Why Scots Drank Claret While England Drank Ale — and Never Looked Back

Scotland once imported more French wine per head than almost any nation in Europe. While England raised a mug of ale and eyed France with suspicion, Scots were raising a glass of claret — and had been doing so for five hundred years.

This wasn’t accidental. It was the direct legacy of one of history’s most remarkable diplomatic friendships.

The Alliance That Started a Love Affair

In 1295, Scotland and France signed the Auld Alliance — a mutual defence pact that would outlast both nations’ medieval ambitions and leave an unexpected mark on Scottish life: a deep, lasting love of Bordeaux wine.

The terms were simple. Scotland and France would support each other against England. Both nations held to the agreement through two centuries of intermittent warfare. But the trade that followed the alliance proved more enduring than the politics.

Scottish merchants were granted remarkable privileges in French ports. In Bordeaux — the heart of the wine trade — Scots could trade on the same terms as French citizens. They paid lower duties, gained residency rights, and settled in numbers along the River Garonne.

By the fifteenth century, wine was flowing north to Scotland’s ports in quantities that astonished foreign visitors.

Claret Through the Port of Leith

Leith, the port at Edinburgh’s edge, became the gateway for French wine into Scotland. Ships arrived laden with barrels of claret — the light red wine that would give Scotland its lasting taste for French culture — and returned to Bordeaux with Scottish wool, hides, and salted fish.

The word “claret” itself entered Scots English from the French clairet, meaning a clear, light wine. Scottish merchants didn’t merely sell it. They embraced it, cellared it, and served it to guests as freely as any other staple.

Taverns along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile kept their vaulted cellars stocked with Bordeaux. Edinburgh’s Old Town, built along a volcanic ridge, was riddled with underground storage chambers — many holding barrels of French wine. A good claret was cheaper in Edinburgh than in London, thanks to Scotland’s separate trading arrangements and lower duties — for a while, at least.

The Edinburgh Two-Bottle Culture

By the eighteenth century, Edinburgh had developed what contemporaries called the “two-bottle culture.” Even merchants of modest means regularly drank two bottles of claret at a sitting — a quantity that raised eyebrows among visiting English travellers.

The philosopher David Hume counted himself among Edinburgh’s enthusiastic claret drinkers. Robert Burns praised wine in verse. The city’s professional classes considered a well-stocked wine cellar essential to a respectable household.

This wasn’t mere indulgence. It was identity. Drinking French wine signalled Scotland’s cosmopolitan connections — its confident place in European intellectual and commercial life. Scots saw themselves as citizens of a broader world, not merely subjects of the British Isles.

For those planning a Scottish heritage trip to their ancestral clan lands, it’s worth knowing that this cultural tradition shaped the very character of Scotland’s towns and port cities for centuries.

When the Wine Stopped Flowing

The Acts of Union in 1707 changed everything. Scotland merged its parliament with England’s — and English attitudes toward France became Scotland’s policy. Duties on French wine rose sharply. Claret became expensive almost overnight.

Port and sherry — wines from Britain’s Spanish and Portuguese allies — became the fashionable alternatives. Scottish merchants adapted, but something irreplaceable faded from the national table.

Sir Walter Scott wrote with unmistakable longing about the Edinburgh of his grandfather’s generation, when a man of modest standing could nonetheless pour a decent French wine. The loss of the claret trade was, to Scott and many like him, a symptom of something deeper — the slow erasure of Scotland’s independent cultural life.

The Auld Alliance itself had already faded by 1560, when Scotland’s Reformation fundamentally altered its relationship with Catholic France. But the culinary and cultural legacy endured. You can read about the remarkable Scottish soldiers who served France directly in The Scottish Soldiers Who Stood Guard Over France’s Kings for Three Centuries.

A French Taste Scotland Never Quite Lost

Today, Scotland still holds a distinctive affection for Bordeaux. Fine wine merchants in Edinburgh and Glasgow keep French reds prominently on their shelves. Claret remains, for many Scots, the wine of choice for a good dinner.

When you visit Edinburgh’s underground vaults — the ancient stone chambers beneath the Old Town’s bridges and closes — it’s worth pausing to think about what once filled them. Not whisky. Not ale. French wine, shipped across the North Sea by a people who felt, quite genuinely, more at home in Europe than their southern neighbours ever fully understood.

Scotland’s taste for claret was never an affectation. It was five centuries of friendship, trade, and shared identity — poured, unhurriedly, into a glass.

If you’re planning your own journey through Scotland’s history-soaked cities and landscapes, the Scottish Highlands road trip itinerary is an ideal way to travel through the places where this extraordinary story unfolded.

Download our free Scotland Travel Guide (PDF)