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This will be a quick, and easy-to-understand guide to the Bordeaux wine culture and the spirited dynamics of the early wine trade. This article is meant to accompany the Right Bank article written earlier this year. To fully understand the nuance of Bordeaux and its blends, as well as its grape varietals and climatology, we must first understand its geography. The city of Bordeaux itself rests on what we would call, the left bank.
It is directly adjacent to the much older city of St.-Emilion, across the plain of Entre-Deux-Mers. The Dordogne and Garonne rivers both flow into this Estuary from the east of the country, and they have both, for centuries, allowed the French economy to churn mass amounts of its gross domestic product out into the Atlantic for interstate commerce.
Historically, however, the Gironde Estuary region is about as French as Shepherd’s Pie, in fact for a long while, it was actually dominated by the English crown, part of Henry II’s inheritance of Aquitaine via his wife Eleanor, duchess before Hundred Years War. Thus, by the seventeen hundreds the English were well established in the region due to historic ties, and able to ship French wine back to Southhampton.
A lot of the nobility in the region were English, almost all of the bankers who supplied capital to the wineries and the traders were English, and of course, a fair bit of the winemaker’s themselves were English. You can still see remnants of this Englishness today, in the traditional cuisine of Bordeaux. Because of the incredible amount of capital flowing in and out of Bordeaux, it wasn’t just the English who got a piece of the pie, but the champions of the seas themselves: the Dutch, who had already set up a wine trade operation in Vouvray on the Loire river.
The Dutch customers very much preferred wine sweet white, and often fortified styles of wines made by the Dutch merchants, and distilleries located in both Armagnac, Cognac, and on the Loire; notably, the styles were much friendlier to storage for long voyages than the English wine style of Claret as well. Thus, the Dutch East India Company, seeking to expand its output southward, decided to drain the marshland that is now called the Left bank, with a series of dykes and canals, giving way to an infertile, sandy, windswept area covered in small pebbles, that makes some of the finest wines in the world today.
This area today is known as Graves, and the Médoc, and while today we associate them with Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, back in the late seventeen and early eighteen hundreds, they were brimming with Carménère and Malbec, the former of which really can be found today in some remote bits of Chile, and was for a long time disguised as Merlot.
These were the favorite wines of Thomas Jefferson, who served as ambassador to France, and was a bit of a wine enthusiast himself. He loved the wines of the Left Bank and considered Chateau Margaux and Durfort-Vivens among the finest in the world. These Châteaux inspired him to become a wine producer himself, as when he returned to Monticello, his estate in Virginia, he planted a vineyard, which, unfortunately never produced a crop, as pests and mold quickly decimated the vines.
Due to their popularity, especially in the UK, the Claret of the left bank were heavily exported, leading to mass amounts of wealth for anyone who owned a vineyard. Gone were the days of independent vintners making high-quality wines, and in was the mass production of marketable flavorless plonk simply labeled Claret. A new trade-dominant system of negotiators, traders, stockrooms, accountants, and clerks had become the norm. This multi-faceted business model is simply referred to today as the negoçiante system.
Because the price of quality wine had gone up so significantly, the price of land in Bordeaux had also increased significantly, and it became so high that a lot of locals were priced out of their own wineries, opting instead to sell the properties to the negoçiantes who had once bought their grapes. This gave rise to regional winemaking family empires, like the Lurton family, who still own a deluge of wineries in Bordeaux today, including La Tour de Bessan.
Claret at this time was not bottled in the wineries that made the wine, instead they were often sold to negoçiantes, who would bottle them, and put their names on the labels, and then distribute them to the various importers. Sometimes houses would be blended together, vineyards would be blended and even vintages were not spared this blending. In some cases, even wines from the Rhône Valley were used to thicken the light reds in bad vintages.
In 1855, Paris was set to host the World’s Fair, and in order to make the products of France, namely Bordeaux wine, less complex, he ordered a survey done of the most expensive wines sold via the negoçiante system. He wanted the wines ranked into categories, to make wine easier for foreigners, importers, and fairgoers to purchase. The wines were ranked not on the basis of Terroir, as in Burgundy, but simply on price. Napoleon figured that price was an easy way to convey value in a way that would be profitable for France.
The system established five levels of Grand Cru, or Great Growths, and ranked Châteaux wineries in order of Premier (1er), Deuxième (2me), Troisième (3me), Quatorzième (4me), and Cinquième (5me) Grand Cru Wines. We know them in English as first, second, third, forth, fifth great growths. There were originally four Premier Grand Cru houses: Château Margaux, Château Lafite-Rothschild, Château Haut-Brion, and Château Latour. This was updated in 1974, when, at the behest of Baron Phillippe de Rothschild, Château Mouton-Rothschild was upgraded from a second growth, to a first growth. There are thirteen second growths now, you can find them here.
At the end of the nineteenth century, catastrophe struck Bordeaux, as it did all of the vines of France, and they withered away into furled branches. The culprit was Phylloxera, a vine-louse that eats away at the rootstock of vinifera grapes. No one knows how this American vine louse ended up in Europe, but most suspect it was brought on a clipping of illegally imported Native American vines, perhaps Niagara - regardless, these vines were totally banned in France henceforth.
It wasn’t until 1909 that there came a solution: by grafting the vinifera vines onto labrusca root stock, and the roots of other Native American varietals, the vines would be resistant to Phylloxera, and would lack the undesirable foxy characteristic of Native American grapes. Not all grapes vines were destroyed in Europe, but the plague spread fast, and infected the vast majority, which inevitably required Marshall Plan-style replanting and organizational efficiency.
When Bordeaux did replant, they ended up abandoning Carménère, and instead planted Cabernet franc, Merlot, and a lesser-known crossing between Sauvignon Blanc, and Cabernet Franc: Cabernet Sauvignon, today, the King of Bordeaux, and invader of vineyards around the world, yet it was in Bordeaux that this beast of a grape first set its roots down.
In 1936, France ordained its codified protections to emancipate consumers from the yoke of counterfeit wine, the first being Châteauneuf-du-pape, whose framework established other regional laws. This system is called AOC: Appellation d’Origin Contrôlée - and you will see it on almost all French wine labels. The system further codified the Climat in Burgundy, and stamped the 1855 Classification into law in Bordeaux. It forbade vintners from marketing their wines with the name of a place, if the grapes hadn’t come from there, or hadn’t been aged long enough in oak, or weren’t made in the regional traditional style.
Prior to the passing of this system, some counterfeiters were filling bottles with watery food coloring, and re-using labels or simply not properly representing the style of the region by selling grapes from other Climat. Aft
r this legislation passed, it outlined wine law for several other European countries, but also codified Cru Bourgeoise. These are any Château in Bordeaux that are not, either due to less substantial rating earlier, or having not yet been founded, listed as Grand Cru.
As you can see by the map above, the upper-tier Châteaux are located mostly in the Médoc, in places like Margaux, Pauillac, St.-Estephe, and St.-Julien. Notably, Châteaux Haut-Brion is located in Graves, in a distinctive area known for its incredible wines, called Pessac-Léognan. They also make white wines here that taste of key lime pie, grass clippings, and creme brie. It is dangerously close to the aforementioned Entre-Deux-Mers, a region that specializes in white wine blends of Sémillon and Sauvignon Blanc, first established by the Dutch.
The area is very much more moist during the harvest, as it is lower and the warmth of the Gironde flows eastward over this plain, creating a risk of Botrytis. Just across the Garonnne, in fact, you can find lovely Sauternes and Barzac, known for their caramel-like sweet wines that dance over the palate with flavors of caramel apple and honeyed tobacco.
During the second World War, and of course the First as well, but to a lesser extend, Châteaux were often used as barracks and supplemental wine producing facilities for troops. this meant focus on quality was significantly cut, and reputations damaged in the post-war era. Many heirs died, leaving some Châteaux in disrepair, vines untrimmed, and techniques of the trade unable to be passed down.
In the sixties, Pomerol, across the Gironde, became quite popular and les Vins de Garage sprung up on the Right Bank. If you haven’t read the article on the right bank, please consider. This indicated a cultural resurgence in some of the dilapidated properties in Bordeaux as a whole, and a lot of properties saw renewed interest from investors, and capital began to flow. Gone were the days of boring, watery Claret, and in was a rush of capital waiting to be dispensed to value-laden Cru Bourgeoise. Expert winemakers from all over the world flocked to Bordeaux with new concepts from the old world.
The result of all of this renewed interest in the region was a slow rising tide for producers that did not seem to hit Châteaux in the order of importance according to the 1855 Classification. This dated ranking system began to look very irrelevant as people were paying top dollar for third growths or even fifth growths that had more pizzaz and bolder flavors than first and second growths due to their revamped winemaking techniques.
Today, as more and more wineries begin to trend to lighter and more complex, these bold, rich, oaky flavors fall from favor with the public, and Bordeaux has adapted graciously. More and more top rated Châteaux are pursuing biodynamic and organic production means, and allowing nature to present a patina on their wines, offering less perspective per bottle. This is a good thing, because now, as Châteaux begin to catch up with the standards of fine wine today, they offer exceptional value for money. Here’re just three names to consider from the left bank.
Château Brane-Cantenac 2me Cru Classé is a fantastic second-growth with improving quality vintage by vintage. I selected this wine, because as of right now they are one of the cheaper Cru Classé wines, and continuously up-and-coming. Several of the previous vintages of this wine have been smash-hits in regards to complexity, and they age beautifully - did I mention that they're one of the few Biodynamic cru wines? This second-growth gives strong flavors of graphite, followed by dark-fruit, plums, and cassis, namely, with an incredible hint of roses petal and tabacc semois.
Château La Tour De Bessan is another incredible winery that is gaining in the ranks of prestige amongst Bordeaux lovers. This biodynamic winery leads with an imposing feminine mystique. Its beautifully layered and wonderfully floral. It's a soft, round injunction on the palette that offers hints of pencil shavings and hibiscus, as well as underpinnings of papaya. The rich, round blackcurrant crêpe flavors hit the palate with excellent depth but controlled balance.
Les Carmes de Rieussec is the second wine of a major house maker of Sauternes and an incredible example of what a delight these wines can be. This rich desert wine gives miles of honeyed-melon flavors, with sharp acidity that would break apart the creaminess of vanilla ice cream very well. There is a grape-element that is noticeable as well as orange blossom. The botrytized flavor in this wine is most prominent, flooding the palate in warm caramel apple expressions
That's all,
~K
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