The cellaret — a cabinet or case for storing bottles of wine in the dining room — appears in poems of Georgian and Regency domestic life as a marker of masculine comfort and social ritual; A poem about a country house might describe the cellaret's mahogany interior, the bottles nested in their fitted compartments like well-ordered arguments; In a poem about decline, the cellaret stands empty: "the last of the claret drunk the winter he died, the compartments showing their green baize like small abandoned gardens"; Surtees's hunting squires and their afterdinner rituals inhabit the same world as the cellaret — poetry of the dining room and the stable block; The cellaret's lock — wine being a commodity worth securing — gives poets an image of household economy: pleasure rationed, abundance contained; A verse meditation on the country house sale might itemise the cellaret among the lots: "one mahogany cellaret, fitted interior, provenance uncertain, contents long since vanished."