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that he was thinking of? Go into a restaurant or a bar now and call for a bottle of Toulon—we have conducted this experiment so that you do not have to—and you’ll be met with blank looks. Explain that Toulon was, in the eighteenth century, a center of the French wine trade, and that the wines of Toulon would probably now, geographically, fall into the Côtes de Provence, and some light will dawn, resulting in the offer—the odds are still roughly four to one—of some light, dry rosé, the stuff of holiday memories on the Côte d’Azur. The Provençal wine growers are making efforts to move out of this frisky, slightly frou-frou ghetto, mindful perhaps of their heritage as arguably the most ancient wine-growing area of France; certainly the Provençal landscape of vines, olives, and lavender would have been familiar to the ancient Romans, though Narbonne disputes the claims of Marseilles to precedence in the matter. Whatever the historical truth, Provençal growers are leavening their Cinsaut-and Grenache-based rosés with some serious red wines. Two of the essential varietals in red and rosé Côtes de Provence, Mourvèdre and Tibouren, have ancient roots in the region, and Syrah has been identified as being the progeny of two other grapes from southeastern France, Dureza and Mondeuse Blanche. Somehow it is contrary to nature to imagine the Great Bear, the tremendous, squinny-eyed, skew-wigged, dropsical Johnson, planning to illuminate his and Mr. Thrale’s friendship with the sort of cool rosé more suited to balmy evenings on restaurant terraces in Gordes or St. Paul de Vence, dreaming of selling up and moving to the sun. Far more satisfying to think of the two of them working happily through the third bottle of something more akin to a new-style Provençal red, ideally from Bandol, with Mourvèdre, Tibouren, and Syrah’s forebears working in their veins.

And yet … Johnson was opinionated about wine, but no snob. After all, it was he who wrote to his friend Samuel Richardson asking to be rescued from the bailiffs. “I remember writing to him from a sponging-house”—where debtors were confined until their friends could spring them by paying their debts—“and was so sure of my deliverance through his kindness and liberality that, before his reply was brought, I knew I could afford to joke with the rascal who had me in custody, and did so, over a pint of adulterated wine, for which, at that instant, I had no money to pay.” Conviviality and friendship, as ever, took precedence over what was in the bottle. Perhaps it was, after all, a skinny quotidian rosé he had in mind.

Why is hock linked to Queen Victoria?

ACCORDING to Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary, hockamore (the English rendering of Hochheimer) and its shortened form, hock, referred to “old dry strong Rhenish,” that is, Rhine wines made primarily from the Riesling grape. This was in the eighteenth century, and England had been importing Rhenish wines since the medieval period—Samuel Pepys notes in his diary in the 1660s his regular visits to “Rhenish wine houses.” In transport terms, it was an easy journey for the wine: by barge down the Rhine, stopping only to pay tolls at every passing castle, and by ship across the North Sea. Thomas Jefferson noted in 1788 that the wines of Hochheim, along with those of Rüdesheim and Johannisberg, were the most expensive in the Rheingau, and indeed, hock was one of the world’s most expensive wines in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Michael Broadbent has pointed out that at the Christie’s sale in 1808, a dozen bottles of “Very Old Hock” sold for over £10, the highest price for any wine at auction between 1766 and the 1880s.

Thus, before Victoria was even thought of, hock was a fashionable wine in England. Why, then, do wine cata logues ascribe to Victoria the responsibility for the wine’s popularity? Most wine merchants do not claim to be historians, but the story of Victoria and her liking for hock is part of the wine trade’s folklore. Undeniably her devotion to her consort, the German-born Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, led her to