The Scottish World

I am on holiday with my family at Expo ’98 on the shores of the River Tagus in Lisbon. It is one of the biggest such events staged anywhere and there are hundreds of thousands of people enthralled by the pavilions of what seems like every nation in the world, except my own, Scotland. The Football World Cup had just ended in France, where the style of the Croatians had made an impact, and you could see the effect here with long queues snaking around the Croatian pavilion – people from every part of the globe desperate to learn something of Croatia and its culture. Scotland, and especially the Scotland fans, had also been hugely popular in France, with their humour, colour, music and grace in glorious failure once again! I know of the positive impact they made in Bordeaux through my friends the Johnstons and because the regional newspaper Sud Ouest interviewed me and still take articles from me on the Auld Alliance when the two nations meet at rugby or football.

At Expo ’98, however, the contrast between the profiles of these star nations of the World Cup could not have been more dramatic: Croatia’s star continued to shine brilliantly; Scotland’s dulled to the point of oblivion with a single reference to the North Sea oil industry within a lacklustre British pavilion. Waiting to enter it, the first thing you saw was a statement that began: ‘Portugal is Britain’s oldest ally . . .’ I pointed out that Britain did not exist when Portugal and England, and Scotland and France, were old allies, but Her Majesty’s officials cared not a jot for historical accuracy!

That experience was not untypical, and all over the world I have cringed at the pathetic efforts by British embassies and the tourist board to promote Scotland: a poster of a piper is usually about as far as it goes. On receipt of complaints from disaffected Scots, their representatives shrug their shoulders and argue that their job is to promote the whole of Britain and not what they regard as a tiny part of it – and within the confines of a British perspective they may well be right. But from a Scottish perspective what I know is that we have missed out, and continue to miss out, on countless opportunities to promote our country.

A friend, Fiona Ritchie, makes a successful Celtic music programme, The Thistle & Shamrock®, which is broadcast on almost 400 national public radio stations all over the United States. I remember her describing for me a similar scenario: when she sought sponsorship and support for her radio programmes and events in the United States, the response from Irish agencies and business interests was enthusiastic and positive; when she approached British authorities and corporate interests, invariably she was told they would get back to her. They rarely did.

I retell these stories with a great sense of frustration for, despite the positive reputation we have established throughout the world, so much more could have been done. Indeed, since the creation of the Scottish Parliament, I have been encouraged by developments such as the setting up of a Scottish Affairs office in Washington, DC, a Scottish House in Brussels and the creation of a network of Global Scots worldwide. Until very recently, though, our history has been littered with missed opportunities, but, as we shall see, there were still substantial areas that provided notable exceptions. We have left our mark in various places on the Iberian peninsula, particularly in those regions famous for their fortified wine.

‘I’m sitting on the veranda of the Graham Quinta dos Malvedos, perched high on one of the few straight furlongs of the River Douro. Just beneath are orange and lemon trees in fruit, and an olive grove festooned with the glorious purple of Morning Glory . . . opposite, reflected in the river, are the mountains girt with the green horizontal stripes of perfectly tended vines . . . it’s rugged, peaceful and stunningly beautiful. It was here the Scots came to make one of the world’s great wines, port.’

These are the opening words of my radio feature Let Them Drink Port, programme two in a four-part series entitled The Complete Caledonian Imbiber on the Scots involvement in the great wyneyairds of the world. Port, of course, has the reputation of being quintessentially an Englishman’s drink. To the outsider, it conjures up images of carnivorous West Country squires warming their blood with rich ruby blackstrap at the end of a day’s hunting, or of Oxford Dons sipping exquisite vintages over memories of their college’s great cricket team, while, beyond, the close lies in a breathless hush! Yet, like so many English icons of a commercial nature, from the Bank of England down, it was the infusion of Scottish blood which did much to transform what had been an ignoble fizzy beverage from the wilds of Portugal into one of the great wines of the world. The finest examples of the port blender’s art still bear the names of the pioneering Scots shippers: Sandeman, Robertson, Cockburn, Dow and Graham. This simply affirms that although all of these men belonged to a nation whose history had produced an early aversion to port, the Scot very rarely permitted his patriotic heart to interfere with his commercial head for good business, even if it meant dealing with the English as his principal customers!

Port got off to a very bad start in Scotland in the mid-eighteenth century. Almost every section of society bore it a grudge, and many of the grudges overlapped. To the Jacobites, it was the favourite drink of Whigs and Hanoverians; to the anti-Union faction, it symbolised English domination at Parliament due to its preferential treatment in comparison to the Scots ancient tipple, claret; to the claret drinker it was inferior plonk at an inflated price.

That the resistance to port was political rather than aesthetic, however, is revealed by the long-standing Scottish predilection for Iberian wines, which had existed since at least the fifteenth century. Canary, Tent, Mountain, Madeira, Bastard, Alicante and Lisbon all enjoyed a period in vogue, while Malaga is even commemorated in an early version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. And by the end of the eighteenth century, the political resistance had weakened considerably and port was welcome on all but the most diehard of Jacobite tables. The wine itself had improved beyond recognition and its position was further enhanced by the forging of a British identity through Scots and English fighting together for the first time against France. The Scots involvement in the Peninsular War is enshrined in folk songs like the ‘Forfar Sodger’ and ‘Twa Recruitin Sergeants’, but a less tangible legacy was the growing propensity for the fortified wines of Portugal. The Scots officers would reminisce about the battles of Buçaco and Torres Vedras while sipping fine ports shipped by a man they may well have met there, George Sandeman.

It was often the case that old Scots families sent their eldest sons to law or the ministry, the favoured professions following the Union with England. When it came the turn of the younger boys, the wine trade, while not as prestigious, offered an attractive alternative where one would at least be dealing with people of a similar social standing. Few men of twenty could have entered a new trade with the arrogant certainty of success possessed by George Sandeman, the youngest of a family of six. Here he is writing to his sister in Perth, shortly after he had set up his wine vault in London in 1790:

I shall remain where I am, till I shall have made a moderate fortune to retire with, which I expect will be in the course of nine years; which to be sure is a long time, but some lucky stroke may possibly reduce it to five or six. It is but lately I have taken up this prospect of growing rich, but I find it has been of infinite service to me already. One may see the marks of thriving in every line of my face. I eat like a man for a wager. People stand out of my way as they see me bustling along the streets. I have a good word to say to everybody I meet, and as I am informed, I frequently laugh in my sleep.

George would no doubt have applauded the Sandeman firm’s later mould-breaking introduction of the first trademark in the business – the black Don with his Spanish bonnet, representing sherry, and Portuguese cape, representing port. The rest of the trade thought the gesture pushy and in bad taste, but the Sandemans established brand recognition in a wider market, and the competition took a while to catch up. Marketing themselves, and their product, has always come easy to the Sandemans.

Even London could not contain George’s boundless energy, and by 1809 he and his wines were entertaining the most important man in the Peninsula, Wellington, the Iron Duke, whose biographer refers to him as ‘Mr Sandeman, then head of the great wine house in Porto’. Sandeman was one of the many shippers experimenting with port at this time to discover the optimum amount of brandy to add to the wine. This practice, which started simply to preserve weak wines on the sea voyage to England, had now developed to the point where the brandy was added to arrest fermentation and bring out the natural sweetness in the grape must. The ratio eventually settled on by trial and error was 1 to 5, brandy to wine, a blend which prepared the way for the great era of vintage port in the second half of the nineteenth century when Leith-bottled port enjoyed tremendous cachet mainly due to the work of Robert Cockburn.

The younger brother of Lord Cockburn, he was another young blade with a guid conceit of himself and his knowledge of wine. Unlike Sandeman, though, Robert based his conceit on years of experience as a wine merchant in Edinburgh, a city with a fondness for the grape. Both Cockburn’s the port house and Cockburn & Co. of Leith thrive today due to his original founding expertise. Robert commuted regularly between Edinburgh’s Atholl Place and Oporto, entrusting the port side of the business to his Scots friends George Wauchope and Captain Greig, and eventually his son Archibald. The firm’s letter books in Oporto show that for at least the first decade, more than half of their trade was with the home port of Leith: importing cork and bottles as well as wine. In this, Edinburgh’s Golden Age, Cockburn’s reputation spread far and wide with the aid of the world’s bestselling novelist, Walter Scott. In the introduction to The Fortunes of Nigel, Captain Clutterbuck proposes a dinner with ‘a quiet bottle of Robert Cockburn’s choicest “black”, nay, perhaps his best “blue” to quicken one’s talk of old books’. The colours refer to the coloured wax Cockburn used to seal his different styles of port. The novelist was a frequent guest at Cockburn’s table and recorded in his diary the aftermath of a session in which he tripped and fell in the mud of the building site that was Atholl Place:

Luckily Lady Scott had retired when I came home; so I enjoyed my tub of water without either remonstrance or condolences . . . Cockburn’s hospitality will get the benefit and renown of my downfall, and yet he has no claim to it.

High up in the Douro region, the Portuguese word quinta can refer to both a tiny peasant farm and a showpiece estate with a magnificent dwelling house where the British shippers lived at vintage time. The quinta at Malvedos, at the centre of the Graham lands, is very much in the latter style. There, portraits of upright Presbyterians gaze earnestly at you in the cool shade of a house built in the Portuguese style, which dominates spectacularly one of the few straight furlongs of the river. Glasgow merchants savoured chilled tawnies on its balcony as those high-prowed barcos rabelos, the traditional Douro boats, glided across the still waters of an autumn evening, carrying pipes of their young wine downstream to the lodges at Vila Nova de Gaia.

The Grahams, whose vintage port is renowned among the cognoscenti, came into port by accident. A textile and dry goods firm in Glasgow, they had already firmly established factories in Bombay, Lisbon and Oporto when, in 1820, a bad debt accrued in the latter city. The only asset the debtor had was liquid, so a consignment of port was sent to the Clyde. Once they overcame their initial shock and anger, the head office discovered to their surprise that they couldn’t sell enough of the stuff, and so they ordered more. Ironically, the wine division proved so successful that it was separated from the rest of the company before the Second World War, and the product of the bad debt survived the parent company’s bankruptcy in 1959.

It was another economic crash that brought the family who presently own Graham’s, Dow’s, Warre’s, Quarles Harris and Smith Woodhouse out from Scotland. Today, the Symington clan produce up to 16 per cent of the port sold in the world. They stem from one Andrew James Symington who joined Graham’s in Oporto following the failure of the City of Glasgow Bank and the dissolution of his father’s fortune. Within two years, he was in business for himself and was soon a partner at Warre’s and Dow’s. An enterprising man, he still found time to appreciate his father’s travel books and editions of Wordsworth while relaxing on frequent fishing trips home to Scotland. He also had the decorum, style and foresight to label the bottles of port he brought over ‘A.J. Symington’s Mixture’ so as to avoid confronting the house rules of the temperance hotel he frequented on the banks of the Tweed!

He would have appreciated the balance between old and new exhibited in the family’s Quinta do Bomfim at Pinhão in the very heart of the high port country. I remember sitting at a table on a manicured lawn before a bungalow built in the style of those more commonly seen on an Anglo-Indian tea plantation, drinking chilled white port, looking over the Douro and romanticising about port being the drink of an empire on which the sun never sets. But below me in the working part of the quinta was state-of-the-art technology from California and Australia – the auto-vinificateurs which do the job that elsewhere in the region is done by trampers thigh deep in must and singing bawdy songs from the days before the arrival of the British. Earlier in the twentieth century, one of the old Scots shippers was known to appear beside the tramping lagar with an accordion and get some good-going reels resounding to reinvigorate the rhythm of the work!

The balance between old and new is also in evidence at the elegant Factory House in Oporto, a building whose architecture would not look out of place in the Georgian elegance of Edinburgh’s New Town. There the shippers, once exclusively British but now British and Portuguese, meet for a weekly lunch where part of the sport is to guess the year and origin of the vintage port circulating the table in a clockwise direction at the end of the meal. On the two occasions I was there, I got close both times, but those steeped in the wine’s traditions always come up with a winner.

Vintage port represents the upper end of the port market, but it was always the Rich Ruby that was the bread-and-butter drink for the trade, and Scotland was a very important market for them until the end of the Second World War. Then, wines fortified in South Africa were given imperial preference, so the Rich Ruby sadly was replaced with the Red Biddy, and Eldorado, Lanliq and eventually Buckfast became the cheapest route to alcohol-induced oblivion. Suddenly, Graham’s Diamond label range was undercut and over 20 per cent of the market disappeared almost immediately. Fortunately, the spread of Portuguese migrants to countries like France and Belgium saw the popularity of port spread there as well, so new markets were conquered and replaced the sales lost at the lower end of the British market.

Today, port is thriving again, and for anyone who loves wine and Scottish history, it is a thrill to see the barcos rabelos on the quay at Vila Nova de Gaia with their wide sails billowing and emblazoned with the names and the logos of those pioneering Scots – Dow, Sandeman, Robertson, Cockburn and Graham. And there is still a good conceit of the Scottish role in port’s history. When the well-known wine scribe Edmund Penning-Rowsell referred to the shippers as ‘English’ in the magazine Decanter, he received the following ticking off from Michael Douglas Symington in the form of a letter to the editor: ‘British please, not English, as the majority of families and firms here in Oporto are of Scottish rather than English descent.’ With so many Symingtons active in the trade today, the Scottish presence in the Douro is guaranteed for another century at least.

Most of the old families are now intermarried with the Portuguese, so they share the same heritage as my own children – a balance of northern and southern European culture which works well except on the rare occasions when the countries are drawn together on the football field. I have particularly painful memories of a 5–1 drubbing in Lisbon when the separate factions led by husband and wife watched the game in separate rooms, with the children, as they were then, hedging their bets. Suffice to say, by the time the fifth goal went in, I was the only Scotland supporter left in the house! Johnny Graham, who now runs his own port firm of Churchill Graham, told me that on the same occasion he found himself supporting Portugal, though he did feel sorry for the native Scots from the textile firm of Coates Clark who were watching the game with him!

The other national game, golf, was brought to Oporto by the Scots and provides a less divisive sport for Portuguese and Scoto-Portuguese to enjoy. The St Andrew’s Night ball is another major gathering in the city which goes back many years, and it is said that the quality of the dancing in the eightsome reels is impressive, despite the evening’s excessive consumption of whisky and port. I prefer to keep the two well apart, though a good malt or vintage port are the perfect ending to a dinner on a cold winter’s night in Scotland – and with the latter you can taste and remember the strong sun on the terraced vineyards of the Douro. There, in the late summer evenings, when the sun sets it gives off a brilliant orange incandescence which is said to give the river her name, the Rio d’Ouro – the river of gold. For me, fine port wine is that incandescence bottled and released as a golden glow to this Caledonian imbiber on cauld winter’s nichts at hame, content.

At Xeres, where the Sherry we drink is made, I met a great merchant – A Mr Gordon of Scotland – who was extremely polite, and favoured me with the inspection of his vaults and cellars, so that I quaffed at the fountain head.

– George Gordon, Lord Byron, 1809

Jerez, Cadiz and Malaga have supplied the Scots with wine since medieval times, so it is not surprising that a number of families put down roots in southern Spain and traded in the local wine with the homeland. There was never as extensive a Scots community in Jerez as in Oporto, but a few kenspeckle figures left their mark. The Sandemans branched there from Oporto and became equally famous for their sherry as for their port. By the time the Sandemans arrived, though, an Ayrshireman, Sir James Duff, was already established in the trade, sending wines home to Oliphants of Ayr as early as 1767. He brought his nephew William Gordon into the firm, and the name Duff Gordon is still to be found on some wonderful bottles, though the owners of the brand today, Osborne, only use the historic Duff Gordon name in certain markets.

One of the wines shipped by James Duff to Ayrshire was Malaga, sometimes called Mountain, which hailed from the hilly region inland from that coastal resort. It was obviously extremely popular among the Scots, for it entered the folk tradition of the area. When Robert Burns was devoting his time to Scots songs, he wrote a letter to Mrs Dunlop in 1788 which contained the following lines of one he had just collected:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

And never though upon

Let’s hae a waught o’ Malaga

For auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne my dear

For auld lang syne

Let’s hae a waught o Malaga

For auld lang syne.

So Burns’ great international anthem had its roots in the south of Spain as well as the Ayrshire folk tradition. Recently, I managed to procure two different bottles of Malaga for a group of friends interested in tasting wine, so I led us all in a chorus of ‘Let’s hae a waught o Malaga for auld lang syne’ in between sips of the sweet mountain nectar.

Other old family firms in the region with Scots connections included Findlater’s, MacKenzie’s and yet another branch of the Gordons – though these names are unfortunately no longer used by the multinational conglomerates which now own so much of the drinks industry. My host when I visited the old MacKenzie vineyards and bodegas was a marvellous old Spanish gentleman called Diego Fergusson, whose people came from Banffshire in the middle of the nineteenth century to join the firm. Upper Banffshire was also the home of the Gordons who had entertained Lord Byron. That part of Scotland contained Roman Catholic enclaves in places like Glenlivet and the Cabrach, so just as you had Scots Jacobites exiled in Catholic countries like France and Spain, you also had a tradition of Roman Catholics fleeing Scotland at times of persecution and settling in the more congenial surroundings of Andalucia.

Significantly, when the Cadiz-based merchant Arthur Gordon died in 1815, he left part of his estate to the Real Colegio de Escoceses, the Royal Scots College in Valladolid. Now part of the University of Salamanca, the college was first set up in Madrid in 1627 as a seminary for Scottish Catholic priests, then moved to Valladolid where it remained from 1771 until 1988. I visited in the summer of 1982 and made recordings on the history of the establishment for a programme called The Scots College in Spain, before heading south to support the boys in blue against our World Cup opponents New Zealand, Brazil and the Soviet Union in Malaga and Seville. I was given the imposing Bishop’s Room within the college to use as my bedroom and impromptu studio while I was there. On a quiet Sunday afternoon, the peace of the place was shattered by the sound of breaking glass, running footsteps without and within, and doors slamming. Now, you may recall that the Falklands War was at its height during the summer of 1982, and public sentiment in Spain was very much pro-Argentina and anti-British. Some drunken youths had gone past the building and decided to show their solidarity for Argentina by putting in the windaes of the Real Colegio de Escoceses. What they didnae reckon on was a posse of substantially built trainee Glesga priests, chasing them in hot trod, the hottest of hot pursuits. Within seconds they were apprehended, huckled back to the college and relieved, nay, extorted of the price of the window plus interest. That done, they were removed ashen-faced and frichtened from the cool of the premises and ejected back into the hot afternoon sun. They would be good boys I am sure for the rest of their lives, and they would never again mess wi Glesga priests!

Another memory of Valladolid returns me to the subject of wine. The college had a country property out at Boecillo complete with its own vineyard, which produced the wine drunk with the meals at the college. It was awful stuff. Now, I had just driven down from Bordeaux, where I had been partaking of some of the best wine in the world, so it is possible that my palate had been spoiled for anything inferior. I am sure, however, that the wine just wasnae very good. On investigation, it turned out that while the wine may have been all right, the equipment for making and storing it looked as if it had not been upgraded since the Duke of Wellington had stayed there in 1812. Basically, the barrels had holes and the wine was severely compromised by oxidisation – to my taste it was closer to vinegar than wine, but for these boys it was just bevvy and they swallied it back with alacrity! Here’s tae us wha’s like us – damned few an they’re aw deid!

The Scots did not exactly discover Madeira, but they as much as anyone were responsible for the transformation of the island into a paradise of sumptuous wines, exquisite embroidery and grand old-world hotels for tourists to stay in while enjoying its pleasures. The word madeira in Portuguese means wood, the name given to the uninhabited forest-covered islands when they were first glimpsed from the caravels of Zarco in 1418 on one of the first of those great voyages of discovery that would carry the Portuguese to every corner of the globe. When the first Portuguese emigrant ship left the mainland to populate the island in 1424, aboard was a young Scot called John Drummond of Stobhall, who became known there as João Escocio, or Jock the Scot. He was the first of many influential Scots to put down roots on the island, and his descendants in the families called Drummont and Escorcio would achieve prominence in Madeira and every part of the Portuguese empire. And if that in itself is not remarkable enough to whet your appetite to read on, you can turn to the chapter on South America and discover the story of an amazing Scots Presbyterian missionary and doctor called Robert Reid Kalley who began a Protestant reformation on the island and subsequently influenced communities as far apart as Hawaii, Illinois, Trinidad and Brazil! But to our tale . . .

Vines, especially ones bearing the rich Malvasia or Malmsey grape originally brought to the peninsula from Crete, were planted throughout Madeira in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is said that the Scots colonists en route for Darien in the 1690s exchanged homespun cloth for wine and took on water in Madeira before continuing their journey to the Isthmus in Panama. In the eighteenth century, Madeira also became a haven for Scots Jacobites who continued to trade with fellow Scots at home and in far-flung corners of the British Empire. Francis Newton arrived in Madeira in 1748 and founded the firm that is still trading today under the name Cossart Gordon. The Gordon in question, Russell Gordon, was a descendant of William Gordon, 6^th Viscount Kenmure, who was executed as a Jacobite rebel on Tower Hill, London, in 1716. Russell Gordon married the Portuguese Countess Torre Bella but had enough of a sense of his Scottish history to name his first born James Murray Kenmure Gordon. I have this image in my head of the baby being dandled by the proud daddy singing ‘Kenmure’s Up and Awa’!

When I was on Madeira recording material for the series The Complete Caledonian Imbiber, I learned to my amazement that the hotel I was staying at in Funchal had at one time been part of the estate of the Gordon and Torre Bella families, and that a member of the family, Susan Seldon, was visiting the island at the time. I interviewed Susan, who spoke with great feeling and pride of her mixed Scoto-Portuguese heritage, a link that had continued in the present generation through the marriage of her sister to a gentleman who owned Myres Castle in Fife. Both women had substantial collections of old vintage Madeira, probably the longest lasting of all of the great wines of the world. Its longevity may also be due to a Scottish connection, as the Fifer Francis Newton is one of the first people we know to mention the practice of adding brandy to the wine in order to fortify it. That and the distinctive method of ‘cooking’ Madeira wine, first of all naturally in the sun giving the beautifully named vinho do sol – wine of the sun – and later on in estufas or heating containers, both methods imparting a slightly burnished tang, then the practice of sending the casks in the holds of ships sailing in hot climates – all of this resulted in a wine that was the toast of the British Empire.

The letter books of Cossart Gordon testify to the extent of the old boys’ network in distant places. Wines were sent to firms such as Law, Bruce & Co. of Bombay, and Newton commented to a fellow Scot in America that ‘an old schoolfellow Wattie Hunter traded here lately on his way to Jamaica’. In Madeira, the clannish nature of the Scots may have been heightened by religious differences with the Portuguese and political differences with the English, who in the majority were sound Whigs. Then again, with Francis Newton it may have been down to his being a dour Fifer that he didnae get on wi his neebours!

I agree as yet very well with the climate which is very pleasant and perhaps one of the most healthful of any in the world but that is balanced by the people . . . the whole Portuguese nation seems completely pervaded with a sluggish spirit of inglorious indolence. They are a very sullen, proud, deceitful people and in short there is no such thing as finding one to make a companion of, very few of them having good education unless the Priest and Collegians whose ceremonies are so many and conversations so very narrow, being Roman Catholic, that their company is very disagreeable. As for the English here, they are much worse.

Despite such personal hazards, by the later eighteenth century there were at least four Scottish trading firms based on the islands – Pringle & Cheape; Murdoch, Cattenach & Co.; James & Alexander Gordon & Co.; and Fergusson, Murdoch & Co. In 1814, another Scottish firm famous in the history of Madeira wine, Rutherfords, set up in Funchal. Rutherfords was founded by Jacobites who had first gone to the American South. Southern ports like Savannah and Charleston were major entrepôts for Madeira wine, and they were also thrang with Scots merchants. It was natural for firms like Rutherfords to establish a foothold on the island that was the source of this popular wine and lucrative commodity.

It should also be pointed out that the fortunes made in the triangular trade between Glasgow, Madeira and on to America and the West Indies were fuelled with the human misery of slavery, something which I shall turn to in more detail in the chapter on the American South. The whole Atlantic economy was underpinned with slave labour. Writing to a friend in the West Indies, Newton apologises:

Since my arrival here I have been endeavouring to sell your negro wench but have not as yet sold her. When I do I shall render your acct. Sales, – however that you may not be disappointed have advanced you a hogshead New York Wine shipped on the Jamaica packett.

Due to its position at the crossroads of the Atlantic Ocean, Madeira was visited by many of the great seafarers of the day, Captain Cook and Lord Nelson included. On his way to permanent exile, Napoleon Bonaparte was entertained in Madeira by the British consul and wine trader Henry Veitch, who hailed from Selkirk. Veitch took Napoleon gifts of books, fruit and wine – no doubt a few choice Verdelhos and Buals rounded and matured to perfection on the voyage to St Helena to while away his days in the South Atlantic. During my first visit to Château Lafite in Pauillac in the Médoc, I was told that Napoleon had also been given a few bottles of that generous liquid to take into exile with him as well, so life still had its compensations.

Despite Britain’s wars against Napoleon’s forces, many radical Scots revered Napoleon; indeed, at one point the Sea Wolf Admiral Cochrane had a plan to cut Napoleon’s exile short and make him Emperor of South America after Cochrane had rid the continent of the Spanish! As you will see later in the book, he did succeed in defeating the Spanish navy in Chile and Peru but found that just a trifle taxing and was unable to make time to visit Napoleon out in St Helena.

For centuries, Madeira’s prosperity was based on wine, but when the vine disease of Phylloxera attacked the island’s vineyards in 1872, the major new industry of tourism and the embroidery promoted by it helped ward off economic disaster until the vines could be re-established using root stock imported from America. Both industries were pioneered by Scots from my own home county of Ayrshire. When the women of Madeira took up embroidery to supplement their family’s income, they adopted a style that was based on Ayrshire white work, which had developed from the old skill of tambouring and had been introduced into the island by Miss Phelps, a merchant’s daughter. Her importance to the island’s prosperity is commemorated in the square bearing her name in Funchal.

Another Ayrshire name still features on one of the island’s and the world’s most famous hotels, Reid’s Madeira. Willie and Alfred Reid from Kilmarnock had what almost amounted to a monopoly of hotels catering for Victorian tourists who came to take the ‘healthful’ air mentioned by their countryman Newton a century before. The Royal Edinburgh, The Carmo and The Santa Clara were the forerunners of Reid’s Madeira itself, built in 1890 and the perfect place to sip vintage Malmsey, gaze seaward and raise a glass to Caledonia.

At Reid’s, I had lunch with Richard Blandy, whose family, English in origin, have been prominent in Madeira for many generations. Richard told me how even pragmatic Ulster Scots engineers like Lord Kelvin had romance in their hearts – the famous marine scientist proposed to one of the Blandy girls by Morse code from ship to shore, and she replied in the affirmative by the same method. He also told me how the tradition of calling their styles of wine after famous aristocrats from English history backfired in Scotland. The ‘Duke of Clarence’ was most acceptable at an Edinburgh tasting, but he became unstuck when he introduced his ‘Duke of Cumberland’ label. He could immediately sense a latent Jacobite frisson in the room, which was broken by a simple statement of fact by the man in the front row: ‘Well, you’ll not be selling much of that here in Scotland, Mr Blandy!’

Madeira wine is now also part of the portfolio of the Symington family from Oporto, so the Scottish connection continues. They have a large shareholding in the Madeira Wine Company which owns some of the most famous grandes marques including Cossart Gordon, Blandy’s and Leacock’s. In Funchal, the beautiful old buildings of the Caves São Francisco are a mecca for anyone interested in wine. You can buy wines by the glass going back a hundred years, and they are still rich and glorious in the mouth. It was there at the offices of the Madeira Wine Company that I discovered yet another Scottish link with Madeira, which came as a complete surprise and was all the more astonishing in that it was completely personal. After interviewing Jacques Faro da Silva of the Madeira Wine Company on the history of the wine, I mentioned the story of John Drummond of Stobhall and asked whether his family still existed in the island. Jacques replied in the affirmative, saying that there were hundreds of people called Drummont and Escorcio (a corruption of the Portuguese word for Scots – Escocês) who were all descendants of João Escorcio – John the Scot. Jacques pulled out the Dictionary of Madeiran History and there they all were, his descendants making a huge mark on Madeiran, Portuguese and Portuguese empire history. But what caught my eye was the reference to the woman he had married, who became the mother of his Scoto-Portuguese children, ‘Branca Affonso of Covilhâ’! The Afonsos were godparents to my own children’s great-grandmother, and the quinta where we spend our summer holidays was a gift inherited by her from her madrinha, her godmother Afonso. Now Covilhâ is about as far from Madeira as you can get in Portugal, so first of all I was surprised to discover a woman from there on the island in the fifteenth century, but when I realised that she had married a Scot and then it dawned on me that our quinta came from their family, I was quite taken aback. My Portuguese in-laws are still taken aback, but when I sit out on those warm summer nights in our quinta in the foothills of the range called Serra d’Estrella – Mountains of the Star – I often think of John Drummond and the strange coincidences that bring people of different centuries and different cultures together.