A "Bellarmine" is carved stone jug, typically made to look like a bearded man (the name for it in German is "Bartmann"), which was used to bring wine from the cask to the table. A great number of them were produced in the area round Cologne. They may have been called "Bellarmines" in England to mock the famous cardinal. When he goes on to specify the wines he'd like, Welsted's taste looks predictable: Muscat, Frontignac, the famous Bordeaux wines of Margaux (here spelled "Margou") and Haut-Brion (here referred to by the surname of its then owner, "Pontac"), Hermitage, and Cyprus. But when Welsted begins to list recent European poets who have been inspired by wine, we come across something unexpected:

"Ramsay" is the Scottish vernacular and Jacobite poet Allan Ramsay (1686-1758), father to the more famous portrait painter. It is however very surprising to find a reference to Chianti as early as 1725. Although the "Classico" heartland had been delimited nine years before, in 1716, the permissible grape varieties for Chianti would be specified only as late as 1872 by Baron Ricasoli. Before Welsted Chianti is hardly mentioned by English writers. The 1615 English translation of Pierre d'Amity's The Estates, Empires, and Principallities of the World notes that "Valdarne aboundeth greatly in corn, Chianti in wines, and Mugelle in fruits." Edmund Smith's poem on the death of his fellow-poet John Philips makes a passing reference to Chianti as does Richard Bradley in his New Improvements of Planting and Gardening.

It is hard to say which is the more surprising: that this supposedly bigoted Whig writer should have admired the vernacular Jacobite verse of Allan Ramsay, or that this alleged beer drinker should have been unusually aware of Italian wine. Either way, we are reminded that it is unwise implicitly to trust Pope's accounts of his fellow-poets, no matter how brilliantly phrased.