Battlefield vineyards: part 2

1805: ambush at Dürenstein-Krems

The Loiben plain on the Wachau where the battle unfolded. Krems is upriver to the right and Dürenstein around the bend of the Danube to the left.

The campaign of 1805 was is widely regarded as the greatest and most skillful ever undertaken by Napoleon Bonaparte.

With the combined armies of the Austrian and Russian empires forming against him, the French emperor had reacted with his trademark mixture of speed, decisiveness and ruthless exploitation of his enemy’s weaknesses.

In a few short months he had all but knocked Austria out of the war, forcing the capitulation of General Mack and 60,000 men at Ulm.

He pushed on to Vienna, as the remaining Austrian troops hurried to link up with the Russians who were just arriving in the theatre of operations, their use of the older Julian rather than Gregorian calendar having contributed to their tardy appearance.

Yet if Napoleon were fastidious in his preparations and hard to outfox, the same could not always be said of his subordinates.

Read more: Click here for the first part in the series

The key to Napoleon’s speed was the parceling up of his forces into ‘corps d’armée’, self-contained armies in miniature, moving in concert with each other. Never more than a few hours march away they were mutually supporting but each moved through their own patch of countryside on their own roads, which saved the inevitable traffic jam that would result in 100,000 men trying to march down the same stretch.

One of these corps, the VII under Edouard Mortier, was given marching orders which took it along the banks o the Danube, right through the vine growing region of the Wachau.

No doubt confident there were no Allied troops in his immediate vicinity, Mortier allowed his three divisions to become dangerously separated along the route. He also allowed his supporting light cavalry to gallop off into the Austrian interior to the north, which meant he was not being kept up to date with accurate reconnaissance about lie of the land into which he was advancing.

On 9 November, therefore, when Mortier and his lead division made camp around the town of Dürenstein (today Dürnstein), he had no idea that just around the next bend of the river at Krems was a Russian force more than twice his size under the command of the overall Russian commander, Mikhail Kutozov.

Unlike his French opponent, Kutozov was well served by his light cavalry, the Cossacks, who’s skirmishing with the French brought in valuable intelligence about the French at Dürenstein.

Kutozov and the Austrian general Heinrich von Schmitt decided on an ambush. As the French troops marched out onto the vine-covered plains of Loiben on the morning of 11 November they thought nothing of the light resistance they began to encounter from Russian troops in the villages of Unter and Oberloiben.

By late morning, with Russian troops beginning to pour of the mountains to the flank and rear Mortier knew he and his command were in the fight of their lives.

By midday the second French division, marching to the sound of the guns, arrived to relieve the pressure on their comrades. Nonetheless, the fighting raged until nightfall as Allied troops continued to pour down the hillsides outside Dürenstein. Even after dark men in isolated groups skirmished through the vineyards.

The next morning the Allies pulled back and the French licked their wounds. The pretty towns and vineyards between Dürenstein and Krems would have been scenes of terrible carnage. All of the towns were smoking ruins, huge swathes of vineyards had been destroyed, trampled under the feet of thousands of advancing men or smashed to bits by musketry and artillery fire. Everywhere there would have been bloody piles of dead men and horses, spent cannonballs and destroyed pieces of artillery.

Dürenstein has been largely forgotten as a battle, overshadowed by Ulm and the great victory of Austerlitz a few weeks later.

But this day of combat would have shattered the economy of this stretch of the Wachau and the livelihoods of its inhabitants for years, if not decades. The historian Rainer Egger in his 1965 essay on the battle ‘Das Gefecht bei Dürnstein-Loiben’ mentions that the economic impact on the region was very great.

One can well imagine that as well as the means of their livelihood and their homes being destroyed, the winemakers and merchants of the area would have had no stocks of wine to sell after many thousands of thirsty soldiers had either bought, requisitioned or simply stolen all the wine they could lay their hands on.

By the time Napoleon’s armies next marched on Austria in 1809, a campaign which culminated in the vineyards outside of Vienna at Wagram, the vineyards of Loiben and Krems would only just be beginning to recover.

1809: retreat in Galicia to storming the Douro

General Paget is wounded during the crossing of the Douro. Command would devolve to one of his brigade commanders, Rowland Hill

Not strictly a battle in a vineyard but instead an important battle in one of the world’s great wine cities.

The French had invaded Spain in 1808 and swiftly routed the forces of the Bourbon king. A British expedition under general Moore sent to support the Spanish had been forced to retreat through the mountains of Galicia in the middle of winter. Their retreat took them right through the heart of Bierzo and the British soldier’s taste for drink was at times their undoing.

The great historian of the Peninsular War, Sir Charles Oman, wrote scathingly of the army’s indiscipline on the march. “If the badly-managed regiments had been up to the disciplinary standard of the Guards or the Light Brigade, the whole march would have been remembered as toilsome but not disastrous.”

Read more: How the Barossa got its name

As Oman continued, the “serious trouble” began at the town of Bemimbre on 31 December, where the divisions of Hope, Baird and Fraser were quartered for the night.

“The village was unfortunately a large local depot for wine: slinking off from their companies, many hundreds of marauders made their way to the vaults and cellars. When the divisions marched next morning they left nearly a thousand men, in various stages of intoxication, lying about the houses and streets.”

The men of the rear guard arrived to find the town “looking like a battlefield”, with red-coated men strewn about as if killed in house to house fighting. Officers and sergeants spent several hours kicking and cursing men to their feet in a bid to get them to march on. An officer with the 28^th Foot later recalled they were successful with many but “little could be effected with men incapable of standing, much less of marching.”

Even the next morning, 2 January, there were a good number of men in such a state that with the French cavalry now appearing on the road, they had to be abandoned.

Oman writes that some of these wretches no tried to flee but the enemy “rode through the lines…slashing among them as a schoolboy does among thistles.” Many were killed or captured but some, covered in sword cuts, managed to escape and Moore had them paraded in front of all the regiments, “as a warning to drunkards and malingerers.”*

It didn’t help much. At Villafranca the same divisions that had so disgraced themselves at Bemimbre went at it again, looting their own supplies this time including hundreds of barrels of rather more lethal rum. Stragglers were once again left behind.

In contrast to the ill-discipline of those divisions, the men of the rearguard continued to perform admirably. At Cacabelos they checked an overhasty attack by the French general Colbert. Having seen so many drunkards on the roads, Colbert was convinced that the British army was falling apart. Taking two regiments of cavalry he pressed on and attacked the British but in doing so was ambushed by several battalions who Oman said had hid themselves away behind the walls of vineyards on either side of the road. The French attack withered in the face of fire from three sides and Colbert himself was shot dead by Rifleman Plunkett of the 95th.

The French fell back. Several squadrons of dragoons forded the river but, says Oman, “unable to charge among the rocks and vines, they were forced to dismount and act as skirmishers.”

Finally, Moore turned to fight at the port of Corunna on 16 January. He won the battle but at the cost of his own life. His army embarked and was transported back to England.

The French now turned their attention to Britain’s oldest ally and enthusiastic opponent of Napoleon’s ‘Continental System’, Portugal.

Napoleon had left Spain in early 1809 with 45,000. His old enemy Austria was stirring once again and later that spring would invade Italy and Bavaria. He left behind him Marshal Nicolas Soult, with orders to invade Portugal in February.

Melt water and early rains turned the roads of the Minho into quagmires but by March, Soult had fought his way to the town of Porto.

The first battle was a one-sided affair, which ended in a terrible tragedy. With the French forcing the Portuguese regulars back towards the city, thousands of civilians tried to flee from Porto to Villa Nova de Gaia on the opposite bank. They stampeded across the one boat bridge that connected the two towns. Already weakened by Portuguese engineers so they could destroy it should the French win, it collapsed with predictably terrible consequences; thousands of townsfolk were pitched into the river and drowned.

Soult captured Porto and with it hundreds of tons of British military equipment left behind by Moore and also 30 British merchantmen “laden with Port wine” which had been unable to leave because of a “persistent North-Wester”.

At this point however, Soult found his lines of communication with Spain were cut after a Portuguese force captured the fort at Chaves. To make matters worse, Soult was now not only surrounded by a hostile populace but in April a new British army under a new commander, Sir Arthur Wellesley, landed in Portugal.

Wellesley immediately pushed up towards Porto and Soult energetically set about destroying all the bridges and bringing over all the boats he possibly could to the north bank of the Douro to deny any form of passage to this freshly arrived and rather dangerous enemy.

For several days therefore the two armies stared at each other across the Douro, the French in Porto, the British in Gaia at a perfect impasse. Wellesley called up boats from nearer the coast while he pondered the best plan of attack and studied the French positions from the garden of the convent on the Serra heights (the Mosteiro da Nossa Serra do Pilar). On 12 May one of his intelligence officers, Colonel John Waters was riding upstream with the prior of Amarante as a translator and guide when he saw a Portuguese in a little boat mid-river, waving frantically at him. The man turned out to be a barber and explained that four large wine barges, that had gone unnoticed by the French, were moored up on the opposite bank. Furthermore the bank was largely unguarded and the bishop’s seminary at the top of the bank (now the former seminary of Largo Padre Baltasar Guedes) would provide a solid defence for the British to occupy while more troops were ferried across.

With the help of the barber and the prior, Water rounded up several local peasants and the little party crossed over the river.

A barco rabelo today, very much like those used by the British at the crossing although at the time they were not owned by the Port houses but local boatmen.

“It was a hazardous undertaking,” wrote Oman, “for one French picquet [patrol] had lately been seen to pass by, and another might appear at any moment.”

The barges are obtained however and taken over to the southern bank.

Oman continues: ‘They turned out to be big clumsy vessels, capable of holding some thirty men apiece.”- they were almost certainly ‘rabelos’ which at the time were owned by local boatmen who offered their services to the Port houses to ferry wine from up-river to the warehouses in Gaia/Porto.

Wellesley immediately acted on the opportunity offered him and set the 3^rd Foot (‘The Buffs’) the task of seizing the seminary and a foothold on the opposite side.

Three batteries of artillery were pushed onto the Serra heights to cover the crossing. It was a nervy hour as the first men of the 3^rd made their way over and began to fortify the seminary. It was not until the third trip when close to half the battalion was across that the first shots were heard from the gates.

Too late the French realised what was going on and the danger it presented. The surprise was total and the British were across the Douro. Marshal Soult was still in bed having breakfast when he was brought the news.

The French began to attack the seminary but their assault was impeded by the covering fire of the British artillery on the heights. With the 3^rd foot now all across the battalions of the 66^th (Berkshire) and 48^th (Northamptonshire) followed.

Later in the morning three battalions of the French 70éme Ligne began a more concerted attack but, as Oman relates, “a thousand English infantry, comfortably ensconced behind stone walls, and protected on their flanks by the storm of shot and shell from the opposite bank of the river, could not be easily moved.”

With the French distracted the people of Porto now took a hand in the battle. Wellesley and his staff watched as hordes of people rushed to the riverbank and, taking to the boats and “anything that would float”, began streaming across the Douro to Gaia. Rather than fleeing, the citizens then began taking the men of the brigade of Guards and 29^th (Worcestershire) Foot across to Porto. The British swept up through the city and took the French attacking the seminary in the flank. With their position completely untenable Soult ordered a retreat which quickly turned into a rout, albeit one that could not be properly exploited by Wellesley due to a lack of available cavalry.

Although the celebration in Porto that night can well be imagined, the prospect of British troops in control of a major wine city was a cause of some concern to British officers – memories of the retreat to Corunna fresh in their minds.

When allowed to though, the British army got down to drinking as much Port as they could.

Julius von Hartmann, an artillery captain in the King’s German Legion, remembered 20 of his gunners drinking 41 bottles of Port between them in one sitting.

Meanwhile, while the battle of Porto was going on, a young British cavalry officer in the 23^rd Light Dragoons called William Warre was part of a force sent down river to cut off French troops trying to cross the Douro. Warre and his troop got to a bridge over the Tamega river and set up a barricade. What arrived at the bridge however were not a few French stragglers but the entirety of Soult’s retreating army and Warre wisely decided discretion was the better part of valour and fell back.

He served throughout the war, mostly on the staff of General Beresford and also supplied Port to Wellesley from his family’s company. He even had to source some wines from stocks in London as, “at Oporto it is impossible to get any old wine.”

That’s presumably because men like Hartmann’s gunners had drunk it all.

 

*The entire episode is almost an exact repeat of the failed English raid on Cadiz in November 1625. An English landing party under the Duke of Buckingham attacked the town in an emulation of Sir Francis Drake’s raid of 1587. However, whereas Drake had made off victoriously with barrels of Sherry and King Philip’s fleet burning at harbour, in 1625 the English troops broke into the wine warehouses and drank themselves into a stupor. The raid failed and those who could not be moved were killed or captured by the Spanish the next morning.

Champagne 1814: Napoleon’s last lightning campaign

‘La Campagne de France‘ by Horace Vernet. The painting shows French peasants and a gendarme skirmishing with Russian infantry and Cossacks who are plundering the Champagne countryside. Although the locals may have used the vines for cover, as the campaign took place from February to April 1814 there would not have been as much foliage as displayed here.

Napoleon’s campaign in Champagne in the first few months of 1814 is generally regarded as his last ‘great’ display as a master strategist and tactician.

If 1805 was his masterstroke, the campaigns in Russia in 1812 and Germany in 1813, were marked by unimaginative, lumbering and futile battles where Napoleon displayed a complete disregard for the lives of his men.

Some 600,000 men had marched with him into Russia, just 93,000 emerged from the snow and ice. In 1813 at the battles of Lützen, Bautzen and Leipzig he lost 400,000 men, killed, wounded and captured, in just two months.

In 1814, with the Allied armies of Prussia, Russia and Austria on the frontiers of France, Napoleon was short of men and horses.

Nonetheless, he gathered together an army of less than 80,000 men and inflicted a stinging series of defeats on the enemy armies arranged before him – who together amounted to nearly 400,000 men.

One of his chief foes during the campaign was the Prussian Marshal Gebhard von Blücher, who harboured an almost pathological hatred of Napoleon and the French for the humiliations inflicted upon Prussia by them in 1806.

Blücher’s 3^rd ‘Army of Silesia’ as it was known had spent the New Year crossing the Rhine through the vineyards of the Rheingau between Kaub and Bacharach.

Allied troops occupied Epernay and thoroughly ‘liberated’ the contents of its cellars; the Emperors of Prussia, Russia and Austria meeting at Moët & Chandon where they toasted Napoleon’s imminent demise – so the story goes.

There was fighting through the Aube, and Côte de Sézanne. Napoleon inflicted a stinging defeat on Blücher at Vauchamps in February forcing him to fall back on Vertus.

‘La derniére victoire‘ by Maurice Orange. Triumphant French cavalry show off captured Russian and Austrian standards in front of Reims cathedral. Napoleon can be seen in the background.

Away from the frontlines, Allied troops burned and plundered the villages of Champagne and skirmished with local peasants and gendarmes who rose up in arms against them.

In March Napoleon won one of his last victories at Reims. Occupied on 12 March by the Russians under General Emmanuel de Saint-Priest, a French émigré born in Constantinople where his father had been ambassador for Louis XVI, Napoleon sped his army east from Soissons and arrived the next day taking the Russians by surprise.

As Napoleon wrote to his brother Joseph afterwards: “I captured the city, taking twenty guns, plenty of baggage, and 5,000 prisoners. General St. Priest has been mortally wounded”.

The historian F. Maycock called the battle, “surely one of the greatest triumphs of [Napoleon’s] remarkable career, and speaks volumes for his powers as a leader of men”.

Yet it was also a tactical rather than a strategic success. Constantly jumping from one fight to another Napoleon’s skill at manoeuvre warfare was supreme but the enemy was simply too numerous.

Despite receiving bloody noses time and time again they irrevocably forced Napoleon back towards Paris.

On 12 March, the same day Saint-Priest had taken Reims, a British force under Beresford had been welcomed into Bordeaux without any resistance.

By April the Allies were before Paris and on 12 April Napoleon abdicated. That same night he tried to commit suicide by poisoning his glass of wine but the opiate was old and it failed.

Exiled to Elba Europe believed it had seen the last of the “Corsican ogre” until, of course, he escaped for one last throw of the dice in 1815…

1870: death in Burgundy

If Champagne has been at the crossroads of European military history since the invasion of Attila the Hun and Gascony and the Loire were the stamping grounds of the Hundred Years War, Burgundy has got off rather lightly as far as French wine regions go.

English chevauchées and marauding routiers did in fact bring fire and sword to Burgundy in the 14^th century as did Protestant and Catholic troops in the French wars of religion in the 16^th century. The vineyards of Macon and Beaujolais meanwhile were the scenes of some fighting in 1814 between the French Army of the Rhône and the Austrians.

But the single stand out battle fought in the Côte d’Or is a largely forgotten action that raged through Nuits-St-Georges in 1870.

Usual accounts of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 usually neglect a lot of the fighting that took place after the collapse of the Second Empire and Napoleon III’s abdication following the debacle of Sedan in September 1870.

but the war continued into the winter of 1870 and on into early 1871. The fighting largely moved westwards into the Loire with fierce battles around Orleans and Le Mans as well as in the north-east of France with efforts to relieve Paris which was under siege.

Still less known are the battles around Burgundy. The German advance into Burgundy was largely entrusted to the XIV Corps under General August von Werder and Prince William of Baden and most of the troops came from that particular state.

The main thrust went first for Strasbourg, then Besançon and finally Dijon where there was a battle on 30 October which began on the heights of St Apollinaire and ended in street-fighting in the suburbs themselves, the French defenders initially making use of farms and vineyards to hamper the Germans’ advance.

After the fall of Dijon, the Germans were primarily concerned with checking the movements of the great Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi who had landed with an army of volunteers from Italy and on his march north had gathered more French volunteers to him which he turned into a ragtag band known as the Army of the Vosges.

Meanwhile, another French general, Camille Crémer, had formed another division around Beaune largely composed of the Gardes Nationals of the Côte d’Or and German operations between the capture of Dijon and the beginning of December were aimed at preventing a link up of Garibaldi and Crémer’s forces; which led to a great deal of marching and counter-marching across the Saone which does not need to be related here.

Luckily for the Germans the two Franco-Italian commanders failed to co-ordinate properly and continued to act independently of each other. In late November the Germans ventured south and there were skirmishes in and around Vougeot and Nuits-Saint-Georges but the troops were recalled when Garibaldi attempted to re-take Dijon later in the month.

However, Garibaldi and his Army of the Vosges were repulsed leaving the Germans free to deal with the build up of French troops in the Côte d’Or.

Prince William and several divisions of Badeners advanced south in mid-December and found Crémer had taken up a strong position with nearly 13,000 men around Nuits-Saint-Georges, the main French infantry line being on the railway, which to this day constitutes the Paris-Lyon line, their right flank anchored on the Meuzin stream, while the artillery was positioned on the slopes behind.

The initial German advance from the east pushed in the French outposts at La Berchere and Boncourt. Then the Germans struck from the north pushing down from Gevrey and forcing the French to fall back on Vosne.

The Baden divisions then advanced out of La Berchere and Agencourt towards Nuits. Although supported by superior artillery they still had to cross over three-quarters of a mile under fearsome French rifle and artillery fire and their losses were heavy.

Nearly 1,000 Germans were killed in the vineyards before Nuits-Saint-Georges and some 2,000 Frenchmen in defence of the town but, advancing into the teeth of French fire and with their formations disrupted by the vines the Germans threw their enemy back from the railway line and stormed Nuits which they then held until 6pm despite French counter-attacks.

The exhausted men then slept in the vineyards and market square of Nuits while the shattered French army retreated on Beaune and the Hospices was turned into a military hospital to deal with their wounded.

The Germans fell back the next day as Garibaldi tried to take Dijon for the second time

Garibaldi would take Dijon in early 1871 (as the Germans had pulled out) and was even made a deputy of the Côte d’Or after the war but in practice his army achieved very little. Dijon was awarded the Légion d’honneur for its citizens’ resistance on 30 October.

Paris was occupied in January 1871 and a united Germany was proclaimed a little later in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles – the same hall where Germany would be brought low 40 years later after the First World War; the choice of venue being entirely deliberate on the part of the French.

Back in 1871 meanwhile, victory in the war paved the way for German unification. The German emperor ordered an enormous monument representing ‘Germania’ to be built in recognition of the fact.

If you’ve ever been to the vineyards of the Rheingau around Rüdesheim-am-Rhein you’ll have seen it.

1879-1883: the War of the Pacific

Death of the Peruvian Colonel Bolognesi at the Battle of Arica in June 1880, a hard fought victory for the Chileans.

South American history does not figure prominently in European education, save perhaps for a mention about the Spanish invasions of Pizarro that destroyed the Incan empire.

Wine of course followed the coming of the Spanish initially for use in the sacrament as Catholic priests founded their missions and carried out the conversion of the local Indians.

Varieties like Pais (known as ‘Mission’ in California) were introduced for this purpose and the Jesuits in particular took a guiding hand in the creation of the American wine industry.

The Spanish split their new and vast colonies in the Americas into two principal administrative areas. There was the Viceroyalty of New Spain which included all the territories north of the Isthmus of Panama, Mexico and California and so on, and the Viceroyalty of Peru which covered Peru, Chile and Bolivia.

Governed from Lima it was the territory of Peru which became the principal wine producer in South America – and it was an industry that would be virtually destroyed in one of the continent’s little known but typically sanguine wars.

By the middle of the 18^th century Peru was producing millions of litres of wine with much of the production located south of Lima towards the border with Bolivia. The region of Moquegua in the south had an annual production of 10-12 million litres.

With the suppression of the Jesuits throughout the Spanish empire, which took place in the 1760s, many of their wine estates were taken over by non-clerical owners. Without the knowledge to make good wine many turned their grape crop over to the production of ‘Pisco’ instead but nonetheless, by the 19^th century Peru was still a formidable wine producing country, much larger in fact than Chile to the south.

The War of the Pacific was born out of an argument between Chile, Bolivia and Peru over control of the nitrate-rich Atacama desert.

Before 1879, Chile’s northern frontier stopped short of Antofagasta which was owned by Bolivia, which in turn owned the desert and coast until Tocopilla and Peru owned the north of the Atacama including the towns of Iquique, Pisagua and Arica.

In short, after a mounting war of words Bolivia declared war on Chile and called on its ally, Peru, for support. Chile demanded Peruvian neutrality and when this was refused she declared war on her northern neighbours.

Although small, the Chilean armed forces were perhaps the best in South America, better equipped and with a more stable and unified political system to support them and the Chileans soon made short work of the Bolivians and the Peruvian navy in a quick and decisive campaign in 1879.

From 1880 onwards the war would largely take place in Peru with Chile using her complete control of the sea to land troops at will along the Peruvian coast. One of the landing places was Pisco, the port from which the spirit takes its name.

A division under Commander Patricio Lynch* landed at the port and, as Sir Clements Markham wrote in his account of the war, “marched northwards on the 13^th December to form a junction with the rest of the forces which disembarked at Curayaco, a point near Lima.

“The valley of Pisco is famed for its vineyards. They produce a spirit called ‘Italia’ [actually the grape variety used to make the spirit] and excellent wine.”

The Peruvian army was no pushover and the fighting was hard but by 1882 Lima was occupied and the war effectively over. Chile came out of the war substantially enriched. She occupied the entirety of the Atacama and its nitrates which Chilean and British companies were quick to exploit. Bolivia signed an accord with Chile in 1904 in which she formally handed over the territories of Antofagasta and Calama, leaving the country landlocked. Peru and Chile would not formalise their border until 1929 and the Treaty of Lima in which Chile kept all the lands south of Arica and Peru reacquired Tacna.

The Chilean wine industry really took off in the aftermath of the war. One example is Viña Undurraga whose founder, Francisco Undurraga, grew rich supplying the Chilean army. Christopher Fielden in The Wines of Argentina, Chile and Latin America states he supplied the army with beef cattle from the ranches he owned and in 1882 bought the San Vicente de Talagante estate for $157,000, immediately turning it into the wine estate he had always dreamt of creating.

Undurraga’s website however states that in fact he supplied the wood for the crates in which the rifles of the army were transported. Whatever the truth of it, the war kick started his vinous ambitions.

The boundaries of Chile, Bolivia and Peru in 1879 shown in colour and with the black lines showing the modern boundaries as fixed in 1929.

If Chile and its wine industry profited however, that of Peru foundered. Markham noted gravely that Chilean forces were excessive in their requisitioning and plundering of Peru. He wrote: “They have made their neighbours taste the full bitterness of defeat by every form of insult and violence, and by a system of wholesale plunder, and they have needlessly extended the area of their destructive operations.”

The Peruvian wine industry was a particular target of theirs and Moquegua in the south was especially badly hit. A catastrophic earthquake of about 8.5 to 9 in magnitude had struck Arica and devastated the area in 1868 from which local industry was only just beginning to recover. Now the Chileans arrived.

Prudence Rice relates: “The city itself was invaded four times by Chilean forces between 1879 and 1883 – the Battle of Los Angeles taking place on the high Pampa Los Angeles between the Torata and Tumilca rivers. The Chileans are locally blamed for all manner of economic woes during and after the war: demolishing the railroad; appropriating mules; ruining the new oak fermenting barrels and generally stealing, plundering and destroying the forces of the wine industry.”

The territorial changes brought about by the war also adversely affected the Peruvian wine industry.

Rice continues: “Two of Moquegua’s then-primary markets for wine, Arica and Tarapacá, disappeared after the war with Chile. The hacendados were able to identify new markets or expand old ones in the highlands, but these were at greater distances and therefore transport costs were greater.”

With water in scarcer supply and cotton a more attractive industry, wine withered while those grape growers who stuck to their vines remained turned to distillation as a cheaper, easier alternative than winemaking.

Soon after the war Moquegue was struck by phylloxera, which further hastened the collapse of the wine industry. This plague was also blamed on the Chileans with locals claiming the invaders brought it in on the hoofs of their horses and mules. Chile has never suffered from phylloxera however so this charge, at least, is unsubstantiated.

Wine is still made in Peru today and is making qualitative strides once again, so much so that Corney & Barrow has said it will be adding a few Peruvian wines to its on-trade offering from next year.

 

*The grandson of an Irish émigré, Lynch joined the Chilean navy aged 12 and used its close ties with the Royal Navy to see action aboard the British frigates ‘HMS Calliope’ and ‘HMS Blenheim’ during the First Opium War, which, of course, led to Britain’s taking of Hong Kong.