues that “passing off has become increasingly difficult and, just possibly, less rewarding as wine consumers become ever more sophisticated and more concerned with inherent wine quality.”42 In the 1950s, there were cases of “fine” wine merchants buying a single vat of wine and passing it off as Beaune or Beaujolais or Burgundy, depending on what the customer asked for.43 It is much harder to imagine anyone getting away with this now. Cyrus Redding was right. “The best test against adulterated wine is a perfect acquaintance with that which is good”; and this acquaintance is far more widespread now than at any time in the past.

  It would be naive, though, to suppose that wine adulteration is entirely a thing of the past. Many are concerned by the rising alcohol levels in red wine, from around 12 percent in the early 1980s to around 14 percent now, a result of the vogue for very sticky reds, particularly in the New World. Such wines can make drinkers far drunker far quicker than they had intended. On the other hand, at least the alcohol content is stated on the label.

  Periodic scandals still rock the wine world. In 2005, a South African producer, KWV, was found to have added artificial flavouring to two batches of sauvignon blanc.44 In 2006, the best-known producer of Beaujolais, George Duboeuf, was charged with tweaking some of his wines with non-Beaujolais grapes, a charge Duboeuf appealed against.45 More serious was the Austrian antifreeze scandal of 1985, when a hundred Austrian wine-makers were indicted with boosting the body and sweetness of their wines with diethylene glycol, a chemical used in antifreeze.46 The next year came the Italian methanol affair, which killed more than twenty people: gallons of cheap Italian wines were found to be adulterated with methyl alcohol, a toxic version of alcohol that can cause blindness or death. Yet the net result for wine quality of this skulduggery was probably beneficial: a new artisanal wine industry sprung up in Italy to eradicate the memory of the scandal. In the past, one wine scandal was likely to lead to another, putting ideas into the heads of those who might not otherwise have contemplated the fraud. Now, one wine scandal is likely to lead to better enforcement of standards. On balance, wine is purer, more honestly labelled, and—possibly—more delicious than at any time in the past.

  All this improvement has happened in the last hundred years, a mere fraction of the total history of wine consumption. During the long period when there were no reliable tests for the quality of wine, drinkers keen to assert their rights tended to fall back on the business of quantity instead. Alongside the enduring and largely futile search for better wine, therefore, went another, apparently contradictory quest: for accurate and honest measures, recalling the Woody Allen joke from Annie Hall: “The food here is terrible.” “Yes, and such small portions.” The wine was often terrible and sometimes noxious. And still consumers wanted to make sure they were getting their full measure of it.

  Weights and Measures

  Being short-changed is unquestionably a nasty feeling. It makes you feel foolish, to be given a pint of beer that is all head and no beer, or to be charged for a kilo of plums when all you have bought is a pound, or to leave a shop and find that you are a lemon short or that you’ve been slipped a mouldy punnet of berries in place of the fresh ones you saw on display. You are left simmering with a mixture of embarrassment and rage. Do you return to the shop and confront the seller, giving yourself an inconvenient journey and risking an aggressive dispute at the end of it? Or do you let your resentment simmer away, because you feel powerless to do anything about it? This dilemma goes back a long way. Giving short weight is surely one of the oldest of all the food and drink swindles. Traditionally, or so the joke goes, merchants had three sets of weights: a heavy one for buying, so they got more than their fair share; a light one for selling, so they gave less than they should; and an accurate set for themselves, so that they knew what things really weighed. The potential dishonesty of sellers has always been one of the earliest concerns of the law.

  Magna Carta, the peace treaty signed by King John and his rebellious barons at Runnymede in 1215, is now seen mainly as a noble and lofty document about liberty. It established the principle of habeas corpus, protecting the citizen against wrongful imprisonment, and has been revered through the ages as the cornerstone of constitutional justice. But in truth it was a ragbag of a charter, the work of many hands and minds, a solution to diverse grievances, which settled none of them adequately. And if it was concerned with liberty, it was no less concerned with fair measures for ale and wine. Article 35 reads: “There shall be one measure of wine throughout all our kingdom, and one measure of ale, and one measure of corn, namely the quarter of London.”

  Behind this bland statement lay a politically fraught but hugely potent alliance. On the one hand, there were the consumers, fighting an often losing battle to be served an honest measure of food and drink. On the other, there was the British crown, seeking a standardized measure as a way of spreading the rule of law, regularizing commerce and getting the full amount of any customs or sales tax due to the Exchequer. Establishing agreed weights and measures was one of the first aims of good governance; but it was easier said than done.

  William the Conqueror had commanded that all weights and measures be uniform and stamped with his seal to authenticate them. The weights and measures he chose were Anglo-Saxon ones, the standards for which William installed first in Winchester and then in the crypt at Westminster Abbey as a sign of his control over his new kingdom. Despite this, there was huge regional variation in the weights and measures used. “A pound” of corn in York might be very different from “a pound” of corn in Hastings. This was partly because—despite the crown’s attempts to unify—some localities clung to regional standards of measurement. Back in Celtic times, each tribe had had its own system of units tailored to the particular needs of the group; in places, this practice survived. Measures of ale might vary even from one hamlet to the next. Oversight was haphazard to say the least, and it has been reported that “the alewife who was thought to have given short measure would soon be the alewife floating in the village pond.”47

  Even national standards, insofar as they existed, fluctuated. Units of weight were determined essentially by the weights of grain and money. The basic unit was the grain of barley—or later, the grain of wheat, which is marginally lighter. The old Etruscan pound used by the Romans was 4,210 grains, but as new coinage was introduced, the pound rose in weight. The Saxon king Offa (r. 757–96) brought in a new “moneyer’s pound” to correspond with his new silver penny, the sterlingus. Offa wanted twenty of these pennies to designate an ounce (450 grains) and twelve ounces to a pound (5,400 grains). Over time, different weights were set up for measuring different things. The wool pound of 6,992 grains was heavier than the tower pound of 5,400 grains used for measuring coins and the troy pound of 5,760 grains, used to measure gunpowder. Today we use the avoirdupois pound, the word deriving from the French for “goods of eight,” equivalent to 7,000 grains.

  The situation was further complicated by the fact that most of the countries that Britain did trade with—Scotland, France, Flanders, the German Hansa, Italy—had their own weights and measures, which di
d not correspond with the British ones. The North German commercial pound corresponded to 6,750 grains of wheat, while the old Etruscan pound was 4,210 grains and the Saxon pound was 7,680 grains. The crown’s difficulty in cutting through this confusion is shown by Richard I’s Assize of Measures of 1197. It called for uniform measures throughout England but did not say what these measures should be. Magna Carta did at least state that the measurement for corn should be the London quarter—equivalent to eight bushels. But it named no measures for wine and ale.

  As the Middle Ages progressed, the crown’s attempt at standardizing weights and measures became more effective. In 1266, exact weights were set for both bread and wine, and it was also decreed that an English penny “round and without any clipping, shall weigh 32 wheat corns.” The crown had a keen interest in fighting fraud. In 1380, new regulations were set for wine measures imported into England, Wales, and Ireland. Parliament ordered that the king’s “gaugers” carefully check the measurements of all incoming casks and punish those who refused to surrender them.48 In 1389, Richard II decreed that all illegal weights and measures be burned. This was to counter the problem of merchants “hastily repairing illegal weights and measures to pass government inspections and then afterwards counterfeiting them to suit local preferences.”49 All kinds of sharp practice evidently went on, such as installing a larger than statutory measure with a false bottom, which would be removed after it had been inspected. Even when weights had not been tampered with, standard weights and measures often got worn down through wear and tear and were therefore far less accurate than modern platinum and gold standards. If wooden, standards became worm-eaten. If made of lead, iron, or brass they would oxidize. They were also continually expanding and contracting in the weather. A brass yard-bar was shorter in winter than summer because the metal expanded in the heat.50

  Yet for all these problems, the question of weights and measures— unlike the question of the quality of wine—was at least something that the state understood. Policing weights and measures was one of the fundamental duties of all town officials.51 The crown—or Parliament—did its best to set standards. These were then distributed to all the shires and from there to all the towns, where the physical measures were often attached to the walls of local municipal buildings. Finally (as of 1266), six “lawful” men went out to gather the weights and measures of individual businessmen in the town and test them for any variance from the crown standard. It was law that each local weight or measure had to be inscribed in legible script with its owner’s name.52 Punishment for false weight was usually the pillory.

  This policing was also extended to particular foodstuffs, chief among them being bread. There is an old saying that if you put a baker on the scales after he dies, he will be found to be of short weight. Nevertheless, governments have always tried to prevent bread being sold under weight or at unfair prices. One of the primary functions of the British state—and in this respect it resembled other states—was to set the weight of bread and, up to a point, describe its composition. Unlike wine, whose quality was, as we have seen, largely a mystery until the twentieth century, bread was a substance whose quality could be clearly defined and gauged. The state therefore did not have to confine itself to questions of quantity when it came to bread; it could deal in quality too. The whole community knew what good bread was. It was the duty of the state to ensure that they got it.

  The Policing of Bread

  Fifty years after his accession, in 1266, King Henry III promulgated his famous Assize of Bread and Ale. Though it would be tinkered with over the years, the assize remained a part of British law for over six centuries, only finally being abolished in London in 1822, two years after Accum’s Treatise on Adulterations appeared.53 The assize regulated the weight, price, and composition of bread to a remarkably precise degree. It stipulated the size and price of a loaf of bread, depending on fluctuations in the grain market. For example, when a quarter of wheat sold for twelve pence, a standard wastel loaf (costing a farthing) must weigh 6.8 troy pounds. When a quarter of wheat sold for three shillings, the weight of a wastel loaf went down to 2.4 troy pounds. This was to stop bakers from profiteering. For most of history, baking has been seen not just as a trade but as a public duty. Bakers were expected to extract a certain number of loaves from a certain weight of flour. They could not make up recipes according to whim but had to tailor them precisely to the economic needs of the community.

  A medieval manuscript referring to the Assize of Bread.

  The 1266 assize mentions seven different kinds of loaf. Wastel bread was the standard superior loaf, which varied in weight depending on the price of corn. It was white and eaten by the rich. Cocket bread was like wastel, but made of slightly inferior flour. Simnel bread was a rich cakey thing, also eaten by the wealthy. Bread of whole wheat (panis integer) was the bread eaten by the masses, unless they were really poor, in which case they might eat treet or “household bread” made of coarse brown unbolted meal; poorer still, and you would have to torture your stomach with something called “bread of common wheat” or “horse bread,” a loaf made from the miller’s refuse, which cost half as much as the cocket bread.

  Horse bread may not have been very nice, but at least those eating it were not being swindled. The point of the law was precisely to ensure that no deception took place. Both millers and bakers were strictly regulated. If you were a maker of coarse bread in London, you were not allowed to sell any fine bread, the obvious implication being that there was a danger of being slipped a coarse loaf for a fancy one. At Ipswich, similarly, there were four categories of bakers. One lot (the most skilful, it seems) were allowed to bake best cocket, wastel, and treet; another lot, only simnel and treet; a third group, whole wheat and second-class cocket; and the lowliest bakers could make only whole wheat and common wheat bread. Thus, the consumer, whether rich or poor, was protected.

  The modern supermarket loaf is almost completely anonymous. To whom do you complain, if you are sold a bad loaf—one that is stale or underbaked or corrupted with foreign bodies? Not to the person who baked it. Their role has been reduced to little more than that of a machine operator. Instead, the person ostensibly “responsible” will be some customer care manager in an office untouched by yeast and flour. In this way, the aggrieved customer never really sees his or her score settled. You might be given some token monetary compensation, but you are never truly able to say you have held to account the person who made the thing you put into your mouth. Effectively, this is food with no person behind it. By contrast, bread in the Middle Ages was personal. Bakers were obliged to indent the bread with their seal, so that if they did break the assize, it would be easy to track them down and hold them accountable. This seal could be a mark of pride, if the bread was especially good, or of shame, if it was tampered with, or of short weight, or made with the wrong flour. Bakers were obliged to sell bread by their own hand, or that of their servants, and were not allowed to use middlemen.54

  Such measures acted as strong disincentives to malpractice. In addition, at least four times a year, bakers and millers were inspected by bailiffs, mayors, or other town officials, who checked that the assize was being observed. Despite this policing, there were always a few bakers who broke the assize. A sixteenth-century writer railed against them, saying that “the poor cry out” and “the rich find fault” with bread, while “the Lord Mayor and the Sheriffs . . . every day walk abroad and weigh your bread, and yet all will not serve to make you honest men.”55 Local court records show numerous cases of bakers selling defective loaves, though almost always of short weight rather than badly composed.

  Yet if the law did not ensure universal honesty, it did mete out regular punishment when dishonesty was detected. London bakers seem to have been singled out for retribution. The first time a baker was caught swindling, he was drawn from a hurdle from the Guildhall, through the dirtiest streets, with the bad loaf hanging from his neck. The second time, he was drawn from the Guildhall through Che
ap Street, with his head and hands locked through a wooden pillory, for all to ridicule. The third time, the poor wretch was dragged on a hurdle, his oven was dismantled, and he was forced to swear that he would never again practise the trade of baking in the City of London.56 In later centuries and in other towns, the punishments were often more lenient. In Southampton in the fifteenth century, the norm seems to have been confiscation of the offending bread, plus a fine, often quite a modest one.

  Though the punishments varied from place to place and time to time, what remained universal was that people knew the composition of bread, in a way that few people do nowadays. Some might say this is a sign of our luck. We can afford not to scrutinize the dubious contents of a sliced loaf, because we have plenty of other things to eat. By contrast, our ancestors had no choice but to know the composition of bread since they depended on it for their subsistence. This explains the widespread mistrust of miller and bakers: they were suspected because people depended on them to fill their bellies. Baker’s bread was relatively expensive, and the majority of poorer households avoided the potential swindling of bakers by kneading their own dough at home, forming it into loaves and baking it in communal town ovens, or else in a bakeshop. But they still depended on the miller, who was often seen as a malign figure hoarding more than his share of the grain that he was meant to grind for the whole community. As the miller says in the old song “The Miller of Dee,” “I care for nobody, no, not I / If nobody cares for me.”

  In prerevolutionary France, similarly, millers and bakers were demonized—often unfairly—precisely because their job was so important. “To eighteenth-century Parisians the presence of bad bread in the markets or shops was an intolerable affront and menace. It signalled either an act of social crime or a mark of social breakdown”57— social breakdown, because in eighteenth-century Paris, as in medieval Britain, the baking of bread was highly controlled, and bad bread was a sign that basic law and order had failed. As in Britain, the greatest problem was short weight. Stephen Laurence Kaplan, the great historian of French bread, calculated that the bread lost to consumers through short weight in Paris alone would have been enough to feed “several thousand families.”58