What is claret, and why do the English call Bordeaux that?

A French word for a pale red

Claret comes from the Old French claret, a clear, light-colored red wine, which in turn comes from the Latin clarus, clear. English had the word by the mid-15th century, for a light-colored wine, and by about 1700 it had come to mean the red wine of Bordeaux and no other. Since about 1600 it has also been slang for blood, which says something about the color.

Three centuries of English Bordeaux

Bordeaux became English by marriage. Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry Plantagenet in 1152, and Henry became King of England in 1154, which put the duchy and its port under the English crown. The city made the most of it. In 1214 its burgesses won exemption from customs duties on the wine of their own vineyards. Later the city kept wine from upriver out of the port until November 11, then until December 25, so that its own wine sailed first.

The volumes were enormous for the age. In the season of 1306 to 1307 Bordeaux shipped 93,452 tonneaux (the great casks the trade was counted in), and in the record season of 1308 to 1309 it shipped 102,724. That is more than 100,000 casks leaving one port in a single year. Light reds were a large part of the cargo, beside white wine and the darker wines from upriver.

English rule ended in 1453, after the battle of Castillon, when Charles VII took the city. The word the English had learned for its wine stayed.

After the English: where the wine sailed in the 1700s

The French customs kept registers of what left the port, and historians have turned them into a database, TOFLIT18. For the Bordeaux customs district it holds the wine shipped abroad and to the colonies in most years from 1717 to 1778, and in 1789. By then the English were one buyer among several.

Shares of the declared value, rounded, from the rows TOFLIT18 marks as its best regional record. Contains information from the TOFLIT18 dataset, made available under the ODbL 1.0.

In wartime the English share shrank. In 1746, during the War of the Austrian Succession, and in 1761 and 1762, during the Seven Years’ War, the registers record no wine at all for England. Holland and the ports of the North kept buying.

The clerks also kept the old line between the city’s wine and the wine from upriver. They entered the wine of the sénéchaussée of Bordeaux, the city’s own jurisdiction, as vin de ville, and the wine from upriver, the High Country around Bergerac, Gaillac, and Cahors, as vin de haut. Vin de ville made up 70% of the value from 1717 to 1739 and 78% from 1760 to 1778.

The English share had begun to fall before the registers open. From 1689 England was at war with France and taxed French wine far above its rivals. The Methuen Treaty of 1703 fixed the duty on Portuguese wine at a third less than on French. What crossed the Channel after that was the expensive end of the trade: the "new French clarets" of Haut-Brion (opens in a new tab), Margaux (opens in a new tab), Lafite, and Latour (opens in a new tab), sold in London from about 1703. The word came to mean the best of Bordeaux rather than the bulk of it. The longer story is in the history of Bordeaux.

The English kept the word. Most of the wine sailed elsewhere.

The word split in 2

In France the word entered the law.

The Bordeaux cahier des charges (the appellation’s official rulebook) reserves Claret for light reds, ruby to purple and pale in color, with light tannin. A red claimed as claret must carry the term. The term dates from 2025. INAO validated it that year, and the ministerial order of September 19, 2025, published in the Journal officiel on September 21, wrote it into the rulebook for the 2025 harvest.

The rulebook treats a claret differently from other reds. The malolactic fermentation (a second, softening fermentation), compulsory for every other red Bordeaux, is not required, and a claret may be sweetened with grape must. It may keep up to 3 grams of sugar a liter, or 7 when its acidity is high enough.

Clairet is the dark rosé. It is made from red grapes left on their skins for a short time, usually 24 to 36 hours. That is long enough for a vivid raspberry color and a little tannin, well short of a red.

Both words live inside the same appellation. Bordeaux, recognized by a decree of November 14, 1936, and spread over 494 of the 535 communes of the Gironde, makes red, white, and rosé, as well as these 2 named styles. A bottle labeled Bordeaux Clairet or Bordeaux Claret is not a separate appellation but a Bordeaux with a term the rulebook defines.

Who may use the word

In France, claret on a Bordeaux label is a term the rulebook controls, not a word anyone may use. In the United States, federal law lists Claret among the semi-generic names, along with Burgundy, Chablis, Champagne, and Sherry. An American wine could once use such a name with its true place of origin beside it. Since March 10, 2006, that door has been closed to newcomers: only a brand whose label was approved before that date may keep using it.

Ask for claret in London and you will get red Bordeaux, as the English have since about 1700. The oldest English word for Bordeaux is also its newest label.