Best of Bordeaux

times, which are very good at regulating the water balance thanks to their gentle

undulations and the excellent filtration capacities of their soils (preventing the

vine roots from rotting in overly damp ground, or conversely from drying out

excessively in the Atlantic weather with the exception of a few days or weeks

between mid-July and mid-August that cause the delay in ripening which is one

of the secrets behind great Bordeaux). The fact that producers also flirted with

rather dishonest methods to acquire these suddenly extremely precious soils

is illustrated by the case of Pierre de Mazure de Rauzan who was involved in

estates such as Latour, Pichon Longueville, Rauzan Gassies and Rauzan-Ségla

as founder, director or owner: he would lend small producers money in an ap-

parently benevolent fashion, and when they were unable to pay it back he pock-

eted their land.

Another illustrious estate owner Nicolas Alexandre de Ségur, the ‘prince of

vines', popularised his wines Latour, Mouton, Calon and Lafite at the court of

the French king from 1716 onwards via the intermediary of the Marechal de

Richelieu. Lafite was said to be a treatment for gallstones. Legend also has it

that the Marquis de Ségur adorned his waistcoat with polished Médoc pebbles

rather than precious stones in order to demonstrate the source of his wealth.

Another regular consumer of his wines was the first British Prime Minister Sir

Robert Walpole, ensuring that Ségur wines enjoyed success in London. Be-

tween 1705 and 1711, the ‘London Gazette' newspaper (founded by the journalist

Henry Muddiman in 1667 and still in existence today) listed privateer booty for

auction, including on 22 May 1707 hundreds of barrels of Haut Brion, Margaux,

Latour and Lafite which all fetched impressive prices several times higher than

standard ‘claret'. So it is no surprise that local merchants began looking for more

affordable alternatives. As the four aforementioned top wines were virtually

una

ff

ordable in the 1727 vintage, one Bordeaux broker wrote a letter to the cel-

lar master to the heir to the throne suggesting a replacement which he tastily

described as follows: ‘Never in my life have I tasted a Chateau d‘Issan so good

as this vintage. It truly is a wine full of charm which I would very much like to

send to the Prince.'

From then on, new Bordeaux from fairy-tale Bordeaux chateaus became a

status symbol of the rich and beautiful. In the second half of the 19th century,

Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary could be counted among Issan's fans,

and the ambassador and future US President Thomas Je

ff

erson said ‘there can-

not be a better bottle of Bordeaux wine than Margaux 1784'. Château Margaux

was praised by Rossini and drunk by Engels, who gave a simple answer to a

question from Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor about what he considered to be the

greatest expression of happiness: ‘a Château Margaux 1848'.

28

Trade triangle

The ‘vignoble bordelais' as we know it today, with its grand historic brands, ac-

tually emerged during the 18th century. Any claims by estates to have produced

top wine prior to 1650 can be considered pure speculation or even somewhat

fanciful. This new style of winegrowing initially spread across the best soils of

the Haut-Médoc peninsula, or more precisely throughout a strip of land a couple

of kilometres wide running along the Gironde containing the best gravel soils

around Margaux and its satellite villages, Saint-Julien, Pauillac, Saint-Estèphe,

Saint-Seurin de Cadourne, Moulis, Listrac and Saint-Laurent. Based on the Mé-

doc model, it then also emerged in the Libourne area (Fronsac, Saint-Emilion,

Pomerol), whose wines were primarily sold in northern France and the Benelux

region thanks to a few capable merchants in the city of Libourne. The global

Bordeaux trade first took an interest in this little corner in the late 19th century

when wines from the Médoc and Graves were in short supply after the phyllox-

era crisis: the vines in the limestone soils of Saint-Emilion withstood the insidi-

ous pest for somewhat longer, and the draining of the Pomerol plateau (which

was often knee-deep in water during the winter) enabled top-level winemak-

ing on a wider scale. The driving force behind this rapid development was Bor-

deaux's moneyed aristocracy, made rich by ‘triangular trade' with the colonies.

I have already suggested that coming to terms with the past is not really one of

The city of Bordeaux

29

Bordeaux's strengths, and one aspect is missing or even completely ignored in

many analyses of Bordeaux, namely the inglorious chapter of the slave trade.

Bordeaux, with Liverpool and Nantes, was for a long time one of its major hubs.

This is how scheming merchants did it: they gathered capital (as already men-

tioned, many Bordeaux citizens were part-time bankers), bought or chartered

a couple of ships, loaded them up with goods (wine) in Bordeaux, sent these

across the world, invested the profits in ‘black ivory' from Africa that they trans-

ported to the colonies, where these slaves were exchanged for ‘colonial goods'

such as coffee, cocoa or sugar which made their way back to Bordeaux – so as

well as making a bigger profit, they only indirectly got their hands dirty. So many

wine estates were created with capital earned from the slave trade that the phi-

losopher Montesquieu, living in neighbouring Labrède, definitely had first-hand

knowledge of what he was talking about when he penned the following: ‘the cry

for slavery is the cry of luxury and voluptuousness, not of public felicity.' How-

ever, in many learned books this chapter reads as follows: in the 18th century

Bordeaux became rich from trade and attracted numerous immigrants from

countries all over the world such as England, Ireland, Scandinavia, Germany

and Switzerland. They generally settled in the Chartrons (‘Carthusians') district

like generations of immigrants before them: originally marshland outside of

the city proper. By the late Middle Ages, Chartrons – with its barrel stores from

Château Gruaud Larose

31

Trade triangle History

which barrels could be rolled directly onto cargo ships – had already become a

traditional winemaking district and remained so until the 1980s. Bordeaux grew

quickly and was soon bursting at the seams, becoming the third-largest city in

France (behind Paris and Lyon), and was able to afford one of the 18th century's

most beautiful (and today one of the best maintained) collections of buildings.

For centuries Bordeaux survived skirmishes and military campaigns un-

scathed or with little damage. Its strategic location was too important, the in

fl

u-

ence of its residents was too great, and too much money was at stake, so Bor-

deaux was forgiven any transgression. During the ‘Fronde' from 1748, Bordeaux

was a sponsor and bastion of this uprising against the power-hungry holder of

the increasingly absolutist French crown. The city's surrender on 3 August 1653

brought an o

ffi

cial end to the protest movement. Despite a few punishments,

such as Bernard de la Nogaret de la Vallette, Duc d'Epernon and owner of Beych-

evelle (who had remained loyal to the government) razing the chateau belong-

ing to agitator Blaise de Suduirault to the ground (although it is still not entirely

clear whether this was to settle a private or a political score) – Bordeaux's mer-

chant nobility remained virtually unscathed, and happily continued making

wine and enjoying its extravagant lifestyle. During the French Revolution, the

parliamentarians once again backed the wrong horse (although who really man-

aged to pick the right one in the bloody confusion?), were declared enemies of

the young nation and made the acquaintance of Madame la Guillotine. There

were many other executions in Bordeaux, and anyone wanting to escape the

sca

ff

old was forced to leave their land and allow it to be con

fi

scated, with nu-

merous estates being put up for auction. However, from a modern pragmatic

perspective, the Revolution was just a turning point that brought an influx of

new blood and capital, as many estates were acquired by different aristocratic

families during the Restoration. In the years after the Congress of Vienna, a large

number of citizens quickly came into money, began by acquiring a patent of no-

bility (sold in bulk by the reinstated French crown which was constantly short

of money), and as the crowning glory of their career and a symbol of power and

success, they acquired a real chateau, surrounded by vines of course. (Nouveau

riche) bankers or businessmen then replaced Bordeaux's old moneyed aristoc-

racy who had ruled the winemaking roost in the 17th and 18th centuries, and as

merchants, notaries, doctors or tradesmen were constantly forced to buy a seat

in the city parliament, rather than inheriting it from a father or uncle. This was

almost as essential for a first-class Bordeaux citizen as a service pistol once was

to a Swiss who wanted to join the ranks of high society.

32

History Fairy-tale chateaus

Fairy-tale chateaus

Today only a few, well known wine estates such as Lafite, Latour or Margaux

actually date back to medieval manors (or ‘seigneuries' in French, a form of ad-

ministrative district where the local lord dispensed justice and reigned supreme).

Most of these also had an old, generally dilapidated castle, or more specifically

a fortress, as a chateau is by definition not a residential building but rather be-

gan life as a military defence facility. These dark, damp stone palaces with their

thick walls and arrow-slit windows had long since been uninhabited, or only oc-

cupied when necessary. From the Renaissance onwards, the old chateaus gave

way to more comfortable Italian-style villas known as ‘maisons nobles'. The ac-

tual ancestral seat declined into a symbol of old ancestry and high nobility. One

of the first actual wine chateaus was Haut-Brion which the de Pontacs built in

1550 as a country house, summer residence, and symbol of their estate, wealth

and perhaps even their vineyards which surrounded it. However, the Bordeaux

wine chateau primarily found in the Médoc is a 19th-century invention. In 1787,

Jefferson spoke of Haut-Brion without the Château pre

fi

x, and only mentioned

two examples: Château de la Fite and Château Margau, both old seigneuries.

Only La Tour, also an old seigneurie, had to renounce its chateau title and was

relegated to a mere ‘cru'. Many ‘chateaus', including the one at Latour, were only

built after the o

ffi

cial 1855 classi

fi

cation we will soon be examining in further

detail: it was not until after this publication (which listed all estates still without

their ‘chateau') that the term for a wine estate became an essential prefix, and

a real chateau building played a vital role in establishing its image. The build-

ers of these more or (generally) less tasteful edifices were the nouveau riche,

entrepreneurs or bankers such as the Douats, Pereires or Rothschilds. They

found their ideal creator in the form of architect Louis-Michel Garros, the inven-

tor of every possible ‘neo' style (neo-Renaissance, neoclassical etc.) who was as

happy to plunder English Gothic as the French Renaissance. The first chateau

commission given to Garros, who settled in Bordeaux in 1863 after studying in

Paris, was Fonréaud in Listrac. This was followed by numerous others including

Lachesnaye, Malescot-Saint-Exupéry, Lascombes and Ducru-Beaucaillou. Gar-

ros was the true inventor of the ‘wine chateau', later also creating many other

variants in Béziers, where other levels of society came into money virtually

overnight thanks to the liquor and mass wine trade. His interpretation of the

‘chateau' clearly refuted the principles of the era's other great eclectic architect

Viollet-Le-Duc (to whom we owe renovation of Carcassonne, a childhood dream

of a knight's castle in Languedoc as controversial as it was successful), whose

1858 handbook of architecture complained that the term ‘chateau' should be

reserved for just medieval buildings with all newer forms being described as

a ‘maison des champs', or country house: ‘A country which has abolished the

aristocracy and thus all privilege cannot seriously build “chateaus”. For given

33

Class society History

the partitioning of an estate, what is a chateau other than a flash in the pan, an

extravagant structure which perishes with its owners without leaving the slight-

est reminder.' How can he be so right and yet so utterly wrong!

Class society

On 18 April 1855, the Bordeaux Syndicate of Wine Brokers addressed a letter

to the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce which began as follows: ‘Dear sirs, on

the fifth of this month we were honoured to receive a letter from you in which

you asked us to send you a complete list of classified red wines in the Gironde

and of our great white wines. We have collected all the information we need

in order to comply with your request, and are able to provide you with the at-

tached list.' The list contained 56 names of red wine estates in the (Haut) Médoc

region and one from Graves (Haut-Brion) as well as 21 names of (sweet) white

wines from Sauternes and Barsac, all divided into five categories from 1ème to

5ème Cru Classé: this was the handwritten original of the oldest and most fa-

mous of all the o

ffi

cial wine rankings, namely the 1855 classification, created on

the occasion of the Universal Exposition in Paris and adopted by head of state

Napoleon III. One estate (Cantemerle) was left out and subsequently added a

year later, and in 1973 an estate moved up from the second category to the first:

Mouton-Rothschild. Other than this, the classification has never been changed,

and the fact that it has since grown to 61 red and 27 white wine estates is the

result of estate partitioning and the merging of certain estates with others.

The history of the classification alone would fill volumes. Let us simply note

that this cataloguing of Médoc wines plus Haut-Brion into two, then three, and

ultimately five categories was already taking place in the early 18th century.

‘Crus' (or ‘growths', meaning wines whose grapes were grown in a speci

fi

c loca-

tion) were described as ‘Grand' (‘great') if they di

ff

ered signi

fi

cantly from ordi-

nary everyday wines (consequently known as Crus Ordinaires) in terms of both

quality and price, and were thus reserved for a financially stronger class of pur-

chasers. The four current Premiers Crus Margaux, Latour, Lafite and Haut-Brion

were described by an English wine merchant as ‘topping growths' as early as

1723. In 1740, a list of wine-producing municipalities was published giving the

three categories of Premier, Second and Troisième Cru. The Premiers include

Pessac (or rather les Crus de Pontac, in the plural), Pauillac, Saint-Julien, Mar-

gaux, Sauternes and Barsac. The wine enthusiast, French ambassador and fu-

ture American President Thomas Jefferson visited Bordeaux in 1787 and scrib-

bled a list of the best wines in his diary – with three categories from Premier

to Troisième Cru. He is therefore occasionally described as the founder of the

Bordeaux classification, and a couple of the estates Jefferson listed still use him

as proof that they were already famous and sought-after. This is not entirely un-

34

History 1855 classification

true. However, it is scarcely conceivable that Jefferson came up with his classifi-

cation by himself – he quite simply did not have the time, as he spent just three

days in Bordeaux. He arrived in the city from Toulouse/Agen/Langon on 24 May

and travelled on towards Blaye and La Rochelle on 28 May, probably never even

entering the Médoc.

He mentions that he crossed the Garonne near Langon, near Sauternes where

the Gironde's best white wines were produced, which automatically puts him in

southern Graves and means he must at least have passed through Preignac and

Barsac. He also wrote: ‘We find the plains entirely of sand and gravel, and they

continue so to Bordeaux. Where they are capable of any thing, they are in vines.'

He definitely also paid a personal visit to Haut-Brion: he writes that he examined

its sandy and stony soils, extremely different to the chalk soils of ‘Pontac' which

he also investigated. Haut-Brion had belonged to the de Fumels since 1749. It is

unclear which estate he means by ‘Pontac belonging to a M. Lamont': he could

perhaps be describing what is now Carmes Haut-Brion, sitting on a limestone

base next to the present-day Haut-Brion and originally belonging to the Pontacs,

who bequeathed it to the Carmelites. Je

ff

erson is not always as unfailingly pre-

cise or reliable as is sometimes claimed, and was simply writing a diary which

was only published after his death.

Nevertheless, in his travel journal he always clearly notes facts deduced

from his own experience or insight. This does not apply to the ‘classification',

suggesting that it was a generally accepted list: he most likely simply asked a

Bordeaux broker or merchant to dictate a list of the best and most expensive

wine, perhaps the broker Desgrands whom he cites as a source of information

at another point. Incidentally, Jefferson was not only interested in wine – he also

showed an interest in activities such as strawberry production near Agen, ice

manufacturing in northern Italy, to which he devoted several pages, and ox feed

production or the fact that oxen were virtually the only source of motive power

used in Bordeaux, which will be of interest to all of the estate owners now using

horse-drawn ploughs to cultivate their vine rows as part of the booming organic

movement.

The state-certi

fi

ed classi

fi

cation of 1855 came about after Bordeaux mer-

chants heard rumours that the Burgundians, who had gained direct access to

the Atlantic and Mediterranean following the opening of the Canal de Bour-

gogne (1832), were wanting to have their wines o

ffi

cially classified at the 1855

Paris Universal Exposition. The Bordelais simply decided to beat them to it. In

1855, Dijon-based doctor and researcher Lavalle did indeed publish a compre-

hensive work covering all wines in the Côte d'Or, which is still a treasure trove of

information about the region. There was never any mention of the state's bless-

ing. However this was also no longer relevant, as the initiative taken by the Bor-

deaux Chamber of Commerce and the city's wine brokers gained Bordeaux and

Eric de Rothschild

36

its new-born ‘Crus Classés du Médoc, de Sauternes et des Graves' an ingenious

advertising campaign which is still benefiting the region today. It is therefore no

surprise that two other Bordeaux appellations have since emulated this rank-

ing system, namely Saint-Emilion and Graves (now Pessac-Léognan), which

have also been operating their own classifications since the mid-1950s. Graves

has a similar static system to their model, whilst the Saint-Emilion classifica-

tion is updated every ten years. Whether or not this is an advantage remains

open to question: sometimes, it seems to me that the biggest beneficiaries are

the lawyers who are constantly appealing against the recently adopted reclas-

sifications, on behalf of those who have been declassified of course. The value

measured by all of this cataloguing, often based on quality but also nearly al-

ways on high prices, is something that wine enthusiasts are capable of deciding

for themselves. We should note that state-sanctioned classifications are not the

same as state protections of origin (AOC), which have applied in France since

1937 for the geographical origins, style and production conditions of a particu-

lar area. In Bordeaux a distinction is drawn between regional appellations (e.g.

Haut-Médoc) and village appellations (e.g. Margaux, Sauternes, Pomerol) within

the base appellation (Bordeaux), and Saint-Emilion has two appellations, name-

ly Saint-Emilion and Saint-Emilion Grand Cru, with the latter awarded annually.

The Saint-Emilion classification on the other hand di