Why Bordeaux? What makes this region so famous internationally?
 
First published by Oxford Wine Company, by Jane Anson

 
The first ever auction held at Christies, in 1766, featured a number of bottles of ‘claret’ from Bordeaux, and the region has been a regular feature of auction houses ever since. Today, you could sell a bottle of 2005 Chateau Petrus for almost £3,000 for a single bottle, if you were lucky (and wealthy) enough to have bought it en primeur for around £500. In 2007, the Bordeaux Fine Wine market outperformed the FTSE by a considerable margin, rising 39% against the FTSE’s 3.4%.

All of this is good news for the producers of Bordeaux wines, both big and small – because even if their wines never end up under the hammer, all local vignerons get to enjoy the cachet of sharing the same origin as big guns such as Petrus, Le Pin, Chateau Lafite Rothschild and Chateau Latour. The very fact that Bordeaux wines are able to be bought and sold with such regularity is surely because there are few regions world over with the same name recognition, the same promise of ageing ability and reliable pleasure that Bordeaux has been able to offer. There are even fewer with comparable history; that reaches back over 2,000 years to Roman times, and the first planting of vines in this tiny corner of southwest France.

The renown of Bordeaux wine is in many ways a geographical accident. Even the name Bordeaux – au bord de l’eau, by the water – gives the major clue to its first route to fame. The region is close enough to the Atlantic Ocean to give a gentle maritime climate, far enough north on the 45th parallel to allow a long, cool growing season to allow delicacy of flavours to develop, with the softening effect of the Gulf Stream ushering in long, warm autumns that allow the grapes to ripen fully.

The location of the city itself, 80km inland from the ocean, meant a safe harbour that allowed trade to flourish (the Garonne river as it passes through Bordeaux is called Port de la Lune because of its crescent shape, deep enough that even today cruise ships can sail right up and moor in the city centre). Until the 18th century, piracy was a real threat on the open seas, and a safe haven was needed if wine and other wares were to be loaded off and on the boats undisturbed. This effect has been seen in other areas – Cognac for example, was able to get swiftly to market because of its location alongside the River Charente, and therefore became much more famous than its land-locked cousin Armagnac. In Bordeaux, the river Garonne and especially its busy Quai de Chartrons provided this, and merchants from Ireland, England, Holland and Germany made it their home. Names of today’s wine merchants such as Barton, Schroeder, Kressman and Sichel all attest to the success of these ventures that were started centuries ago and are still trading from Bordeaux today.

Besides the advantages of geography, politics came into play in creating an international market for these wines. From the 12th to the 15th century, following the marriage of Henry Plantagenet to Alienor of Aquitaine, this strip of southwest France became part of English territory, and the majority of wine produced in Bordeaux was traded with the English market in exchange for tea, china and other goods. Following a royal decree, taxes were also abolished on Bordeaux wines, making it far more attractive to sell in London than in other parts of France.

This is one of the key differences between Bordeaux and Burgundy, France’s other iconic red wine region. Again due to geography, for much of its early history Burgundy found its main market in Paris, while Bordeaux was heading over the sea to England. Even the classic English name for Bordeaux wine, the ‘claret’ described in Christie’s first auction back in the 18th century, stems from this time. The wine that was produced in Bordeaux during the English reign was a far paler drink than is made today. You can still try a version of it in the region today, where they continue make a dark rosé known as ‘clairet’. In colour and taste, it lies somewhere in between a usual rosé and a red wine. This was the style that was most exported from Bordeaux until the 18th century, and its name over time became Anglicised from ‘clairet’ to claret. Today, no one outside of England uses the term claret, preferring instead ‘red Bordeaux’, or just ‘Bordeaux’, but it is still protected Europe-wide as meaning a red wine that comes from the vineyards that lie on either side of the Garonne river.

There is yet another key reason for Bordeaux’s supremacy historically – that it was the first wine region in the world to put together a simple classification of its wines, from level one to level five, easy to understand by consumers, not unlike the impact that Robert Parker’s 100-point system was to have 130 years later. This classification, in 1855 at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, ranked wines from the Médoc and Sauternes regions, according to the prices that they reached on the marketplace. The same ranking system holds true today, giving the world’s merchants and wine collectors something easily identifiable to trade, talk about and – of course – drink.

The 1855 classified growths are far from the only great wines in Bordeaux, but they are the ones that gave the region status internationally. Today, there are many stellar wines from all over, with smaller areas (appellations) such as Fronsac, the Bordeaux Cotes and Entre deux Mers promising some of the most exciting bottles, and Sauternes and wines of the Medoc’s cru bourgeois offering some of the best known names. Bordeaux is just as exciting today as it has ever been, with the city gaining UNESCO World Heritage Status in 2007, with more and more vineyards owned by international figures from the UK, China, India, the States and elsewhere, and with new techniques continually evolving in the vineyard and the winery.