I have not yet been to the cinema to see the latest despatch from that castellated stately home where half the inhabitants speak in a strange strangulated drawl and wear tiaras and penguin suits to dinner, while the other half toil cheerfully in Piranesian dungeons (I exaggerate slightly). Even the title Downton Abbey: A New Era has a somewhat absurd ring. In a truly new era, surely Downton Abbey would cease to exist.
The point, however, at least for the commercial backers, is that we collectively remain in thrall to the myth purveyed by Downton. The last Downton movie grossed $194 million on a budget of $13-20 million. The myth of benevolent aristocracy is immensely profitable.
Here’s how it goes. It’s a world where everyone knows their place. At the apex the Earl and Countess, despite the odd slip, are essentially benign figures, whose determination to cling on to a magnificent heritage, their immense privilege, and a rigid hierarchy, is somehow made acceptable by their essential “niceness”. In similar fashion, their daughters’ shallow and narcissistic behaviour is excused by their gorgeous frocks. One important proviso is that we must never see where the wealth, enjoyed by the very few, actually comes from. The conditions described by Dickens in Hard Times in 1854, which underwrote Victorian and Edwardian wealth, are never glimpsed or even alluded to. It’s old money, you see, with the beautiful patina of age. Of course deep down we know that the world of the 1920s or 1930s, and especially the lives of domestic servants, were not really like that at all.
So the myth of aristocracy casts a kind of glamorous veil over a much more mixed reality. Here I can add a personal note: because by a quirk of fate I was educated for four years with the sons of the Catholic aristocracy (I am neither a Catholic nor an aristocrat), I was for a time somewhat seduced by the illusion. I had a friend who lived in a magnificent half-ruined Irish castle and I went to stay there. Others were sons of the Earl of this or the Marquis of that. I gradually noticed that that this didn’t make them appreciably more intelligent or better behaved, or better qualified to be future legislators, than the ordinary run of mortals; the more I heard of their philandering, irresponsible parents the more I realised that aristocracy didn’t apply in the realm of morality.
How does any of this relate to wine? Well, wine also has its myths of aristocracy. They are centred, funnily enough, on France, the land which brought down the blade of the guillotine on its decadent aristocracy in 1789. If aristocracy is about a hierarchy which is made to look timeless by rigid and complicated rankings, ceremonial trappings and grand addresses, all designed to befuddle critical thinking, then one wine region in particular plays it in spades: Bordeaux. The 1855 classification had its origins in a meritocratic ranking by…
