‘Go fetch to me a pint o’ wine’

Several Trust gardens grow vines in glasshouses, including Harmony, Malleny and Crathes, and indeed some even grow outside – at the Pineapple and Culross. Perhaps the most successful growing of grapes is in the reconstructed 19th-century vinery in the walled garden at Culzean. The rebuild was based on archaeological evidence recovered from the site, which confirmed the use of horse carcases (bones) as fertiliser. We now grow six varieties of grapes there and a previous Head Gardener at Culzean did make some wine with them!

We have some very nice examples of wine glasses in our collections, including a number of early 1700s Jacobite glasses – some are on display at Culloden and others at Kellie Castle.

We have a wealth of information in the historical records, as well as some of the stories that relate to wine importing, storage and drinking at Trust properties. They follow the general history of this topic for which Billy Kay’s book Knee Deep in Claret: A celebration of wine and Scotland is a great source of information.

Of course, wine was probably first imported into Scotland with the arrival of the Roman army to the British Isles from the 1st century BC onwards. Initially transported in amphorae, by the medieval period wooden barrels, which were less fragile and easier to move, had become the norm. At Crarae Garden, a number of sherds of 12th-century Spanish amphorae were found during our archaeological investigations there.

In the high medieval period, we have references to James IV and James V importing and consuming large quantities of wine at Falkland Palace. At Culzean Castle, in the 17th and 18th centuries the Kennedys imported wine legally through local wine merchants, but they were also heavily involved in the illegal smuggling of a range of goods (but mostly alcohol).

In 1733 John McIlvane, a local merchant, sold Sir John Kennedy ‘thirty pints of claret, eight pints of genever, three dozen bottles of claret and white wine, and seven pints of brandy’. In 1735 it was ‘two dozen bottles of white wine, six dozen claret’. In 1753 Irish smugglers/pirates intercepted a boat from the Isle of Man that included ‘two hogsheads of wine’ which were meant for Sir Thomas Kennedy. He was offered a dozen bottles of ‘best Lisbon or claret’ in compensation.

In addition to the artefacts such as bottles and glasses, the importance of wine drinking is reflected in the built fabric of many of our castles and country houses. There are a wide range of wine cellars across the Trust, for example in Brodick Castle and at Broughton House. Perhaps the most impressive example is the cellar in the basement of Culzean Castle built by Robert Adam in the 1780s. Here there are racks for hundreds of bottles on the walls of a circular room, with a vaulted ceiling held up by a central stone pillar. Although dark, on closer examination it’s easy to see, disappointingly, that the racks are all empty!

But what does survive for Culzean is a copy of the Cellar Book, which lists the numbers and types of bottles that were kept in these wine racks and sitting on the cellar floor. There was a lot of claret, but also hundreds of bottles of sherry and port.

Wine certainly played an important part in Scottish history and features quite a lot in poems and songs by Robert Burns. The opening lines of one song, My Bonnie Mary, reads ‘Go fetch to me a pint o’ wine, And fill it in a silver tassie’. If it was being consumed or served in such quantities, this might explain why such large numbers of bottles were kept and why we find so many glass shards on archaeological excavations.

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