When on a visit to one of Cognac’s numerous distillery tours, you will almost certainly hear from your tour guide that the Dutch played an important role in the emergence of France’s most iconic spirit. The word ‘brandy’ itself, you will be told, derives from the Dutch brandewijn. But how did this occur? What was it exactly that the Dutch did? When? And why the Dutch? Let's try to figure this out.
From roughly 1580 to about 1670 the Dutch merchants have been at the forefront of stimulating new commercial activities and advancing associated technological developments all across Europe. During this so called ‘Golden Age’, the United Provinces of the Netherlands have bound the entire continent through their trade networks and became a leading financial centre as well as the world’s most important intellectual and cultural entrepôt.
Surprising as the rise of the Dutch economic power in the early modern period may have seemed to contemporaries, it had solid foundations. The key reasons for the brisk development of the Netherlands are very well summed up in a petition submitted to Charles V by the States of Holland in 1548:
It is noticeably true that the province of Holland is a very small country, small in length an even smaller in breadth, and almost enclosed by sea on three sides. […] Wherefore the inhabitants of the said country in order to make a living for their wives, children and families, must maintain themselves by handicrafts and trades, in such wise that they fetch raw materials from foreign lands and re-export the finished products […].
Thanks to the geographical location of the ‘Low Countries’ – in the mouths of three great rivers and at the crossroads of main international trade routes – they became an important transit point where merchandise from Southern Europe was exchanged for products coming from the Baltic region. As the passage above explains, the Dutch quickly learned how to add value by processing raw materials arriving to their ports into finished goods, which they then sold on international markets.
Dutch Merchant Ships at Anchor or under Easy Sail in a Moderate Breeze, Willem van de Velde I (ca. 1658). The Robert Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
At first, it was the indigenous textile industry that formed the backbone of the local economy. Spanish and English wool was brought to the Low Countries in great quantities to be transformed into cloths and draperies, which were then exported to the Mediterranean. Textile industry was labour-intensive, so its development required large segments of rural population to relocate into cities. Rapid urbanization, in turn, fuelled the need for imported foodstuffs, notably grain.
The Baltic grain trade (which the Dutch themselves characteristically referred to as the ‘mother of all trades’) sparked the development of new industries. Baltic markets were interested in salted herring, so it has boosted the fishing industry. Increased demand for fishing and trading vessels gave rise to extensive shipbuilding. This required sails, ropes, masts, and other shipping equipment to be manufactured in the Netherlands, for which large amounts of flax, hemp, tar, and timber had to be brought from Poland, Russia, and Sweden. Grain trade even stimulated the production of such goods as tiles and bricks – these were used as ballast for the Dutch ships on their voyages to Baltic ports.
Another bulky product that could very well serve this purpose was wine. Beer continued to be the everyday drink of choice in Northern Europe, so wine wasn’t an absolute necessity in this part of the world and for a long time remained a luxury commodity, but it was still in great demand. Since climate prevented the growing of grape vines locally, wine could only be imported from abroad. Its high value more than absorbed freight charges and could turn very hefty profit for the merchants – and the better the perceived quality of the wine, the more money it could bring them.
Back then it was the degree of sweetness and alcoholic strength that determined the wine’s price. Sweeter and heavier wines were considered to be the best in terms of taste, they were also believed to have medicinal and restorative powers and were usually consumed at the end of or after dinner, or as an aperitif. The most prized sweet wines during this period were coming from Greece – Peloponnese, Crete, Cyprus, and the Aegean islands. Most often they were sold in Europe under the name of Malvasia (‘Malmsey’ in English). This was nothing but a denomination of origin – the name related to the port of embarkation for the wines in question, Napoli di Malvasia (today’s Monemvasia) on the east coast of the Peloponnese.
Perspective view of Malvasia in Vincenzo Coronelli, Citta, fortezze, isole, e porti principali dell'Europa, in planta, et in elevatione, descritte e publicate ad uso dell'Accademia cosmografica degli Argonauti (1689)
Before the Dutch, international trade – including luxury wine business – was controlled by Venetian merchants. After the sack of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204, Venice has annexed Crete and for several centuries Venetian state-sponsored galleys were taking Cretan and other honey-sweet Greek wines across Mediterranean all the way to the Atlantic coasts of Spain and Portugal, as well as to England and Flanders. Their precious cargo even got as far as Moscow – in 1525, a noted Italian historian Paolo Giovio wrote in a treatise which was based on his interviews with the Russian envoy to the Pope:
Being deprived of native wine, they [the Muscovites] are in the habit of using imported one: but only during great feasts, and at the Communion. Above all, they honour sweetish Cretan [wine], but use it only in medicinal purposes or as a display of luxury: as if by miracle, after having been brought from Crete through the Strait of Cadiz, confined at sea and agitated by oceanic waves, its smoothness and dignified odour are enjoyed uncorrupted among the snows of Scythia.
During the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century, changing geopolitical context gradually put an end on Venetian wine trade as wine-producing regions in the Aegean Sea one by one fell to the Ottomans (Monemvasia was seized by the Turks in 1540, Cyprus in 1571, and most of Crete in 1648). As a result, sweet Greek wine – the luxurious commodity that was consumed in Europe for centuries – disappeared from the international market.
Even before the supply of genuine Malvasia had dried out completely, its major success among Western European consumers stimulated the appearance of numerous imitations, with Madeiran and Canarian wines often marketed under the same name. To recreate Aegean sweet and powerful taste, Greek winemaking techniques started to be (and some still are) applied for wine production in mainland Portugal and Spain. These included sun-drying the grapes before vinification, cutting of fermented with new wine, or boiling the must (as in today’s vin cuit). Such techniques allowed to stop fermentation prematurely and raised sugar levels in the end product, creating rich and luscious wine. Just as with the original Greek Malmseys, higher sugar content also enhanced the longevity of wine, making it more suitable for long-distance travel.
Because during most of the sixteenth century the Netherlands were part of the Spanish Habsburg Empire, Dutch merchants have been frequent visitors to Spain’s ports in the Bay of Biscay. They were bringing cereals and timber from the Baltic and exchanged those for cheap and abundant salt from the Iberian coast. A trade triangle connecting Flanders and Holland with Spain and Portugal in the south and the Baltic grain ports in the north was formed, with the Dutch ships going first to the Iberian Peninsula for salt, then to the Baltic to deliver the salt and load with grain, and then finally sailing back home, all within one maritime season.
Salt Flats at Le Croisic, Lambert Doomer (ca. 1671-1673). Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts Endowment Fund and Gift of the Achenbach Graphic Arts Council, Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco
Salt was indispensable to the Dutch Baltic trade, and Holland’s own herring industry heavily depended on it – but as was already mentioned, another commodity that greatly interested Dutch merchants and played a significant role in their exports to the Baltic was wine. Of course, the Dutch have been trading not just Spanish, but other wines, too – including the ones from France. Dutch captains were familiar with French Atlantic ports, drawn by barley from the Marans region needed for Holland’s numerous breweries. Also, Iberian salt carried to the North was supplemented with some quantities of salt from the marshes near La Rochelle. It is therefore not surprising that throughout the sixteenth century Dutch ships also took on wines from France. But, compared to their Greek, Iberian, or even Rhenish counterparts, most French wines in this period were considered to be of inferior quality. For example, the price for a barrel of Poitou wine on the Amsterdam wholesale market in early seventeenth century was around 50 guilders, while Spanish wine could fetch well over 300. French wines also didn’t travel well and because of this were rarely suitable for re-export once in the Netherlands. Naturally, merchants from the Low Countries preferred Spanish ‘Malvasayen', making Iberian sweet wine a very important segment of the Dutch alcohol trade.
It all changed in the 1570s, when the Dutch Protestant leaders set off a full-scale uprising against the repressive regime of the Spanish General-Governor, Duke of Alba. In reaction to the revolt the Spanish Crown imposed a series of embargoes restricting commerce with the rebellious provinces, the most severe one coming into force with the accession of Philipp III in 1598 and lasting until a temporary ceasefire was agreed in 1609. The Dutch have retaliated with counter sanctions, and navigation to Spain virtually collapsed.
As a result, a serious shift in the international wine trade occurred. Dutch entrepreneurs were forced to diversify their supply chains, expanding traffic to Aquitaine and switching to French products in those categories where they could. To be sure, for quite some time French ports on the Atlantic were used as transfer stations for illegal transshipment of a variety of merchandise to Spain and of Spanish goods – wine among them – to the Netherlands. Embargo evasion schemes included labelling wine that was originating from Iberia as ‘French’. However, with the conflict between the Habsburgs and the Dutch Republic not showing any signs of abating, merchants from Holland had to come up with a way to replace embargoed wines with a similar proposition that was not coming from Spain.
The Wine Connoisseurs, Jacob Duck (ca. 1640-1642). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
The problem was that, as discussed above, most of French wines of the era had nothing to do with the grands vins of today. They were ordinary and weak, and generally had to be consumed very young as they didn’t last long. One solution was to enhance the taste of such wines and boost their longevity by adding sugar or mixing them with sweeter wines. By the turn of the seventeenth century, the Dutch had already mastered these and other adulteration methods, but disguising inferior product and passing it off as a higher quality one was risky for wine traders and ultimately proved to be a short-lived practice since it was considered as fraud by both authorities and consumers.
Instead, the Dutch began to experiment with various techniques aimed at increasing residual sugar in wine by arresting fermentation (what was called muetter in French, or stommen in Dutch). One such technique, for example, involved burning sulphur above the must or by fumigating the barrels. The practice of using sulphur dioxide to ‘silence’ the wine was known in German lands since at least mid-fifteenth century, as is witnessed by several imperial decrees which forbade sulphuring the barrels. Indeed, such treatment of both the wine and the barrels was seen as potentially harmful for the health of drinkers and in 1613 the Dutch government finally intervened by banning the import of any wines produced in this way.
Another highly efficient method of stopping fermentation and thus controlling sugar and alcohol content in wine was dashing it with brandy. The word ‘brandy’ was indeed coined from the Dutch brandewijn (literary meaning ‘burnt wine’), which itself derives from the German branntwein – expectedly so, as it was in fifteenth-century Germany that distillation, until then practiced only by alchemists and apothecaries, becomes widespread. This process accelerated with the invention of the printing press: manuals on distilling were among the first books to be printed. One of the earliest and most comprehensive was Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus by Hieronymus Brunschwig, written in German (despite its Latin title) and first published in 1500 in Strasbourg. Immensely successful both in its original format and as a revised, longer version called Liber de arte distillandi de compositis (1512), it was soon translated into other languages with the Dutch Die distellacien en virtuyten der watere (1517) being the first foreign edition of the book.
The Bitter Potion, Adriaen Brouwer (ca. 1636-1638). Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Although at a later stage Holland became famous for its grain-distilled and juniper-flavoured jenever, during the sixteenth and most of the seventeenth centuries the base liquid for making brandewijn was, as the name itself suggests, wine (grain spirits only gained acceptance toward the end of the seventeenth century, the main argument against their popularization being that it would increase bread prices for the poor and threaten limited grain reserves). Distilled wine served as a basis for various herbal tinctures; occasionally it was also consumed – still predominantly as a medicine – on its own. However, it appears that until well into the seventeenth century brandy in the Netherlands was most often employed as an intermediate product used to strengthen other wine types. The fact that its production was almost exclusively in the hands of wine traders testifies to this.
During the seventeenth century, Dutch towns began to increasingly specialize in certain commodities, and it was Rotterdam that emerged as a centre of wine and brandy trade. Already in 1618, the city council announced that this industry was Rotterdam’s number one economic activity. Rotterdam wine traders quickly understood that they could transform those wines that arrived from France not in their best shape into spirits, which could then be used for fortification of other wines. They have developed a true expertise in brandy production, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Schiedam, which today is a western suburb of Rotterdam, ultimately became the distilling capital of the Netherlands – by the beginning of the nineteenth century there were almost 400 distilleries in this town alone.
Distiller’s Workshop, engraving by Jan Luyken (between 1659 and 1712)
The most forward-thinking Dutch entrepreneurs soon realized that they could export their advanced expertise as distillers and set up brandewijn production at the very source of the raw material. Distilling some of the second-rate wines ‘on the spot’ made a lot of sense because it reduced the volume of the liquid to be transported and therefore significantly decreased the cost of shipping. Records indicate that as early as in 1595 a Dutch merchant called Tuelichon, “resident of La Rochelle”, was already selling eau-de-vie by the cask, 20 barrels on one occasion and 22 on another. In 1609, Antoine Casteleyn of Dordrecht has been operating five stills in Nantes and four in Rezé, from where he shipped brandy to La Rochelle for export. In 1624, two other Dutchmen, Messrs. Van Der Boogvert and Loo Dewijck, built a distillery in Tonnay-Charente to process wines from upstream production areas – which most certainly included Cognac and its surrounding vineyards. It is precisely around this period that brandewijn Conjack appears in the Dutch sources for the first time with a specific mention of its place of origin, being highly appreciated for its quality and therefore commanding good prices.
Before the siege and capture of La Rochelle by Louis XIII’s forces in 1628, it was mainly this Huguenot stronghold in western France that exported wines and brandies from the region into the Low Countries – and served as a key point in their clandestine trade with Iberia. The fall of La Rochelle and its loss of free port status turned Nantes into the new transfer station on the way from the Dutch Republic to Spain.
The choice of Nantes by the Dutch as their next commercial hub was motivated not only by direct access to wines from the Loire valley, but also by the presence in this city of Contractation de Nantes – a group of French and Iberian negotiants who had preferential status and various trading privileges, including customs benefits, at the Spanish port of Bilbao. Among its members, Contractation had a significant number of Sephardic families who moved to France following the expulsion of Jews from Spain in the end of the fifteenth century. This Sephardic diaspora had close ties with the Jewish community in the Netherlands on the one hand, and with Spanish merchants of Jewish origin who converted to Christianity and continued to operate from Iberia, on the other. This and the fact that the surge of the Dutch activity in Nantes began not so long after the Twelve-Year Truce between runaway provinces and Spain expired and the new embargo kicked in confirms that the Spanish factor was still defining the commercial strategies in the Low Countries and that Spanish goods remained in high demand there. Among those, strong and sweet Iberian wines continued to dictate consumer preferences, justifying further investments in the search for non-sanctioned alternatives.
Governors of the Wine Merchants' Guild, Ferdinand Bol (1659). Alte Pinakothek, Munich
For the inferior French wines to tap into the market share of Malvasia, the Dutch started adding grape spirit to the fermenting must to cut short the fermentation and thus retain some of the sugars in the wine and make it sweeter as well as increase its alcohol content. Here is how David Hancock describes in his Oceans of Wine (2009) the production process of eighteenth-century Madeira, another reinvention of celebrated Greek wines:
After producers placed the must in the vat, they introduced brandy according to their discretion and thereby stopping the first alcoholic fermentation. A second or insensible fermentation from lactic acid bacteria often ensued. After three or more months of letting the concoction settle, the producer added more brandy. Finally, at the time of exportation, the shipper introduced yet more. Multiple fortifications made for an exceptionally potent drink.
This method must be very similar to the one employed a hundred years earlier by the Dutch who tried to create a marketable substitute for wine à la grecque. The still existing pineau des Charentes, a fortified aperitif wine made in western France from either fresh grape juice or a blend of lightly fermented grape must to which eau-de-vie is added, is clearly a direct descendant of the ersatz Malmsey produced by ‘Flemish merchants’ in seventeenth-century France (it is not a coincidence that even today Belgium and the Netherlands account for around eighty percent of the global sales of this product).
For a mass production of relatively cheap, homogenized, and stable sweet white wine large quantities of brandewijn were needed, for which the Dutch have dramatically increased the exports of distillation equipment to France. According to the records, 235 brandy stills were imported to Nantes in 1631 alone. To be able to apply the Dutch distillation know-how in situ and to better manage supplier relationships, some Rotterdamers have relocated to Nantes. These were often sons and nephews of established wine traders who themselves remained in the Netherlands – the practice of sending future heirs abroad to serve as family firm representatives at the early stages of their careers was quite common back then. Among the Dutch entrepreneurs in Nantes, there were even some females: for example, when the abovementioned Antoine Casteleyn died in 1626, his widow Machteltgen Michielsdr (a granddaughter of Rotterdam’s most prominent brewer) continued to manage local operations by herself.
Agents and managers were not the only expatriates from the Low Countries residing in France in this period. The Dutch wine trading community in Nantes preferred to employ their compatriots as supervisors, grape processors, warehouse workers, and especially barrel makers. Coopers back in the day not only made casks but also took care of rebarreling and were in charge of properly storing the wines and brandies and enhancing them if needed. As a result, many became specialists in blending, and were much sought after as valuable experts. Moreover, the quality of the French casks was not considered by the Dutch as satisfatory, so not only skilled coopers were brought over from the Republic but even the barrel wood itself. Local barrel makers attempted to seize back the control of their trade by filing official complaints, but the authorities always sided with the foreigners – the need for high-quality casks even for French wine producers was such that Dutch-made barrels were indispensable.
The Cooper. From Jan Luyken, Het Menselyk Bedryf ("The Book of Trades") (1694)
Local coopers were not the only ones who complained about the Dutch activities in the region. In 1645, the French merchants of Nantes submitted the Moyens d’Intervention in which they reported numerous violations of their privileges by the Dutch and declared that traders from the Low Countries established a virtual monopoly on wine and brandy exports. Indeed, the way the Dutch purchasers have organized their business made it very difficult to compete against them. They usually dealt directly with the producer thereby eliminating any French intermediaries. They were also obtaining wines at a very low price: contracts were usually drawn up for the whole crop of a winegrower well before grape harvest, but the price would only be set during the harvest. If the crop was abundant, market forces would dictate low prices. On the other hand, a bad year meant that the wines were of poorer quality than usual, which gave the Dutch an excuse to keep prices low.
Another contemporary petition, from Angoumois, also speaks of ‘the monopolies and connivance of the Flemings and the Hollanders who live in the towns of Angoulême and Cognac and even in several villages along the river of Charente, thereby depriving the local people of the traffic and business which belongs to them’. Similar protests were coming from Bordeaux: in 1646, the city council has expressed serious concerns about the Dutch
secret monopolies and their horrible usury practices […] which go against the customary ways in which our intelligent and faithful merchants do business in good faith. Everywhere these frauds and perpetual usurers […] are called peasant-eaters […] who devour the poor and who achieve the ruin of the entire country.
Of course, these complaints from the French merchants should be considered with a grain of salt as they were clearly aimed at gaining additional privileges and concessions using foreign competition as an excuse. Nonetheless, there could well have been actual abuses by the Dutch who ruthlessly exploited small winegrowers’ lack of bargaining power and very likely occasionally committed business misconduct. Evidence of this is a neologism that appeared in French language around that time: declaring bankruptcy and fleeing town while leaving behind debts was called fair Flandre (‘going Dutch’).
The Winepress of Monsieur Dittyl, outside Nantes, Lambert Doomer (ca. 1645). The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
What is certain is that the arrival of the entrepreneurs from the Low Countries and their attempts to recreate stronger, sweeter Iberian wine profiles locally have markedly changed viticultural patterns in this part of France. First of all, many areas that previously produced red wines (including Cognac and Bergerac) turned to cepages blancs. The specificities of Dutch winemaking techniques and the need for large amounts of raw material for brandy to carry out fortification meant that there was no longer an incentive for wine growers to cultivate higher grade grapes. As a result, they switched to inferior varieties, such as the Gros Plant (also known as Folle blanche), which had a much higher yield. At the same time, the peak of the Dutch activities in the region coincided with a consumption shift by the local population from wine to cider. This was leaving the producers with a lot of unsold wine, which suited the Dutch perfectly as they could now obtain it at an even lower cost.
Pent-up anger with the way the Dutch ran their commercial affairs and local authorities’ failure to address the needs of the Nantais business community led to violence. In April 1647, a group of French merchants assaulted two Dutchmen, Beukel Dedel and Hendrick Doomer, but passers-by managed to drive attackers away. On the same day, three other Dutch expatriates got badly beaten up by the crowd. Envy and sense of oppression at the hands of the foreigners were amplified by religious animosity: on the first day of Easter later that month, three other Dutchmen were attacked by the mob in Nantes, and there was also unrest around the Protestant church in the neighbouring town of Sucé-sur-Erdre. Several Dutch settlers were seriously wounded because of these incidents.
Representatives of the diaspora had to approach the governor for protection, and the troops sent in response to these calls reached the Dutch quarter in Nantes, La Petite Hollande, just in time to prevent the murder of one of the settlers and the looting of his house. Following the attacks, local noblemen – large landowners who had benefited from preferential pricing policy by the Dutch and depended on their shipping capacity – interfered and demanded the immediate cessation of violence. The government had to issue a decree forbidding any acts of aggression against the Dutch. Moreover, following the official protests at ambassadorial level in Paris, the Royal Council forbade any additional taxes to be levied on foreigners and assured that Dutch commercial interests in the region will continue to be protected. Apologies were offered to the victims in Nantes along with monetary reparations.
View of the episcopal city and seaport of Nantes in Brittany, Jean Boisseau (1645). Musée d’Histoire de Nantes, Nantes
These events need to be placed in a wider economic and political context. Precisely in this period France was hoping to convince the Dutch Republic to continue its fight against Spain, since the removal of the Dutch forces from the Spanish Netherlands would allow the Habsburgs to concentrate on the French front (France was itself at war with Spain between 1635 and 1659). This is why any manifestation of hostility towards the Dutch was seen as extremely untimely by the Royal administration and could not but have caused a swift and strident reaction. At the same time, the disturbances in Nantes demonstrated the growing discontent with excessive Dutch involvement in the regional winemaking industry. Oversupply (caused by incentivization of cultivating lower-grade and higher-yield varieties) brought about a serious drop in winegrowers’ profits and made them realize that they would be better off if the lucrative business of brandy production was controlled locally. It comes as no surprise that the first French-owned maisons de cognac were founded precisely around this time, led by Philippe Augier of Châteauneuf (it is worth mentioning, though, that his wife, Elizabeth Janssen, was herself a daughter of Flemish merchants).
In 1648, despite French resistance, the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of Spain have signed the treaty of the Peace of Munster. Dutch independence was recognized by the Spanish and the embargo was finally lifted for good. This removed the main reason for merchants from the United Provinces to be present along the French coast – they could now once again trade directly with the Iberian Peninsula.
Yet, the Dutch colony in Nantes remained active for few more decades. Until France has ended its own conflict with Spain, Dutch traders were acting as middlemen between the two warring nations. In addition, drinking habits in the Netherlands have changed by this time, especially among the lower classes. Economic growth made the consumption of alcohol more affordable, so many people shifted from beer to wine and spirits. The latter were becoming increasingly popular and started to be consumed on their own, having become much more palatable due to improvements in distillation techniques. The demand for French brandy therefore continued to grow – what previously served as a mere ingredient in the production of adulterated wine turned into a self-sufficient product.
Brandy seller, David Teniers the Younger (ca. 1640). The Royal Castle, Warsaw
Meanwhile, political and economic contradictions between France and the Netherlands continued to mount. Under maturing Louis XIV, France has set on an aggressive course. The Sun King pushed for an independent merchant marine of his own and now sought to undermine the hegemony of the Dutch. These attempts manifested themselves in a tariff battle that lasted throughout the 1660s. Economic pressures on both sides eventually brought the two countries to war, which began in 1672 and continued until 1678. Shortly before its start, in 1671, the Dutch government introduced a ban on the import of all ‘brandies and distilled waters’ from France. Wine merchants in Rotterdam and Amsterdam strongly objected and have attempted to push for the importation of French brandies to be allowed via Germany. Nevertheless, the States General confirmed their decision – stocking or selling any brandy distilled form wine or lees in the Dutch Republic was no longer permitted.
It is these measures that explain the rise during the last quarter of the seventeenth century of brandewijn made from corn and the triumph of jenever – which following the Dutch invasion and occupation of England in 1688 (known to us as “The Glorious Revolution”) transformed itself into English gin. Coupled with falling grain prices which now allowed for a much cheaper production of gin and other grain-based spirits, the ban on French brandy meant that its heyday in the Netherlands had passed and called into question the future of the Dutch distilling business in France. The final blow came with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685. Religious persecution that followed deprived Protestants living in France (including naturalized Dutch subjects) of their civil liberties, forcing them into exile. Most of the remaining Dutch merchants left Nantes in this violent period, never to return.
Trading of wine was one of the pillars of the early modern Dutch economy. Its import and then re-export generated millions of guilders for wine merchants. Thousands of people were employed in this business, and hundreds of ships were carrying barrels with alcohol to and from the Low Countries every year. Traditionally, it was sweet, heavy white wine reminiscent of vino greco from Eastern Mediterranean that was the most coveted. From fifteenth century onwards its production has been mastered in Iberia, and initially Dutch traders sourced their wines there – but when the Seven United Provinces have begun their struggle for independence, Spanish embargoes blocked access to the original supply markets of Malvasayen. A replacement had to be found, so Dutch and Flemish entrepreneurs turned their attention to vineyards in western France. Unfortunately, the wine produced there not only had nothing to do with the taste profile that they were looking for, it was also not suitable for long-distance transportation and turned sour very quickly. Adulteration and mixing did help to overcome this issue to a certain extent, but a much more efficient solution was to fortify such wine (ideally during fermentation so that there is some residual sugar left, making the wine sweeter as well as keeping it from spoiling). To achieve this end, the Dutch introduced distillation technology to the region and as a result completely altered local winegrowing practices. In the course of the sixteenth century, brandy has gone from being used predominantly as a fortifier of inferior wines to a product that started to be consumed on its own, with the one made around the town of Cognac gradually becoming a reference in terms of excellence. Its highest flowering, however, occurred in the next two centuries – and thanks not to the Dutch but to the British, who by then had taken a lead from Holland in shipping, trade, and consumption of luxuries such as high-quality liquor.
Alexandr Gorokhovskiy
© 2024
Bibliography and further reading:
C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seabourne Empire, 1600-1800 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965).
Milja van Tielhof, The ‘Mother of all Trades’: The Baltic Grain Trade in Amsterdam from the Late 16th to the Early 19th Century (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
Georg Christ, ‘Did Greek Wine Become Port? Or Why Institutional Interventions Matter (c. 1350-1780)’, Quaderni Storici, Vol. 48, No. 2 (2013).
Pauli Iovii Novocomensis libellus de legationis Basilij magni principis Moscoviae ad Clementem VII (Rome: Franciscus Minitius Calvus, 1525).
Henri Enjalbert, ‘Comment naissent les grands crus: bordeaux, porto, cognac. Première partie’, Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 8e Année, No. 3 (1953), 315-28.
Mariëlla Beukers & Rob Blijleven, ‘The Excessive Use of Sulphur and Creation of Stomme as an Early Modern Cellar Technique in Dutch Wine Trade’ (Preprint, 2023).
Bruno Sepulchre, Le livre du cognac: trois siècles d'histoire (Paris: Hubschmid & Bouret, 1983).
Henriette de Bruyn Kops, A Spirited Exchange: The Wine and Brandy Trade between France and the Dutch Republic in its Atlantic Framework, 1600-1650 (Boston: Brill, 2007).
David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2009).
Pieter Jan Dobbelaar, De branderijen in Holland tot het begin der negentiende eeuw (Rotterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1930).