Practical Utopia: The Many Lives of Dartington Hall by Anna Neima

Abstract

sumers. The most important off-stage player in this book is France, supplier of the finest wines to a tiny fraction of British consumers. Readers interested in this crucial point regarding Britain will appreciate ReganLefebvre’s careful inclusion of tariff legislation across the centuries. The determination to avoid commercial surrender to French supremacy in wine inspired a great deal of colonial entrepreneurial swashbuckling and ambition. Over time, the most knowledgeable vineyard owners grappled with learning more about French methods. Regan-Lefebvre recognizes the arrival of widespread middle-class wine drinking in the Victorian period as a major milestone and contemplates the long arc of commercial effort that made it possible. When tariffs were removed in 1860, she points out, the boost to wine drinking was part of a larger plan of “social engineering” (95). Encouraging the working classes (two-thirds of the British population at the time) to shift from spirits and beer to wine pointed to a new era of gentility, or so the planners hoped. As part of the sociological landscape of alcohol, ReganLefebvre reveals the serendipitous convergences leading to broad-based off-license distribution of wine, even if debatable quality earned it the name of “plonk.” She argues that without the boost of such imports, wine drinking could not have become a distinctly British activity, let alone compete with the ubiquitous and sizable consumption of beer. Regan-Lefebvre’s final three chapters about Britain after World War II and modern consumer culture could alone have countenanced a book-length study, particularly since fluctuations in quantity and quality suggest that this period witnessed a true turn to popular winedrinking. Yet her larger and longer framework is devoted to exposing the power and importance of economic structures. Regan-Lefebvre showcases triumphant twentieth-century capitalism carrying New World wines into a twenty-first century of global mass consumerism. The existence of “affordable and approachable” New World wines is the shared product of imperialism, capitalism, and cultural gentrification (234). This book clearly proves that good commercial wine is one of the ways that the system convinces players that the game is worth playing, another form of the people’s opium that society is loathe to lose.