The History of Bordeaux

Bordeaux was a port before it was a vineyard. The oldest wine traced in the city came from Italy, in clay jars, and Bordeaux has spent 2,000 years learning to sell its own. For anyone who pours it, cellars it, sells it, or gets asked about it at a dinner table, here it is in 7 turns. The dates are gathered in a timeline at the end.

Roman Bordeaux drank Italian wine, then planted its own

Wine came first as cargo. At the Allées de Tourny, in the center of the city, 80% of the Roman amphorae found held wine, and a large share came from the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy. The vines followed. Near the old Devèze stream, archaeologists found 5 vine stocks still carrying their pruning cuts, crushed under fill laid in the second half of the 1st century: vines growing inside the Roman town, a find almost unknown anywhere in the West.

Roman writers of that century, Columella and then Pliny the Elder, knew a vine called Biturica, which made a wine that kept. That it was the vine of Bordeaux’s Gallic people, the Bituriges Vivisci, is a fair guess and no more. Among Bordeaux’s grape varieties, the Roman pips dug up in the city look most like Petit Verdot, a likeness the specialist in vine varieties at INRA, France’s agricultural research institute, who studied them called pure hypothesis.

By the 4th century the city had its poet. Ausonius, born in Bordeaux and tutor to the emperor Gratian, owned a family estate with 100 jugera of vines, about 25 hectares, and saluted his home in a line of verse:

“O homeland, famous for wine, for rivers, and for men”

«O patria, insignem Baccho fluviisque virisque»

Ausonius, Ordo urbium nobilium, 4th century

An English market, won in 1224

Eleanor of Aquitaine inherited the duchy of Aquitaine, Bordeaux with it, in 1137, in her teens, and that summer married the heir to the French throne, who became Louis VII a week later; she was queen of France for 15 years. In 1152 the marriage was annulled, and 2 months later she married Henry Plantagenet, who became king of England 2 years after that, and the duchy passed with its port under the English crown. Wine courses date the English trade from that marriage. The year that made the trade was 1224. Richard the Lionheart and his brother John, kings of England and dukes of Aquitaine, still favored the wine of La Rochelle. In 1214 John exempted the wine of Bordeaux’s burgesses, the city’s enfranchised citizens, from his customs, and in 1224 the French took La Rochelle. From then on the English market belonged to Bordeaux.

The record season came in 1308 to 1309, when the port shipped 102,724 tonneaux, the great casks the trade was counted in. Only 11.9% of it was shipped by the people of Bordeaux themselves; most of the rest came down the rivers from the Gascon country, which is how Bordeaux became the name of a port’s wine before it was the name of a place’s. The city owned almost none of the ships, and in the season of 1372 to 1373, 70% of the vessels calling at Bordeaux were English. The record did not last. War with France from 1337 cut exports by more than three quarters in its first year, and the Black Death followed in 1348.

Even the lighthouse lived on wine. The hermit who kept the Cordouan tower, at the mouth of the Gironde, was paid 2 groats, English silver coins of 4 pence, for every tonneau carried past it, and in 1409 the king of England doubled the fee.

Much of that cargo was clairet, a pale red made mostly from dark grapes, sometimes with white ones in the vat, closer to a modern rosé than to a modern red. The English called it claret. Its own council protected the city: from 1241 it kept the wine from upriver out of the port until November 11, and in 1373 Edward III put the date back to Christmas, so that Bordeaux’s wine sailed first. English rule ended at the battle of Castillon on July 17, 1453, and the city surrendered for the last time that October.

The Dutch wanted white wine and drained the marshes

After 1453 the buyers changed. From the second half of the 16th century the Dutch led the trade, and they wanted white wine, much of it to distill into eau-de-vie, the brandy that survived long voyages. Even in the 1700s, the wine Holland took from Bordeaux was mostly white: Entre-deux-Mers, Preignac, Barsac, and Langon, and above all Bergerac and Sainte-Foy. With them came the sulfur wick that cleaned a cask, the “allumette hollandaise,” and in 1640 a Bordeaux merchant, Casanilles, denounced their grip on the trade before the Parlement, the region’s high court.

They knew water, too. In 1599 Henri IV granted the engineer Humphrey Bradley the right to drain France’s marshes, and that December Bordeaux contracted for the draining of the low land beside the city and at Blanquefort, against the plague as much as for farming. The city paid in an odd currency: the ballast of every ship in port, for 4 years, to build the dikes.

The palus, the rich riverside flats, already carried vines, and they were prized. In the official price list the city’s magistrates, the jurats, fixed on October 29, 1647, the reds of the palus stood above those of the Graves and the Médoc.

The first wine sold under its own name

The magistrates of Bordeaux’s Parlement, the noblesse de robe, the nobility of the robe, turned their country houses into wine estates in the 1600s, and one of them gave the world a wine sold under the name of its vineyard. Haut-Brion’s first vines came to Jean de Pontac in 1525, in the dowry of Jeanne de Bellon; he bought the rest of the land in 1533, and by 1584 the Pontacs were selling to English merchants. On April 10, 1663, at the Royal Oak Tavern in Lombard Street, the London diarist Samuel Pepys wrote down what is often called the first tasting note of a named estate:

“a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with”

Samuel Pepys, Diary, April 10, 1663

The philosopher John Locke walked the same vineyard on May 14, 1677, and was not impressed by the soil: “noe thing but pure white sand, mixed with a little gravel. One would imagine it scarce fit to beare any thing.” The wine said otherwise.

The price gap that made the First Growths opened over the next century. Around 1714 a tonneau of Latour was worth 4 to 5 tonneaux of ordinary wine; in 1729, 13; in 1767, 20. The brokers’ list of 1855 wrote down a hierarchy their grandfathers had already priced.

Bottles from Dublin, buyers from the Baltic

In 1723 Pierre Mitchell, from Dublin, opened the first bottle works in Bordeaux, under a royal privilege that obliged him to burn coal instead of wood, and after his death his widow ran it and defended its monopoly. Most wine still left in cask, bought by the merchant houses of the Chartrons, the merchants’ quarter on the quays north of the old city, many of them Irish, Dutch, or German.

Britain had priced itself out. In 1717 the English duty stood at 55 pounds sterling a tonneau, and Bordeaux took care to send England only its First Growths: 400 to 500 tonneaux a year, not counting the wine shipped to Scotland and Ireland, against 6,000 to 7,000 before. The ships sailed instead to Holland, to the Baltic, and to the French islands of the Caribbean. The islands sent back sugar and coffee grown by enslaved Africans, and the same quays fitted out slaving voyages: 15 in 1785 alone.

Planting outran the market. In 1725 a decree of the king’s council banned new vineyards around Bordeaux, and the intendant, the king’s administrator of the province, enforced it over the protest of Montesquieu, philosopher and winegrower, who sold his own wine to the English and observed that the success of his books there did much for the success of his wine. A decree of 1731 extended the ban to the whole kingdom, with a fine of 3,000 livres, the French money of account.

The privilege that kept upriver wine out of the port was abolished in April 1776, restored that September, and ended for good in 1790. Between those dates Thomas Jefferson, then the American minister to France, spent May 25 to 29, 1787, in Bordeaux, notebook in hand. In Sauternes he put first the vineyard of Monsieur Diquem, or of his son-in-law Monsieur de Saluces: 150 tonneaux a year, at 300 livres a tonneau young and 600 old.

A golden age between plagues

During the Terror, the Revolution’s purge of 1793 and 1794, the authorities arrested 200 merchants in a single night, and the estates of the Church and of emigrant nobles were sold as national property. War with Britain and Napoleon’s blockade then emptied the port until 1815. Julie Delbos, widowed in 1808 with 10 children, spent the next 40 years building her firm into an international house, with its own ships and offices in London and Saint Petersburg.

Peace and steam made the golden age. The railway reached Bordeaux from Angoulême on September 20, 1852, and the line to Paris was complete in 1853. From 1860 Britain cut its duty on light wine, and by 1862 it charged 1 shilling a gallon instead of 5 shillings 9 pence; Bordeaux’s shipments to Britain more than quadrupled within a decade. The sea routes widened with them: in 1857 the new mail steamers to Brazil and the River Plate were given Bordeaux as their port of departure.

The 1855 Classification belongs to this moment: a price list the brokers drew up in 2 weeks, delivered on April 18, 1855, for the Paris Exposition. The names multiplied after it. The trade’s directory went from about 50 châteaux in 1850 to 318 in 1868, 800 in 1881, and 1,600 in 1908.

The plagues came in between. Powdery mildew, first seen in a greenhouse at Margate, in England, in 1845, cut the Gironde’s harvest from 2,296,559 hectoliters in 1850 to 319,892 in 1854, and sulfur saved the vines. Then came phylloxera, the American root louse. On June 11, 1869, phylloxera was found at Floirac, across the river from the city, on the roots of vines that had been ailing for 2 or 3 years, in a vineyard that imported American vines. The answer came from the same continent as the pest: European vines grafted onto American roots.

Downy mildew followed, and its remedy began at the roadside. Some Gironde growers dusted the vines along the roads with lime and copper salts to keep passersby from helping themselves to the grapes, and those vines kept their leaves. In April 1885 the botanist Alexis Millardet urged the Gironde’s agricultural society to try the roadside mixture, and that summer’s trials in the Médoc proved it; the first formula was 130 liters of water, 15 kilograms of lime, and 8 kilograms of copper sulfate. As the Bordeaux mixture, it went around the world.

The cask got its legal size in the same years: a law of 1866 fixed the Bordeaux barrique at 225 liters, and 4 of them make the Bordeaux tonneau of 900 liters. The name got its borders after years of fraud. A law of August 1, 1905, made a false claim of origin an offense, and a decree of February 18, 1911, drew the territory with the right to the name Bordeaux within the Gironde.

Wars, laws, a frost, and a vineyard that turned red

The 20th century brought 2 world wars, and the rules that came between them. In 1914, with the German armies nearing Paris, the French government moved to Bordeaux, which was the seat of government from September 2 to December 8. Across France the harvests of 1915 to 1919 came in 18% below those of the 5 years before the war, and in the peace that followed, prices sagged, then collapsed in the early 1930s. In 1932, in that slump, a list of Crus Bourgeois, Médoc estates outside the 1855 ranking, named 444 properties. A décret-loi of July 30, 1935, a decree with the force of law, created the appellations d’origine contrôlées, the protected place names on French labels, and the national committee that drew them, led by Joseph Capus, senator for the Gironde; the Bordeaux appellation followed in 1936. Bottling at the estate spread slowly: Mouton Rothschild first bottled its whole crop at the château with the 1924 vintage.

The government came back in June 1940. It left Paris on June 10, as the German army advanced on the capital, and it was in Bordeaux, on June 16, that Marshal Pétain was named to lead the government that asked for the armistice. Refugees from the north, many of them on foot, took the city from 250,000 people to about 1 million in a few weeks. The demarcation line between the occupied zone and Vichy France ran through the vineyards between Castillon and Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, leaving the city, the Médoc, Saint-Émilion, and Sauternes under occupation. Châteaux were requisitioned, the Rothschilds of Mouton and Lafite, who were Jewish, lost their French nationality, and only manual workers were allowed wine, about 3 liters a month. The occupiers sent a Bremen merchant, Heinz Bömers, whose family had owned a Graves estate before 1914, to buy the region’s wine for Germany.

In February 1956 ice drifted down the Garonne through the city, and the frost cut that year’s harvest to about a quarter of normal. At Petrus, its owner, Madame Loubat, pruned her surviving vines down to stumps instead of replanting, and they grew back. In 1958 the most planted grape in the Gironde was still a white one, Sémillon, on more than a quarter of the vineyard. In the 20 years to the early 1980s, pushed by the prices red wine fetched and by planting rights no longer granted for white grapes, Merlot went from 15,000 to 32,000 hectares, from a fifth of the vines to a third, and Cabernet Sauvignon, which covered fewer than 7,000 hectares in 1958, passed 17,000. The red Bordeaux the world takes for granted is, in its proportions, a postwar vineyard.

The rankings were redrawn around it. Graves classified its estates in 1953 and 1959 and Saint-Émilion in 1955, and in 1973 the 1855 list changed for the second time, when Mouton Rothschild became a First Growth. The cellar caught up with science. In the 1970s the Bordeaux enologist Émile Peynaud preached riper grapes, each parcel fermented apart, a strict choice among the lots, and a second wine for the lesser ones. The American critic Robert Parker’s praise of the 1982 vintage, published in 1983, made Bordeaux a critic’s market, and in the 1990s the garage wines of Saint-Émilion, tiny cuvées from a few parcels, beginning with Valandraud, showed that a small cellar could make a name.

The buyers changed again. By 2015 more than 100 Bordeaux châteaux had been bought by Chinese owners. In 2021 the Bordeaux and Bordeaux Supérieur appellations admitted 6 grapes for a warmer climate: 4 reds, Arinarnoa, Castets, Marselan, and Touriga Nacional, and 2 whites, Alvarinho and Liliorila. Arinarnoa was bred by INRA in 1956, the year of the frost. The Gironde had 91,543 hectares of vines in production in 2025, 9% fewer than a year before.

A timeline of Bordeaux wine, in 22 dates

The crescent of quays where the amphorae came in and the tonneaux went out is still there, listed by UNESCO in 2007 as the Port of the Moon. Bordeaux began by importing wine. It has spent 2,000 years exporting a name.