Inside La Place de Bordeaux – Episode Six

A Brief History of the Place de Bordeaux

How old is La Place? How did the Bordelais create the most influential fine wine system in the world? Where did the 1855 Classification come from- and who decided? Did 1982 really change the fate of the Bordelais?

In this sixth episode, hosts Felicity Carter and Pauline Vicard dive into the archives and talk to historians, to help them better understand the origins of La Place de Bordeaux.

And what they find is unexpected. Whether it’s the hard-nosed commercial decisions, or the quest for tax deductions, or even the world of smuggling, they uncover the key moments that helped create the world of Bordeaux as we know it today.

For everyone who loves wine and history, this is an episode not to be missed.

With: Prof. Rod Phillips, Charles Leary PhD and Simon Tam.

In Conversation with Rod Phillips

Rod Phillips is a professor of history at Carleton University in Canada, where he teaches courses on European history, and the history of alcohol and food. He is also a wine writer, wine historian, and wine judge, and the author of several books, including French Wine: A History.

Areni Global:

Let’s start with the mercantile history of Bordeaux.

Rod Phillips:

The whole system, which culminates in La Place de Bordeaux, is utterly different from anywhere else in France. Now, quite where it comes from is not, to my mind, really very clear. What you have at the beginning is the emergence of Bordeaux as a major trading port for wine. But for wines from other parts of the Southwest – wines, from the Marmandais, for example, and even as far back as Gaillac and so on. So those were the areas where wine was being produced in the early Middle Ages. There was wine around Bordeaux itself and in the modern Bordeaux region, but most of the wine that was being shipped through Bordeaux was not what we would now think of as Bordelais wine.

And I think this is an important piece of the story: Bordeaux began to export large amounts of wine by the 13th century, whereas, in the rest of France, most of the wine produced was being consumed in France itself. So it’s this export element that’s important.

Was that simply because Bordeaux had a port?

Yeah, I think that’s exactly what it was. They had the advantage of having a port. When you think about it, Burgundy didn’t have a port. It was really difficult to move Burgundy wine. I mean, you could get it to Paris, and you could get it down the Rhône, but quite a bit of the movement of the wine had to be overland. Before the 19th century, moving wine in barrels over land was very slow, very cumbersome, and very risky. Barrels just broke apart as these carts  shook barrels apart. There was all the opportunity for adulteration and fraud on the way, and it was very, very expensive. If you had to move wine overland, it increased the price dramatically. Moving wine by water was far, far cheaper.

Before the 19th century, moving wine in barrels over land was very slow, very cumbersome, and very risky. […] If you had to move wine overland, it increased the price dramatically. Moving wine by water was far, far cheaper.

Rod Phillips

And it didn’t matter whether the water was a canal or a river or in the case of Bordeaux, a river and then around the coast. The advantage was initially to the wines that were produced outside the modern Bordeaux region, not to Bordeaux wines themselves. During the Middle Ages, the city of Bordeaux then began to encourage the cultivation of vines and the production of wine in the immediate area. And then they put in place restrictive laws to try to prevent competition with the producers outside Bordeaux,

So Bordeaux right from its inception was based on a commercial proposition. And so I presume what you’re saying is that as the authorities began to see the amount of tax duty money that was flowing through the port, they decided to capture some of that value themselves by making wine locally. Is that right?

That’s right. I mean, here’s an opportunity to enrich the region, but of course, they had to deal with the relatively large-scale production of wine outside Bordeaux itself. So then they began to put restrictions on when wine from the outside could come into the port and be shipped from the port of Bordeaux.

What impact did this have on other regions?

There’s nothing they could do. You’ve got to think of France at this time. It’s not really France — it’s made up of a number of provinces. There is a king and the king has a certain amount of influence, but these small regions — and the cities themselves — had a great deal of power. And so they could just bring in regulations like this and really there’s nothing anyone can do about them.

Just bear in mind that these are walled cities. Wine had to come in through the gates of the city and all goods were charged duties and taxes as they came through the gates, so they could allow stuff in or they could prevent stuff from coming in. This led to a number of these regions outside the Bordeaux region going into decline for some time. I can think of regions like Cahors and Gaillac and Marmandais, going into decline just Bordeaux was ramping up. So these two things happened at the same time for the same reasons.

What incentives did they give people to plant vines? How did a bunch of accountants thinking “We should make wine ourselves” translate into people actually making wine?

I don’t think it was so much the Bordeaux authorities actually telling people that they should do this or providing incentives. They certainly didn’t provide incentives or subsidies or anything like that. But the owners of land around Bordeaux are aristocrats, they’re nobles. They were canny people, obviously.

The nobles have had a pretty bad press. People tend to think of them as sitting around eating chicken, drinking wine and not doing very much and leaving all the hard labour to the peasant. But later on in the 18th century, it was the nobles who were at the forefront of agricultural reform and increases in productivity because they owned huge amounts of land. Because they had huge amounts of land, they could afford to take risks. They could afford to try new crops. This is exactly what they began to do in the Middle Ages. They had all this land planted to cereals, but here was this new crop—vines—and it was obviously profitable. You could see what the returns were. They were higher than cereal and so many of them began to plant vines. It’s as simple as that.

And who were they selling it to?

In the early part of the Middle Ages, the 12th and the 13th centuries, the bulk of it went to England, and much of it was then transshipped from England. So it would go to Bristol, to London. Some of it went to Scotland, some went to Ireland, and some went directly to other ports on the North Sea, but a lot of it was sent to England.

How much control did the English have over the sector? Today, supermarket buyers can go in and tell you what sort of taste profile they want and you have to make it. Was there anything like that going on?

Well, they began to install agents in Bordeaux. There were a lot of English agents and they represented the interests of English buyers, so it’s very likely they were able to influence production by representing the style of wine they wanted, which at that time was the light red claret. From records at that time, we know that the producers were very careful to make wine specifically for that market. So they would often blend some white wine into red wine if they thought it was too dark. Colour was very important.

From records at that time, we know that the producers were very careful to make wine specifically for that market. So they would often blend some white wine into red wine if they thought it was too dark. Colour was very important.

Rod Phillips

Now we have an infrastructure developing — the nobles are planting vines, buyers are telling them how to make it. When did the rest of the administrative system begin to develop?

My sense is probably in the 1600s, partly because of the arrival of the Dutch in Bordeaux. The English had been able to control most of the export market because most of it was going to England as a final destination or to be transshipped. But in the 1600s, the Dutch began to have a greater presence in Bordeaux; there was a treaty between the French and the Dutch in the middle of the 1600s which helped this. In addition, the Dutch were becoming quite important in the production of wine. They were very good at draining land in the Netherlands and they began to drain swamps in Bordeaux, and they also introduced the use of burning sulphur to clean barrels. They also began to be important shippers of wine. So we’re talking about the 1600s, when the Dutch merchant fleet was the largest in the world. And so the Dutch began to become the main means by which Bordeaux wines left Bordeaux for the wider world.

Is that because the Dutch had all this expertise in shipping, or was it because they were getting richer through their trading, so more of a market for the wines was developing in Holland?

There was a market for wine developing in Holland, and it was a different market from England—full-bodied reds and also whites. They were much more interested in white wines than the English were, so you see a number of producers in Bordeaux beginning to plant white grapes to cater to the Dutch market as well. We often think of Champagne as being the ultimate commercial region—tell us how you want your wine, and we’ll make it for you—but the Bordelais were quite like that.

Now they’ve got two important markets they’re trying to satisfy at the same time. Was one winery doing lighter bodies and another one was doing heavy body wines, or was the same winery producing different wines for different markets?

Well, that’s a good question. Honestly, I can’t tell you but I suspect it’s the latter. I suspect that one winery would make one style of wine for one market and a lighter style for the other. But there’s also a shift in England itself. I mean, the shift in the 17th and 18th centuries is a shift towards heavier, darker red wines with more body as well.

To go back to the question of infrastructure, when do the courtiers and negociants enter the picture—and why?

Well, my sense is they come into the picture in the 17th century, but the picture is not as clear as it’s sometimes represented. For example, when you think of Arnaud de Pontac—who opened his tavern in London in, what was it, 1665?—he didn’t use a courtier. He didn’t use negociants. He didn’t use anyone. He simply had a single supply chain, which went from his winery or his vineyards, straight to retail in London. There’s no evidence that he used intermediaries at all. So it appears to have been possible to sell directly to a retailer. And how many producers actually used intermediaries is not altogether clear. But you do have all these agents, or negociants, in Bordeaux. Some of them are Dutch, some of them are English, some French, and they were clearly doing business. But quite what that business was is unclear to me, whether they were dealing directly with the producers, or whether some of them had courtiers as intermediaries. I’m not clear.

However it began, when do we know for sure that the system of producers-negociants-courtiers existed?

Probably sometime in the 18th century, but certainly in the 19th century. I think the integrated, stable system that we call La Place is more recent than many people think. I’ve seen references to it being 800 years old, and I think that’s just wrong. I haven’t been able to find good records of the internal trade in Bordeaux for anything much earlier than the 18th century. You do find them clearly in the 19th century.

One of the roles of the negociants was to do the blending. Also, one of the points that you make in your book is that quite often they used wine from outside Bordeaux. How did that come about—and when did it stop?

It came about because people were looking for blending components, or they thought the wine lacked something for the style they had in mind. This is well before ideas of place and terroir mattered.  If you could find something that you could blend into your wine to make a wine that was successful commercially, then that was that; if it was elsewhere in southwest France or across the Pyrenees, it didn’t really matter.

In principle, it ended with the appellation system, but we know that Bordeaux producers were blending wines from the Rhône Valley into their wines right through the 19th century. It wasn’t hidden because there was no need to hide it.

There must have been some kind of fraud that was understood as fraud going on at the time, because otherwise, why would you need the courtier with their legal ability to solve disputes and so on?

There were limits. There was no appellation system or law as such, but it was understood there were things you couldn’t do. Things like adding water to wine, or adding certain herbs, spices and things like that. The various guilds enforced the rules. They had expert tasters who could go in and decide whether a wine was adulterated or not. But it took until the 20th century really to bring in well-defined regulations.

When did the first classification system start ?

The earliest classification of Bordeaux that I know of is around 1647. And they’re not all official classifications. People will throw in, for example, Thomas Jefferson’s rankings of the wines. So this is a personal judgement on the part of Jefferson, but you do find that wines were classified right from the middle of the 1600s. Just like the 1855, these classifications are based on price. They’re not based on quality. This is the interesting thing about the history of these classifications—people assume that they’re based on quality, but they were always based on price. If you look at these classifications, which are mostly in manuscripts up until the 19th century, you can see that the ranking of the name of the Château or the name of the producer is always accompanied by a price. It’s not a score out of a hundred or anything like that. The number there is the price.

This is the interesting thing about the history of these classifications—people assume that they’re based on quality, but they were always based on price.

Rod Phillips

Did merchants have their own internal classifications, or were they generally agreed classifications before you get to the big 1855 one?

They’re pretty consistent, actually. They were certainly consistent at the top. You’ve got the four original Premiers Crus at the top, and they just appear over and over and over again. It became a kind of orthodoxy that you put these four at the top because these are the wines that fetch the highest prices. Quite a few of these classifications don’t list particular estates, but they list regions or districts within Bordeaux; Medoc, for example, or Barsac for whites.

As they become more refined, they begin to indicate particular estates like Haut-Brion and Lafite and Latour and Margaux. Those four are just always there. There are dozens of these rankings from 1647 to 1855 and you get these same four. It struck me that for 200 years there was so little movement. There was some movement in the second, third, fourth, and fifth growths, but at the top, nothing. And those top four producers are so important because each year the price was set for those producers first, and then everyone else got less. I mean, if you were second growth, you got a bit less. If you’re a third growth, you got less again, and so on. So it was really important to set the price for the first growths first because they were the benchmark.

Then comes the Paris Exhibition of 1855 and Bordeaux puts wine in and lists a classification. How was that classification conceived and why has that classification lasted when the other ones didn’t?

That’s a very good question, and I’m not sure I have the best answer for it. But they were asked to provide their best wines. Here we have a number of courtiers who are responsible for doing this. They went back and they looked at previous classifications, and clearly what they could see is there’s consistency right from through the first half of the 19th century. There’s consistency in the classifications. So there was no reason for them to change it. So what you get in 1855 is essentially what was in the classifications earlier in the 1850s and then further back through to about 1811.

So you said the courtiers put this together. Why were they doing it? What was their role at this time?

Well, their role was as intermediaries between the producers and the negociants, particularly for the high-end wines. The wines provided as finished products by the producers. Fine wines as we think of them now, or the classified growths.

They must have been very good diplomats. They must have been under a lot of pressure at the time.

Either that or there was a certain amount of graft. I mean, we don’t know if money changed hands, or if people were persuaded in various ways to manipulate these things, I think it’d be very surprising if that wasn’t the case from what we know of human behaviour. And commerce at this time, where regulation was pretty lax.

Now there is the 1855 classification. Why has this one survived?

At first, they didn’t want to put producers’ names on them. They didn’t want to use the labels in the exhibition. They just wanted them labelled by district. One of the producers appealed to Napoleon III directly, and he said, “Yes, we’ll put the labels on so you can show your labels”. And I think what was different was that the 1855 exhibition in Paris was a consumer show. This is the time when hundreds of thousands of people would come to an exhibition and not look just at wine, but they’d look at products of all kinds, clothing, textiles, agricultural products, you name it. The earlier classifications were largely for the trade, not for consumers. Some consumers were aware of the classifications, as these would be the wealthy people who were buying them.

But for the first time, the classification got out into the world. It was in public. It was published in the catalogue. So my sense is that it is the publicity that this got and perhaps the cachet of the 1855 exposition. I mean, it was a very important landmark in national history because here you are putting your nation on display. You got publicity.

For the first time, the classification got out into the world. It was in public. It was published in the catalogue.

Rod Phillips

Were Champagne and Burgundy there as well? And if they were, why weren’t they classified?

They were. But there was no history of classifying in those regions. Bordeaux had this long history of classifications going back more than 200 years. I suspect this has something to do with the fact that so many properties in Bordeaux were owned by nobles, many more than in Champagne and Burgundy, where the Church was more important as a vineyard-owner.  Nobles were obsessed with status – how much more status they had than other nobles. This might well have transferred to wine in the form of the classifications.

So now Bordeaux has got this classification system and it’s got the port, it’s got everything. When did the system that we have today of bottling at the chateau enter the picture?

In the 19th century, you get Mis en Bouteille au Château on the labels, and it’s mainly a guarantee against fraud. Fraud was a real problem, right through the history of wine. But in the 19th century, it was a particular problem. So bottling at the chateau and putting it on the bottle is another guarantee that the wine wasn’t adulterated or fiddled with, because a lot of the wine up until that point, a lot of the fine wine from Bordeaux at that point, was shipped in barrels and then was bottled in England. There were many opportunities for fraud.

But it’s only for the very high-end wines. The bulk wines continued to be shipped in barrels right through much of the 20th century.

It sounds like it’s been successful because people decided it was going to be successful. Do you think there is an inherent quality to the wines that would have been obvious without all the commercial decisions? Or do you think its success is very much a result of having the port and so on?

That’s a big question, isn’t it? I take a historical view of this. I think a lot of writing about wine and particularly about areas like Bordeaux and Burgundy is highly romanticised. And without being too crude about it, I think that the Bordeaux wine industry has been very hardheaded.

I think a lot of writing about wine and particularly about areas like Bordeaux and Burgundy is highly romanticised. And without being too crude about it, I think that the Bordeaux wine industry has been very hardheaded.

Rod Phillips

When we think about it, there’s nothing inherently fine about any wine. There’s nothing inherently excellent about any wine. It’s a matter of what people believe is fine and excellent and delicious and all the rest of it. And here we have people in earlier generations who have established Bordeaux as a benchmark of a certain style of wine, and against which all other wines can be judged. Not all wines. You don’t judge Burgundy against Bordeaux, but we have all these Bordeaux blends all around the world, because that style of wine was thought to be particularly excellent.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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