Happy birth date to Edmund Penning-Rowsell – lifelong Marxist, and one of the world's greatest authorities on claret. Indeed, many oenophiles rank him as the greatest wine writer Britain has ever produced, and the French admired him so much that they knighted him.
He was born in Brompton, a smart part of London, the son of a master printer, and much of his childhood was comfortable enough. But his parents divorced in the 1920s, and his father lost his business in the Great Depression. There was no longer the money to keep the teenager at boarding school, or to send him to university, so Edmund went to work first in newspapers and then in publishing.
Edmund first met his future wife in Hyde Park, apparently when they both laughed at a pompous man falling off a horse. (Hollywood can come up with all the meet-cutes it likes, but it’ll never top that.) Meg Wintringham was already as Red as they come, and her brother was Tom Wintringham, communist legend and co-founder of what became the Home Guard.
Meg and Edmund married in 1937 (they were together until his death in 2002), and it was a wedding present that first triggered his interest in wine. By the time WW2 started, that interest had become a passion and in 1940 he joined the world’s oldest wine club, commonly referred to as The Wine Society; more formally, The International Exhibition Co-operative Wine Society Limited, founded 1874. It’s a not-for-profit wine retailer, which obviously appealed to Edmund’s principles. He went on to be its longest-serving and most influential chairman, from 1964 until 1987.
At this time, the young couple were both active in the Holborn & St Pancras branch of the Labour Party, though they soon left for the Communist Party. Edmund’s membership of the CP, like his marriage, was ended only by his death.
During the war, Edmund worked at an aircraft factory in the West Country, until sacked for his trade union activities. He then joined the Royal Corps of Signals. In peacetime, still employed in publishing, he began writing about wine – first for Country Life in 1954, and later for the Financial Times and Marxism Today. He carried on writing (books as well as journalism) until shortly before his death.
The role of wine correspondent didn’t really exist until he invented it, and he was almost certainly the longest-serving wine correspondent there’s ever been, anywhere. His work is still admired for its painstaking scholarship; he is probably unrivalled to this day for his knowledge not only of wine itself and its history, but of wine as an industry and a business.
One thing Edmund wasn’t interested in was wine as an investment – it existed for drinking with friends, not as a commodity to be traded – but he bought wisely over the years and was said to have ended up with one of the finest private cellars in the country. Jancis Robinson, today’s best-known British wine writer, describes him as her mentor, and recalls him telling her “that I should never think about the value of a bottle when opening it.”
Famously modest and (along with Meg) hospitable, he was described by one friend as “conservative in everything but politics.” Overnight guests at their robustly-cellared cottage, following an evening of plain food and exceptional wine, would enjoy a choice at breakfast of home-made marmalades, and The Times or Morning Star according to taste.
The Republic of France awarded Edmund Penning-Rowsell its Ordre du Mérite Agricole in 1971, and in 1981 he became a Chevalier of the Ordre du Mérite National, currently France’s third-highest state honour. He is buried at Brampton - the UK’s only nationalised cemetery.
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Sources:
www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/edmund-penning-rowsell-a-long-life-in-brief-notes
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, at www.oxforddnb.com
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1387177/Edmund-Penning-Rowsell.html
The Independent, 7 March 2002