Memory, Mess Tradition, and Commonwealth Service Culture
Among the more unusual items in my Royal New Zealand Army Ordnance Corps (RNZAOC) collection are several bottles of Port produced or presented in connection with RNZAOC events and activities. At first glance, they appear to be simple commemorative bottles, the sort of object often retained after a dining-in night, corps function, reunion, anniversary, formal presentation, or mess occasion. Yet they also open a window into a much older military tradition.
Port, in British and Commonwealth military culture, is more than an after-dinner drink. It is bound up with mess etiquette, formal dining, loyal toasts, regimental memory, hospitality, presentation, and the preservation of institutional identity. In the case of the RNZAOC, a commemorative Port bottle can therefore be read as more than a souvenir. It is a small material link to the social world of the Corps, its mess customs, its ceremonial life, and the way soldiers marked service, comradeship, and belonging.
This is why such bottles deserve to be treated as artefacts. Their importance lies not simply in their contents, but in the history, ritual, and institutional memory that gathered around them.
Port, Portugal, and Britain
Port is a fortified wine from the Douro Valley in northern Portugal. Its close association with Britain developed strongly from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, shaped by trade, politics, war, and the long-standing Anglo-Portuguese relationship. During periods when French wines were less accessible, less reliable, or less politically acceptable, British merchants and consumers increasingly turned to Portuguese wine.
The Methuen Commercial Treaty of 1703 is often treated as a key turning point in this relationship. Paul Duguid’s study of the treaty is useful because it warns against viewing Methuen merely as a dry commercial agreement. Duguid argues that the treaty became embedded in English political and cultural imagination, while Port wine became one of its most enduring beneficiaries. In other words, Port’s British identity was not simply a matter of taste. It was also a product of trade policy, wartime rivalry, national preference, political imagination, and a long cultural memory of Britain’s relationship with Portugal.[1]
This matters for military history because the British officers’ mess drew heavily from the dining culture of Britain’s social elite. The mess was not simply a place where officers ate. It was a regulated social institution, part dining room, part club, part school of manners, and part guardian of regimental identity. Port entered military life through this world.
Why Port was fortified
Port’s fortified character was central to its success. Before modern bottling, refrigeration, chemical stabilisation, and temperature-controlled transport, wine was vulnerable. It could spoil, oxidise, or continue fermenting unpredictably during long journeys. This was a real problem for wines being moved from Portugal to Britain by sea.
In Port production, grape spirit is added to the fermenting wine. This stops fermentation before all the grape sugar has been converted into alcohol, leaving residual sweetness while increasing alcoholic strength. The result is a wine that is stronger, sweeter, fuller-bodied, and more stable than ordinary table wine, producing the fortified sweet wine recognised as Port.[2].
This made Port especially attractive to British merchants and consumers. It travelled well, stored well, and suited the needs of a maritime trading nation. For an empire connected by long sea routes and for armed forces accustomed to overseas service, that practical durability helped give Port a natural place in formal military hospitality.
Port and British military drinking culture
Alcohol has long had a place in military life, although not always in the same form or for the same purpose. Some drinks were regarded as medicinal, some as ration items, some as comforts, and some as markers of status or ritual. Gin and tonic, for example, emerged from British imperial experience in India, where quinine was made more palatable with gin, water, sugar, and lime. Rum, beer, wine, and spirits have all occupied different places in military culture, from ration issue to morale, comfort, and ceremony.[3]
Port’s place was different. It was not primarily a field ration or soldiers’ issue. It belonged more naturally to the formal world of the mess, the dining table, the toast, the presentation, and the ceremonial occasion. It was associated with officers, guests, formal dinners, and later with wider mess customs across officers’ and senior non-commissioned officers’ messes.
One modern military presentation supplier describes the gifting of Port as a tradition associated with British military service in Portugal that has evolved into a gesture of goodwill, camaraderie, and hospitality. This should be treated carefully as a traditional account rather than as definitive archival proof, but it reflects how Port has been remembered within military culture as a drink associated with friendship, respect, and formal presentation.[4]
The mess as a place of military identity
Edward Gosling strengthens the central argument of this piece. Gosling does not discuss Port specifically, but his analysis of the British officers’ mess explains why objects such as Port bottles, decanters, mess silver, portraits, menus, and trophies matter. He argues that the officers’ mess has historically functioned as a place where shared history, materiality, and social interaction help construct collective military leader identity. The mess is therefore not just a room. It is a social and symbolic setting in which military identity is learned, performed, reinforced, and passed on.[5]
Gosling also notes that the identity and history of a unit are communicated through tradition and through material and visual culture derived from past and present members and the events in which they participated.[6] This is directly relevant to the RNZAOC Port bottles. Their labels, crests, dates, inscriptions, and associations do not merely decorate the bottle. They locate the object within a web of memory, corps identity, mess culture, and shared experience.
This helps explain why a commemorative Port bottle should be treated as part of the RNZAOC’s material culture. It is not simply a container. It is a small, portable expression of an institution’s social life.
The passing of the Port
The best-known Port custom is the passing of the decanter. In British dining tradition, the decanter is usually passed to the left. The Naval Officers Association of Australia describes the custom as “following the sun”, with Port passing clockwise and to the left, while also noting that the practice’s origins are obscure.[4] Taylor explains the custom in similar terms: the decanter is placed to the right of the host or hostess and then passed left around the table until it returns to its starting point.[7]
Several explanations are commonly offered. Some link it to naval custom, “port to port”. Others suggest that passing to the left kept the right hand, traditionally the sword hand, free. A simpler explanation is that passing in one direction ensures that every diner is included and that the decanter does not become trapped at one end of the table. Whatever its origin, the ritual reinforces orderly sharing, attentiveness, and participation.
There is also the traditional indirect rebuke when the Port stops moving. Rather than bluntly asking someone to pass the Port, another diner may ask, “Do you know the Bishop of Norwich?” The phrase serves as a polite hint that the decanter has come to rest and should continue its journey around the table.[8]
In a military mess, such rituals matter. They reinforce order, awareness, restraint, and shared participation. The passing of the Port is not simply about drinking. It is a small act of collective discipline. Everyone participates, nobody monopolises the decanter, and the table moves through the ritual together.
Port, toasts, and loyalty
Port is closely linked to formal toasts. In British and Commonwealth military practice, the Loyal Toast to the Sovereign has long been one of the central acts of a formal dinner. Other toasts may follow, including to the regiment or corps, to absent friends, to fallen comrades, to guests, or to allied and associated units.
This is where Port takes on a deeper significance. It becomes a ceremonial drink of loyalty and memory. It marks a transition from dining to reflection. The glass is raised not simply in celebration, but in acknowledgement of service, obligation, sacrifice, and continuity.
For a corps such as the RNZAOC, this is particularly important. The Corps was built around service, supply, maintenance support, ammunition, ordnance management, and the unglamorous but essential machinery of military sustainment. Its formal occasions gave members a way to express pride in that service. A Port bottle connected to an RNZAOC dinner or event, therefore, represents not only the function itself, but also the act of collective remembrance that accompanied it.
The commemorative Port bottle
This is where the bottles in the collection become especially interesting. A commemorative Port bottle occupies an unusual place between a mess object, a presentation item, and a historical document. It may never have been intended as an archival record, yet it can preserve details that are otherwise easily lost.
A bottle label, presentation box, engraving, crest, date, unit title, occasion, or inscription can record the name of a corps, unit, mess, or association. It may identify the date of an anniversary or formal dinner, the location of an event, the names of presenters or recipients, the use of a particular badge, crest, or motto, and the social networks that connected serving members, veterans, and guests.
For the RNZAOC, such bottles are part of the Corps’ material culture. They sit alongside plaques, trophies, mess silver, menus, photographs, programmes, badges, reunion items, and presentation pieces. Individually, they may seem modest. Collectively, they help tell the story of how the Corps remembered itself.
Gosling’s work helps place these objects within a broader interpretive framework. He argues that place, history, and materiality can generate, transmit, legitimise, and sometimes reshape meanings associated with leadership and military identity.[9] A Port bottle is therefore not a neutral object. It can transmit meaning, especially when it carries a corps badge, a date, a motto, or the memory of a formal occasion.
RNZAOC identity, regimental culture, and New Zealand adaptation
The RNZAOC, like other New Zealand Army corps, inherited much from British and Commonwealth military tradition. Its members served within a culture shaped by mess dinners, corps days, formal presentations, loyal toasts, farewells, retirements, postings, and reunions. These occasions were not peripheral to military life. They helped sustain identity.
Carol-Jo Phillips’ thesis on New Zealand’s regimental system provides useful context here. Phillips argues that New Zealand inherited the idea of the regimental system from Britain, but that New Zealand’s smaller, more egalitarian, all-volunteer Army adapted that inheritance to its own cultural pressures and legacies. This is directly relevant to RNZAOC and later RNZALR history. New Zealand did not simply copy British practice unchanged. It absorbed, modified, and localised it.
Phillips also defines the regimental system not merely as an administrative structure, but as a form of military culture. Its features include corporate identity, beliefs, values, symbols, and the social and psychological framework that military culture provides for the individual soldier.[10] This helps explain why an object such as a Port bottle can carry meaning. It belongs to the symbolic life of a corps, but its value depends on the values it represents.
For a technical and logistics corps, this mattered. The work of RNZAOC personnel was often carried out behind the front line, in depots, workshops, ammunition areas, supply installations, offices, and administrative systems. The formal life of the Corps helped make that service visible. It gave members a shared language of belonging, whether they were Regular Force, Territorial Force, civilian staff, serving soldiers, or veterans.
A commemorative Port bottle from an RNZAOC function, therefore, speaks to several layers of identity. It reflects the British Commonwealth mess custom. It reflects New Zealand Army ceremonial practice. It reflects the social life of the Corps. It also reflects the pride of a specialist organisation whose contribution was often essential but not always widely understood.
Symbols, values, and the danger of empty tradition
Phillips’ thesis is also useful because it cautions against allowing symbols to become detached from the values they are supposed to represent. In her discussion of the New Zealand Army’s regimental system, she notes that symbols reflect values, but when they overshadow the values they represent, they can undermine those values.[11]
This point is important for an article about Port. A Port bottle has no automatic virtue simply because it is old. Its value depends on what it is used to express. If the object merely represents nostalgia, exclusiveness, or unthinking imitation, then it has limited worth. If, however, it represents comradeship, hospitality, remembrance, discipline, continuity, and belonging, it remains meaningful.
The same applies to the mess itself. Its importance does not rest on preserving every older habit unchanged. Its importance lies in preserving the best parts of military social culture, standards, mutual respect, confidence in formal settings, pride in service, and a sense of connection to those who came before.
Port as a gift and presentation item
The gifting of Port fits naturally into military culture because it combines hospitality with permanence. Unlike a single toast consumed at a dinner, a presented bottle can be retained, displayed, opened on a later occasion, or preserved unopened as a memento.
This gives it a dual character. It is both consumable and commemorative. It may be intended for sharing, but it may also be kept. In many collections, military Port bottles survive precisely because their owners understood they represented more than their contents. They marked an event, a relationship, a posting, a farewell, a reunion, or a milestone.
In this sense, an RNZAOC Port bottle is similar to a challenge coin, a plaque, an engraved tankard, a presentation shell case, a framed photograph, or an illuminated address. It is a token of association. Its value lies not only in what it is, but in what it connects.
Changing attitudes to alcohol and the survival of tradition
It is also important to acknowledge that social attitudes towards alcohol have changed significantly. Military organisations today operate in a very different environment from that of earlier generations. Greater attention is now given to health, professionalism, welfare, inclusiveness, the duty of care, and ensuring that formal occasions remain respectful and safe for all participants. Traditions once accepted without question are now more likely to be examined, moderated, or adapted.
Gosling’s article is particularly useful here. He notes that the officers’ mess can support socialisation and identity, but also warns that reliance on alcohol, or on evening and weekend functions, can become a barrier to genuine inclusivity.[12] This point strengthens the article by allowing Port to be discussed honestly. Port can be part of military tradition, but the tradition cannot be reduced to drinking.
As a result, Port can sometimes appear to belong to another era. A commemorative Port bottle may now seem more like an artefact of the past than a living part of military culture. For some, it may evoke an older mess world of formal dinners, smoking rooms, polished silver, rigid etiquette, and alcohol-centred hospitality. That perception is understandable. The military mess, like the wider society around it, has changed.
Yet this does not mean that the tradition has lost its value. The significance of Port in military culture has never rested solely on alcohol. Its deeper meaning lies in ritual, symbolism, and shared identity. The passing of the Port, the Loyal Toast, the toast to absent friends, the presentation bottle, and the commemorative label all belong to a broader tradition. They help mark occasions, honour service, welcome guests, farewell comrades, remember the fallen, and reinforce the bonds of a corps or regiment.
This is where the mess remains important. A mess is not simply a bar or dining facility. At its best, it is one of the institutions through which military culture is transmitted. It teaches standards, manners, hospitality, respect for rank without servility, confidence in formal settings, and awareness of the organisation’s history. It provides a setting where junior members observe senior members, where guests are hosted properly, where achievements are recognised, and where the living community of a corps or regiment connects with those who served before.
Gosling’s conclusion that the mess has continued to evolve in line with the requirements of modern Defence organisations is helpful here. The mess has never been a frozen institution. Its form and function have changed, but its continuing value lies in the role it plays in formal and informal military social structures.[13]
In that sense, Port should be understood less as a drink and more as a symbol. It represents continuity. It represents the discipline of ceremony. It represents the idea that military organisations are sustained not only by orders, equipment, establishments, doctrine, and systems, but also by customs, stories, shared rituals, and collective memory.
For the RNZAOC, the surviving Port bottles in this collection therefore have value even if the drinking culture around them has changed. They remind us of the social and ceremonial life of the Corps. They record occasions when members gathered as a community, not just as tradesmen, storemen, ammunition personnel, clerks, officers, soldiers, or civilian staff, but as members of a corps with its own identity and traditions.
The point is not to preserve alcohol-centred customs uncritically. Rather, it is to understand what those customs represented, and to decide which parts of the tradition still serve a useful purpose. The drink may become less central, but the values attached to the ritual, comradeship, remembrance, hospitality, dignity, continuity, and belonging, remain worth preserving.
A small object with a wider story
The bottles in this collection, therefore, provide a useful way to explain a wider tradition. They show how a Portuguese fortified wine became part of British dining culture, how British dining culture shaped the officers’ mess, how mess customs spread through the Commonwealth, and how New Zealand Army corps, such as the RNZAOC, adapted those customs into their own ceremonial life.
They also remind us that military history is not limited to weapons, vehicles, uniforms, medals, and campaign narratives. It is also found in objects of fellowship and ritual. Mess menus, toast lists, decanters, Port bottles, place cards, seating plans, presentation items, and reunion souvenirs all help reconstruct the lived culture of military organisations.
For the RNZAOC, such objects are especially valuable because they illuminate the human and social side of a Corps often remembered through stores, depots, equipment, ammunition, ledgers, workshops, and logistics systems. They show the Corps as a community.
Phillips’ discussion of New Zealand’s military culture reinforces this point. She argues that New Zealand’s regimental system adapted inherited British ideas to New Zealand’s own circumstances, emphasising values, cohesion, and cultural fit rather than simple imitation.[14] An RNZAOC Port bottle, therefore, sits at the intersection of inherited British Commonwealth custom and New Zealand Army adaptation. It is both traditional and local.
Conclusion
Port holds a distinctive place in British and Commonwealth military tradition because it connects practicality, status, hospitality, ceremony, and memory. Its fortified nature made it durable and suitable for long-distance trade. Its popularity in Britain made it part of elite dining culture. Its adoption by the mess made it part of military etiquette. Its use in toasts gave it ceremonial meaning. Its presentation as a gift turned it into a keepsake of service and comradeship.
The RNZAOC Port bottles in the collection are therefore more than curiosities. They are artefacts of corps identity. They record occasions when members of the Corps gathered, remembered, toasted, farewelled, celebrated, or renewed the bonds of service.
Changing attitudes towards alcohol may make these bottles seem, at first glance, like relics of a former mess culture. But their real significance lies beyond the alcohol itself. They represent tradition, ritual, memory, and belonging. They remind us that a corps is sustained not only by its official records and operational achievements, but also by the customs and shared practices through which its members understand who they are.
That point is strengthened by the scholarship on the mess and on New Zealand’s regimental system. The mess is a place where shared history, material culture, and social interaction help construct identity. The regimental and corps system is not merely an administrative arrangement, but a culture of values, symbols, memory, and belonging. Port, when understood in that context, is not simply an alcoholic drink. It is part of a symbolic language.
In that sense, the significance of Port is what the bottle represents: continuity, comradeship, restraint, loyalty, remembrance, and the shared discipline of belonging to a corps whose work sustained the New Zealand Army.
Notes
[1] Paul Diguid, “The Making of Methuen: the commercial Treaty in the English imagination,” História: revista da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto 4 (2003).
[2] “Port Wines,” Instituto dos Vinhos do Douro e do Porto, 2026, https://www.ivdp.pt/en/wines/port-wines/introduction/?utm_source=chatgpt.com.
[3] “War Culture – Military Drinking,” Military History Matters, 2012, https://www.military-history.org/feature/war-culture-military-drinking.htm.
[4] “The Tradition of gifting a bottle of Port – one of the oldest Military Traditions,” Hanger 39, 2023, https://hanger39.co.uk/blogs/history/the-tradition-of-gifting-a-bottle-of-port-one-of-the-oldest-military-traditions?srsltid=AfmBOooxohcnarbgOdf2v3enbJhvqbBayhr-c7jLFj4m44dVbUvKJpli.
[5] Edward Gosling, “The role of the officers’ mess in inclusive military leader social identity construction,” Leadership 18, no. 1 (2022).
[6] Gosling, “The role of the officers’ mess in inclusive military leader social identity construction.”
[7] “Passing the Decanter,” Taylors, 2012, https://www.taylor.pt/en/enjoy-port-wine/traditions/passing-the-decanter?utm_source=chatgpt.com.
[8] “”Pass the Port:” the Very British Customs for Serving Port,” The Spruce Eats, 2019, https://www.thespruceeats.com/british-customs-for-serving-port-435163.
[9] Gosling, “The role of the officers’ mess in inclusive military leader social identity construction.”
[10] Carol J Phillips, “The shape of New Zealand’s regimental system: a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Defence and Strategic Studies at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand” (Massey University, 2006).
[11] Phillips, “The shape of New Zealand’s regimental system: a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Defence and Strategic Studies at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand.”
[12] Gosling, “The role of the officers’ mess in inclusive military leader social identity construction.”
[13] Gosling, “The role of the officers’ mess in inclusive military leader social identity construction.”
[14] Phillips, “The shape of New Zealand’s regimental system: a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Defence and Strategic Studies at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand.”
