John Custis IV (1673-1747)

John Custis IV knew firsthand how hard it was to ship alcohol across the Atlantic Ocean. After receiving a particularly bad shipment he wrote to his London agent, “the wine (was) nothing near as good as that sent first… I cannot drink one drop of it.” But this did not stop him from importing huge quantities of European wine for his houses in Accomack County and Williamsburg, Virginia. When his brother-in-law William Byrd II (1674-1744) visited in 1709 he noted in his diary that, “every day at dinner we had a bottle of good wine first and then a bottle of bad.” This wine bottle, made for Custis around 1713, was discovered in the remains of his Williamsburg cellar.