Swift's taste in wine was formed by the years he spent in London working as chief of propaganda for the Oxford-Bolingbroke ministry during the last four years of the reign of Queen Anne. The journal he kept of those years, written as almost daily entries which he collected up and periodically sent to Esther Johnson, or "Stella", and her companion Rebecca Dingley in Dublin, give us the most detailed and intimate picture we possess of any period of Swift's life.

He had fallen in with a hard-drinking set. Oxford scandalised Queen Anne by the frequency with which he would appear before her incapacitated by drink, and Bolingbroke was a notorious libertine. The entry in the Journal to Stella for January 18, 1711 is typical of many. A meeting when Oxford, Bolingbroke and Swift were to dine alone "about some business of importance" degenerated into a drinking party orchestrated by Bolingbroke and from which Swift could not extricate himself: "I wonder at the civility of these people; when he [Bolingbroke] saw I would drink no more, he would always pass the bottle by me, and yet I could not keep the toad from drinking himself, nor he would not let me go neither." It was a way of life that took its toll on even its most hardened practitioners. Also typical is the account Swift gives of calling on Bolingbroke and finding him "very ill with the gravel and pain in his back, by Burgundy and Champagne...I found him drinking tea while the rest were at Champagne, and was very glad of it."

However, the aristocratic wines favoured by Bolingbroke did not suit Swift, and drinking them turned his thoughts into that  hypochondriacal stream to which he was in any case naturally disposed. On July 30, 1711 he wrote in a mood of anxious self-pity: "In my conscience I fear I shall have the gout. I sometimes feel pains about my feet and toes; I never drank till within these two years, and I did it to cure my head. I often sit  evening with some of these people, and drink in my turn; but I am now resolved to drink ten times less than before."

But no such guilty apprehensions were raised by a different drinking party in the City on October 18, 1710: "To-day I dined, by invitation, with Stratford and others, at a young merchant's in the city, with Hermitage and Tockay, and staid till nine, and am now come home." Do we have here a hint about the social geography of wine in early 18th-century London, with the aristocrats of Westminster drinking Champagne and Burgundy, and the merchants of the City preferring the great wine of the northern Rhone, Hermitage, and the wonderful sweet wine of Hungary (now happily much restored after the depredations of the Communist period)?

Swift's tastes cleaved to those of the City rather than the West End. In his later correspondence a particularly melancholy letter describes how a parcel of Hermitage which Swift had bought from Arbuthnot's brother Robert failed to give satisfaction. "I complain to you", Swift wrote to Gay in March 1730, "as I did to Mr Pope" before describing how Arbuthnot had sent him "150 Bottles of Hermitage, that by the time they got into my Cellar cost me 27ll and in less than a year all turned sowr; tho' what I had formerly...was not fit to drink till two years, and grew better at seven, as a few left, yet shew." It was unlikely that this wine was shipped in bottle. Much more probably a half-hogshead of Hermitage was sent by boat down the Rhone, and then shipped to Dublin from Marseille, which was a focus for the Irish linen trade and from which ships frequently set sail for Ireland. On its arrival in Dublin Swift would have had the wine bottled in his own cellar. The wine might have spoiled when still in barrel, or during the bottling. Either way, this attempt by Swift to revive that carefree evening in the City with the anonymous young merchant and his friends was doomed to end in a very Swiftian vexation.