Reds for reds

Wine and Socialism. The fascinating links between the left and wine.

It’s May 2nd and I presume you are hoarse from singing The Internationale yesterday.

…of course you’re not. You’re wine people. And wine is surely inherently bourgeois and the drink of the Capitalist classes obsessed with wine’s status enhancing qualities. The left is the home of teetotallers like Tony Benn, Keir Starmer Hardy, and John Burns: “I neither drink nor smoke, because my schoolmaster impressed upon me three cardinal virtues; cleanliness in person, cleanliness in mind; temperance.”

Or maybe it isn’t.

Maybe wine is the true drink of the left. It’s time to unfurl your red flag, put down your copy of Socialist Worker, and look at a brief history of wine Socialists, Marxists, Communists, and even a Maoist.

Champagne Socialists

When it comes to Socialism of the Champagne variety I am, “something of an expert”, having written a whole book chapter on the subject in the excellent “On Champagne”. I commend you to buy it. Yes, until we have free libraries under the dictatorship of the proletariat, that’s how we’ll have do this:

And it turns out that being a wine lover and a bit of a leftie goes right back to the beginning, in the form of Friedrich Engels. He was a foundational figure of Marxism co-author (with Karl Marx) of The Communist Manifesto (1848).

I’ve often wondered how much Engels’ magnificent moustache interfered with his appreciation of Champagne bubbles.

As I wrote in On Champagne, Engels…

was known by his son-in-law as "the great beheader of Champagne bottles". A biography of Engels by Tristram Hunt titled “The Frock-Coated Communist”, underlines the point with the subtitle “The Life and Times of the Original Champagne Socialist”.

And ever since Engels, Champagne Socialism has been a bit of a thing.

The first person to be called a “Champagne Socialist” was Ramsay Macdonald, the first Labour Party Prime Minister. While the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was known as a “Champagne Communist”. And today, no greater intellectual force on The Left than former Manchester United star Gary Neville, says he’s happy to be described as a Champagne Socialist.

Ramsay Macdonald, Eric Hobsbawm, and Gary Neville. Not a lineup you see everyday

As Neville put it in 2021":