The French had long complained of the pernicious effects of the British tariff system on the French wine trade. Duties and excises on French alcohol to favor Portugal and Spain were initiated in 1667 and 1685 and had been augmented and refined since then both to protect British beverage interests and to generate revenue. A French report to the minister of commerce in 1858 remarked that French wines had been the British drink of choice in the seventeenth century, but that the preferential tariff treatment of Portugal and Spain and the British investment on the continent that followed had led to the French wines being displaced so that French exports to Britain had barely changed in the last hundred years. They were less in the mid-1840s than they had been in the late 1600s, and British per capita wine consumption from all foreign countries had actually declined in the first half of the nineteenth century.