Queen Anne Wine Bottle, Shiraz (1708)

Dr. Peter Good traces the flows of Persian wine culture through precolonial India into Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, via the Queen Anne Wine Bottle from Shiraz.

No other alcoholic drink has inspired - or intoxicated - our imaginations quite like wine. Long considered the perfect gift from visitors, this striking sapphire blue bottle from Shiraz was presented to the English Queen Anne in 1708 - one of many bought and sold by the English from Persia, now Iran. Perhaps surprisingly common, this artefact of the Safavid Empire's multimillion pound wine industry reveals early modern Europe's obsession with Persian wine, from its mythical properties as an elixir of life, to the courtly manners of its taste and consumption. But it also speaks to attitudes towards non-European and Islamic powers before the rise of formal empires in the Indian Ocean. Far from imposing their 'superior' culture upon local powers, European elites adopted and mimicked the practices of their Asian counterparts, from cultivating grapevines and vineyards, to the paradisic Persian gardens of the English East India Company. Since swallowed into existing European tastes, the Queen Anne bottle brings Iran's unique viticulture to light, forcing us to reconsider our privileging of Western wines in popular culture and museum collections today.

PRESENTER: Dr. Peter Good, Lecturer in Early Modern Europe and the Islamic World at the University of Kent. He specialises on cross-cultural and diplomatic exchanges between Europeans and Asian states in the Indian Ocean. He is the author of The East India Company in Persia: Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Eighteenth Century, published by Bloomsbury in January 2022.

ART: Queen Anne Wine Bottle, Shiraz (1708).

IMAGE: 'Saddle Flask - Type II PC-078 Queen Anne Flask'.

SOUNDS: Blue Dot Sessions.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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