Inventing Grand Cru Claret: Irish Wine Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Bordeaux

Professor Charles Ludington

Bordeaux’s most expensive young wines were overwhelmingly purchased by Irish merchants during the eighteenth century. These merchants then blended Bordeaux wine with wines from the Rhone Valley and Eastern Spain in preparation for sale in Britain and Ireland. Irish merchants were keenly aware of the frequent deficiencies of even the best wines, and in blending them were responding to the demands of elite British and Irish consumers. Later changes in wine-making, from the vineyard to the cellar, as well as customer demand for pure wines, would end the practice of blending.

The following is an extract from a paper written by Professor Charles Ludington – please also have a listen to the podcast with Chad on the same subject Ireland and Bordeaux.

Historians of eighteenth-century Bordeaux wine have long acknowledged the importance of merchants from the British Isles in the Bordeaux wine trade. As Paul Butel and Jean-Pierre Poussou wrote in their book about daily life in Bordeaux in the eighteenth century, “English and Irish traders arrived in great number between 1720 and 1750, founding many famous commercial houses, in which their role in commerce and especially the production of wine, was essential: the history of Bordeaux grands crus is linked to their presence.”

Butel had acknowledged in an earlier book that in some years “the entire production of one or all of the four first growths was purchased by English or Irish traders.” He went on to specify that the “British colony in Bordeaux, the majority of whom were Irish, was proportionately more important than any group of foreigners.”

In fact, for most of the eighteenth century, the “British” colony in Bordeaux was never less than three-quarters Irish, and the Irish themselves were both Protestants and Catholics. There were slightly more Catholics than Protestants overall, but perhaps surprisingly, confessional differences played very little role in business relations and personal friendships. Marriage across confessional lines was extremely rare, but otherwise the community was united.

The most important demographic of the Bordeaux’s “British” colony, was that it was overwhelmingly Irish. In this article, therefore, the term “Irish” will be used to encompass all of the merchants from the British Isles, just as the term “British” is often used to include those who may not have been exactly that. But what did these Irish traders do that was so important other than purchase almost all of Bordeaux’s best wines from their French producers? Butel argued that the Irish merchant’s critical role, as with the merchants from other nations, was in finding outlets to sell the wine. Equally important, he claimed, was their role in aging the wine, as “it was in the warehouses of the [foreign] traders and not at the chateau itself that this ageing occurred.”

 

 

Many Bordeaux merchant houses specializing in wine were founded in the eighteenth century by Germans, Dutchmen, and Danes, and by volume they were Bordeaux’s biggest traders; however, it was the Irish, more than any other merchants in Bordeaux, who supplied market outlets for the most expensive wines, perfected aging techniques in their cellars along the Quai des Chartrons, and provided the necessary capital to growers to make wines worthy of their high price. To assert this, is neither new nor controversial.

But this essay argues that along with these contributions, the Irish merchants in eighteenth-century Bordeaux made an even more fundamental contribution to the birth of Bordeaux grands crus wines through the practice of blending or “cutting” the best Bordeaux wines with wines from elsewhere, especially the northern Rhone and eastern Spain. Not that this blending was a secret at the time, nor has it eluded historians of the Bordeaux wine trade ever since. For example, in a chapter concerning the “birth” of first growth Bordeaux wines in the eighteenth century, René Pijassou remarked: “The estate manager was in frequent contact with the merchants of the Chartrons, the Guestiers, Bartons, Johnstons, Fenwicks, Chalmers, Forsters, Skinners, MacCarthys, who were the traditional clients of Latour. These were the ones who adapted the tastes of the wines for their essentially English clientele, by blending with Rhône and Spanish wines.”

 

The Ascendancy of Irish Wine Merchants in Bordeaux

Throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, the bulk of Bordeaux’s best and most expensive wines were purchased from their French producers by Irish merchants, who then “raised” the wine in their cellars and shipped it to the British Isles. This trend is particularly obvious when looking at the ledgers of Abraham Lawton who arrived in Bordeaux from Cork in 1739.

After a few years as a buyer and shipper of wines, Lawton became a “courtier” or broker, using his knowledge to connect producers looking to sell, with merchants looking to buy. As Lawton’s books show, year after year, vintage after vintage, Irish traders such as MacCarthy, Johnston, Byrne, Barton, Connor, Lynch, Nally, Black, Gernon, Galwey, Clarke, Boyd, Kirwan, O’Brian, Dillon, Forster, Burke, French, Morgan, Coppinger, Quin, Geoghan, Mullay, Sandilands, and Roche, purchased the Haut Brion, the “Castle Margaux”, the Latour, the Lafite, the Brane-Mouton (known since 1853 as Château Mouton-Rothschild), the Pontet-Canet, and many other top-growth wines direct from the estates.

 

 

As the decades wore on and stocks built up, these same merchants often purchased wines from each other at various stages in the wine “raising” process. Ledgers and letter-books belonging to Thomas, William, and Hugh Barton, three generations of an Irish family that began in the Bordeaux wine trade in 1725 when Thomas arrived from County Fermanagh, show a similar pattern.

When “French Tom” Barton died in 1780, his business already dominated the high end of the Bordeaux wine trade, and that domination continued under his son and grandson. In some years, it was extreme, as is revealed in a letter from the Bordeaux-based, Irish merchant Thomas Knight in October 1788, to his Irish friend Richard Hennessy in Cognac: “Old Guill.me B-r-t-n has surprized the great ones – he bought up every drop of Lafitte [sic], Latour, Mad.me Brane [i.e. Mouton Rothschild] and Kirwan’s the amount of which is upwards of 460,000 livres.”

Likewise, the ledgers and letter-books of the Johnston family from County Armagh (and later Dublin), who set-up shop in Bordeaux in 1743, are full of top-growth wine purchases and sales. Perhaps, no sale was more indicative of the Johnston family’s prominence in the Bordeaux wine trade than a sale to the Irish-born Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington, in April 1842. On this occasion, Nathaniel Johnston et Fils, the name of the company by that time, sold to the “Iron Duke,” who was now leader of the House of Lords, 108 hogsheads of wine (the equivalent of 27,216 quart bottles), consisting of Latour, Lafite, Mouton, Milon, Brown-Cantenac, Lagrange, and Montrose.16 Wellington was hardly unique among British and Irish wine drinkers in his penchant for grands crus Bordeaux. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Bordeaux top growth wines had been destined for Britain and Ireland since the beginning of the eighteenth century, and in some cases even before that.

Wealthy Londoners in particular purchased the four “first growth” wines – Haut Brion, Margaux, Lafite, and Latour – which were known by their estate names in England by the first decade of the eighteenth century. In most years, the entire production of these four estates went to London, while Ireland, because of its lower import tariffs, imported more Bordeaux wine than all of Great Britain combined. In 1740, for example, roughly 300 tuns of Bordeaux wine went to London, while another 700 tuns went to the rest of England. Scotland imported 2500 tuns total, and Ireland imported over 4000 tuns. However, the average London price per tun was 1500 livres tournois, while for the rest of England it was 800 livres tournois, for Scotland 600 livres tournois, and Ireland 400 livres tournois.

 

 

Thus, there was a broad cost and qualitative difference in the “average” tun sent to the British Isles. Moreover, in any given year as much as half of the Bordeaux wine imported into Great Britain was falsely declared for customs purposes to be Portuguese or Spanish wine. The Scottish in particular were fond of smuggled claret.

Irish Customs taxes on French wine were much lower than their British equivalent, so that Ireland was both “a mass market for Bordeaux wines and a luxury market,” as well as a mostly legal market.20 But keep in mind also that the average price per tun of Bordeaux wine sold in France or elsewhere in Europe and overseas was a mere 200 livres tournois per tun.21 So at least among legally imported claret, the English, Scottish, and Irish were all drinking the very best.

The British Isles continued to be the primary market for Bordeaux grands crus wines throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, despite the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The post-monarchical French state, in its various guises, had no intention of shutting down some of its most lucrative merchants, and thereby hurting their own tax revenue. What did change, however, was that Customs tax increases in Britain-made French wines an even more elite product than ever before, while in Ireland by 1790, Customs tax on French wines increased to the point that the mass market for Bordeaux wine fell away, although grands crus imports continued. As Guillaume Lawton, the son of Abraham Lawton wrote in his private notebook in 1815: Concerning reds, England, Scotland and Ireland receive our first, second, and third growths inclusively, as well as our fine wines. Nothing below this last denomination. It was not like that like that before the augmentation of tariffs in Ireland. That country used to receive and consume a large quantity of our ordinary wines. But now that is finished and our exports there are absolutely the same as those we make to England.

In a similar vein, William Franck, the French oenologist and author of the very first publicly available “Bordeaux wine Bible,” wrote that wines from Chateau Margaux were “the most esteemed in the country. They combine all the proper qualities to flatter one’s taste. . . These wines are highly sought after by the English and enjoy among them a marked preference.” Moving up the road to Chateau Latour, Franck observed that “the English comprise the biggest market and purchase all the [Latour] almost every year when the temperature has been favorable to the vines.” Of nearby Chateau Lafite he said that “it is almost all consumed in England. The English ordinarily purchase all the other top growth wines from this commune [i.e. Pauillac] as well.” Franck, like many people before and after him, used the “English” as a synecdoche for all the people in the British Isles, although he did note that the wines of Léognan, just to the south of Bordeaux in the Graves district, had formerly gone to Ireland before the Irish tariff was raised, but now those wines were exported to the North [i.e. North Sea and Baltic ports].

Franck also said that Haut Brion’s wines were historically equal to the best wines of Médoc, but that in recent years the estate had been using too much manure to fertilize the vines. Guillaume Lawton, the Franco-Irish broker, had the same complaint.

 

“Making Up” Grands Crus Bordeaux

Having shown that most Bordeaux grands crus wines were purchased by Irish merchants (or their descendants) in Bordeaux, and that these wines were then sent to the British and Irish markets, we now arrive at the question of “cutting” or blending the wines with wines from elsewhere. We have seen that French historians of Bordeaux and the Bordeaux wine trade have acknowledged that this activity occurred, but it is my contention that they have underplayed and more importantly overlooked its significance. Let us examine the evidence for my claim. In his study of Chateau Latour, Charles Higounet asserted that most blending was done in England and Ireland in the early-eighteenth century, but gradually moved to the Chartrons, the Bordeaux district where the wine-trade was based and where the merchants had their offices and warehouses.

This claim seems to be accurate. Certainly, the practice of concocting wines in England and Ireland was as old as the wine trade itself. Medieval English wine merchants did whatever they could to make their wines sellable, especially by the summer after the vintage when the wines began to oxidize. Little had changed by the seventeenth century. A vintner’s guide published in London in 1698 under the title In Vino Veritas, is full of ingenious ways to make “French” and “Spanish” wines from wide array of ingredients, or “rectify” wines that had gone bad.

Similarly, in a 1709 edition of The Tatler, Joseph Addison wrote: There is in this city a certain fraternity of chymical [sic] operators who work underground in holes, caverns, and dark retirements, to conceal their mysteries from the eyes and observation of mankind. These subterraneous philosophers are daily employed in the transmigration of liquors, and by the power of magical drugs and incantations, raise under the streets of London the choicest products of the hills and valleys of France. They can squeeze Bordeaux out of a sloe, and draw champagne from an apple.

However, surreptitiously concocting “grape wine” from materials other than grapes is hardly the same thing as “cutting” wines with wines from elsewhere, and the latter practice was never secretive. The Dublin wine merchant John Macarrell sent a bill to his client John Fitzgerald in 1739, for Benicarlo wine and stum (cooked, unfermented grape juice used to start a secondary fermentation), both of which were used in the blending process.28 Walter Woulfe, a wine merchant in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, wrote to William Coppinger in Bordeaux in February 1765, with an order for “5 tuns of claret vintage 1762,” and requested that Coppinger send “a proportionable quantity of stum to make up the said wines, as I conclude [I] can be supplied in Dublin with Spanish wines,” which would be used for blending.

One month later, Woulfe wrote John Connor in Dublin in regards to four hogsheads of claret, saying “I depend on your making those wines as speedily as possible. . . The addition of a few gallons of Alicant has helped them much and Mr. Gernon named to me as one of the best vintages in the Médoc and as vintage ‘63 turned out so very indifferently hope you’ll be able to make out tolerably well.”

In December 1766, Woulfe wrote to a fellow vintner, Will Cormack in Cork, about a different form of blending. When Cormack complained that the wines Woulfe sent were not good enough to sell, Woulfe responded that “they certainly were indifferent and such as I could not place here, they were the refuse of the bad vintages ‘58 and ‘60 made up and refreshed from time to time with new wines.”

However, most blending that took place in Ireland or Britain was not a desperate attempt to make a wine sellable; instead, it was to increase the value of the wine by making it more attractive to the customer. In a letter from Bordeaux to George Boyd in Dublin, written in March 1773, Thomas Barton said that he shipped 10 ¼ tuns of his own wine from his vineyard in St. Estephe, along with three hogsheads of Alicante “that was no way flashy or sweet, and one hogshead of the best high Preignac stum, part to serve to make them up.” A few weeks later Barton wrote to his cousin Captain William Barton in Dublin, saying that he has shipped “3 ¾ tuns racked clean without any Alicant and 2 ½ tuns cut half and half with exceeding good Alicant, which will be sufficient to make them up, 6 iron hoops on each hogshead. I have sent George Boyd [in Dublin] a hhd of the best stum (the high Preignac) and desire him to give you as much as you may want to make up yours. I suppose 2 quarts per hogshead will be sufficient for you.”

In other words, Captain Barton’s final Dublin blend, like George Boyd’s, would have been approximately 80 percent red Bordeaux and 19.5 percent red Alicante, along with the 0.5 percent white Bordeaux from Preignac, which was used to restart fermentation and thus blend the two red wines together. If some clarets were “made up” in Dublin and London, this same practice was even more common among the Irish merchants in Bordeaux before aging and shipping their wines, especially in the second-half of the century.

This practice did not go unnoticed by the French authorities, and in 1755 the Bordeaux Parliament found overwhelming evidence that the Irish merchants Barton, Coppinger, Johnston, Lynch, and Gernon, among others, were blending their wines. Of course, the Irishmen were never trying to hide their activity. Nevertheless, the Bordeaux Parliament outlawed the practice, although the new law was opposed by the Intendant, Louis de Tourny, who had his mind on tax revenue and the possible decline in trade. The Bordeaux Parliament won the battle in the short term, and Tourny was ousted; but when the Seven Years’ War ended in 1763, the Bordeaux parliament noticed that despite some arrests and seized barrels, wines were still being blended for export. Consequently, the Bordeaux parliament increased the penalty for blending to include destruction of property, massive fines, prohibition from trading, and even forfeiture of residency in Bordeaux. Representing the majority of the British “factory” (as the community of Irish merchants was referred to), Thomas Barton argued that blending of wines would be done abroad if not in Bordeaux, and abroad the quality could not be controlled, which would hurt the region’s reputation for making superior wines. Moreover, the parliament could not really be arguing against blending wines as all the foreign and French merchants did the same, with different blends for different markets. What the parliament was really doing was trying to protect the ancient right of Bordeaux producers to prevent the arrival of wine in Bordeaux from farther up the Dordogne and Garonne rivers (i.e. the High Country) until after Christmas. This ancient right was duly investigated by government officials and eventually removed in 1790. But in the meantime, the blending of wines continued unabated.

In fact, Thomas Barton was himself a blender of wines. Writing from Bordeaux in March 1771, he informed John Galwey of Carrick-on-Suir (which seems to have been an inland hub of the Irish wine trade) that “since the vintage of 1769 wines have been taken off the fret and forced they have fallen very kindly and are become extremely bright and promise much better in all respects then ever I expected of them and I believe they will make a very firm good keeping wine. The greatest fault I find in them is an appearance of coarseness that they seem to have which proceeds from the large help of fine Alicant they got but it is to be supposed that age will greatly diminish that coarseness or carry it quite off.”

 

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…. a warehouse ledger for the early 1840s states that the Johnston “Lafite 1837”, was made of mostly 1837 Lafite, but contained lesser amounts of 1837 Léoville, 1837 Milon, 1837 Léoville Barton, 1837 Montrose, 1837 Duluc, 1837 CalonSégur, and 1840 Hermitage. This particular blend was henceforth known as Lafite 1837, No. 466.38 None of this behavior was thought irregular and thus none of it was meant to be secret, although it is also true that not everyone approved. Sir Edward Barry, an Irish physician and later MP for Charleville, County Cork, said that cutting claret with Spanish wines, “particularly the Alicant,” was a form of corruption and Asiatic luxury, the likes of which the Romans had done to their wines once they became an empire. Barry complained that “by these arts we [Irish and British consumers] have been almost completely deprived of any genuine claret wines, which had been so long esteemed for their grateful and salutary qualities.”

Certainly, it was Barry’s right to express his opinion of “cut” clarets, but what he was really doing was criticizing Irish and British taste, because it was these consumers, his countrymen, who demanded that the wines be cut, and thereby given “more strength and flavor.”

Other British writers were more detached in their commentary upon the practice of blending. In his History of Ancient and Modern Wines (1824), the London-based Scottish physician Alexander Henderson stated that there is even a particular manufacture called travail a l’Anglaise, which consists of adding to each hogshead of Bordeaux wine three or four gallons of Alicant or Benicarlo, half a gallon of stum wine, and sometimes a quantity of Hermitage. This mixture undergoes a slight degree of fermentation, and when the whole is sufficiently fretted in, it is exported under the name of CLARET.

Likewise, England’s first professional wine writer, Cyrus Redding, a noted scourge of port, sherry, and all fortified wines, wrote in the first edition of his History and Description of Modern Wines (1833), that the first growths of the Médoc are never sent to England in a perfect state, but are, when destined for that market, mingled with other wines and spirit of wine. The taste of the pure wine is not spirituous enough for the English palate.

In a later book, Every Man his Own Butler (1839), Redding repeated his assertion that the “Bordeaux wines sent to England are not pure, but mixed with second-class Hermitage, and sometimes beni-carlo, with a little spirit of wine.” He noted that Lafite, Latour, Chateau Margaux, and Haut-brion (sic), bring, in good years, £125 a tun; in bad, they sell for little more than £17. . .There are many wines approaching these in goodness, such as those of Gorce, Léoville, Larose, Branne Mouton, and others, which are fit for any table; St. Emilion is a most admirable wine. The great object is to get these genuine, which a discriminating palate in the buyer or integrity in the seller will alone secure. But Redding was not counseling against the purchase of “cut” wines. The genuineness of which he spoke had to do with the base product. After all, he added, the “good houses at Bordeaux for the export trade are Nat. Johnston and Sons, and that of Barton. None understand the English market better.

And as we have already seen, both Johnston and Barton “cut” their wines. As Sir James Emerson Tennent, MP for Belfast, wrote in his study of wine taxes for the UK Parliament in 1855, “vatting, also known as blending in bond, is not adulteration, but simply the same thing that vintners do in the places of production before shipping.”

Were any wines ever shipped to the British Isles without addition of “foreign” wines? The only evidence I have found is in a letter from Thomas Barton to John Galwey of Carrick in April 1773, when Barton says that the clarets he has shipped to Galwey “on the lovely Peggy of Waterford, Martin Heffernan, Master,” had “only 3 gallons of fine Allicant put into them so that they may be called neat wine.”

On another occasion in 1777, Barton wrote to his cousin in Dublin to say that he and his friends were “living better here than what they do at any house in Bordeaux, also the very best of good neat old claret.” Not surprisingly, he was writing from the Médoc.

In fact, it was only during the second half of the nineteenth century that Bordeaux wines shipped to the British Isles began to arrive in something like their pure state. The London-based wine merchant T.G. Shaw, who had been in the trade since the 1830s, said that formerly all Bordeaux arriving in England was blended with Hermitage, but that it was “now much purer.”

He did not, however, say it was completely pure, and until the early-twentieth century there was no reason to believe that it was. So, blending or “cutting” Bordeaux wine occurred annually and in both the British Isles and France. But what did the process actually entail? Luckily for us, William Johnston, who arrived in Bordeaux in 1743, left behind detailed directions for his son Nathaniel Weld Johnston in 1765, before returning to Dublin (he would later return to Bordeaux, where he died in 1772). In these directions, Johnston advised Nathaniel to “set out early to Médoc” to purchase wine from producers as soon as they were made. He recommended buying Graves wines only in good years, as the Médoc wines generally had “more body and flavour.” “In the choice of wines” said Johnston, you are always to look for a good colour, cleanness in taste and not over cuved (i.e. left a long time in the fermentation vat), and in a season when the grapes have been apt to rot, free from a taste of rottenness, a tolerable maturity, and as little greenness as possible – a delicacy in flavour and smell is always very desirable in wines when to be met with, some of the good growths in a tolerable year retain such a smell as you will find in the flower of the vine.

Having purchased the young wines, usually before Christmas, and only after Christmas if the wines were likely to be available and the price to come down, the wines were brought by cart to Johnston’s riverside warehouses along the Quai des Chartrons in Bordeaux. After sitting for a few weeks, maybe more, the wines were then racked, that is they were drawn off their original barrels and poured into empty barrels that had been sterilized with a sulfur match. Both before and after racking, the barrels were frequently ullaged, or topped-up with wine in order to prevent the growth of acetobacter, which turn the wine into vinegar. For ullaging the barrels, Johnston advised using wine of a similar quality, and preferably from the same year. Graves wines if good may do for Médoc wines, or Médoc for Graves wines, but I would not choose to ullage with Pallud (sic), Cahors, or strange [i.e. foreign wines], but with some that will not alter the quality much or any thing perceivable, especially when much ullage is required.

In April, it came time to “cut” the wines, what Johnston called “parting.” And here it is worth quoting Johnston’s recommendations in full:

On parting wines I have generally found the Alicantes always smoother and finer than the Benicarlos which have generally a better colour, but when the latter are good they will do very well to mix half one and half the other, which I generally did for ease, by running off half of the hogshead and filling up with the other. When I found Rivesaltes wines good I have some years put half of them and no Benicarlo. When the Palluds are good either in Montferrand or Queyries a can of them does well to each h[ogs]h[ea]d along with the stronger, as they add to the colour, firmness, and flavour, there may be a little more of them used to middling and low priced than to the finer wines, when they have not been so good in proportion as the Queyries. I have sometimes used a little of Cahors wine but they do not answer so well as the best Palluds. I have always altered my quantities of the mixture in proportion to the years, and body, color etc. of my wines. I have given from 4 or 5 to 7 or 8 of Spanish in a middling year and as far as 15 or 16 gallons to the h[ogs]h[ea] d when the season was very bad and the wine thin and green. Such wines are very strong from Dauphiny [Dauphiné, i.e. Hermitage] and elsewhere may be fretted [i.e. undergo a secondary fermentation] safely with a pot of stum without any mixture, and they become thereby dryer, cleaner, and sooner fit for use. Good fretting makes the mixture of wines incorporate well together, and become one even tasted wine, but when mixed without fretting you will find different tastes, according to the mixture you put in, when it lies awhile, for which reason I never mix wines of different or opposite qualities, till I tend to set them a fretting.

Johnston had much more advice to give to his son, including the belief that after the wines were blended in, they should sit for a minimum of two years in barrel, sometimes more, before they would be ready for bottling.

The Johnston archives hold a similar document from the 1780s, although this latter one is in French, and entitled “Un des meilleurs principes pour soigner les premier, second, et troisieme crus de vins de Bordeaux et autres vins de differente crus comme suis” (“One of the best ways to treat the first, second, and third growth of Bordeaux wines and other wines of different growths as such”). Similar to William Johnston’s advice to his son, the anonymous author of this document states that the “best time to do cut the wines is from the beginning of May until the 15 of June, because that is the time when the vines are flowering and when the wines ordinarily begin a second fermentation.” The author then elaborates upon the process, stating: To begin the cuttings [of the wines] one must have all the materials in advance, meaning well-sealed and cleaned barrels, within which we the cuttings are made according to the quality of the wine. When the [Bordeaux] wines are good we use less foreign wine than when the wines are poor. The best wines that we use for cutting are first and second growth Hermitage and Benicarlo, and a little bit of Alliquante [sic]. The Alicante is ordinarily a sweet[ish] wine that promotes a lot of fermentation in our wines as a result; one must only add a little because it causes a long fermentation if we use too much. In good years I add to the [Bordeaux] first and second growths 1 pot stum 5 to 6 pots hermitage first growth 3 to 4 pots Alliquante 5 to 6 pots of Benicarlo

Not surprisingly, the author states that in years when the Bordeaux vintage is poor (inférieur), he adds a third more still of the Benicarlo and sometimes even twice as much. “The Benicarlo,” he asserts, “is the soul of our wines for keeping them fine and in good condition after they’ve been worked.” Lesser wines, like lesser vintages, require more foreign wines, as they do not have enough vitality [seve], and require more assistance to make them consistent and good. But whatever the quality of the vintage, after stum and foreign wines introduced into the Bordeaux wine, the new blend undergoes another fermentation.

Finally, for a succinct explanation of the blending practices in Bordeaux we can turn to Guillaume Lawton’s private “Observations Générales” from 1815. Lawton is critical of the wine-making in Hermitage, saying it is sloppy, but adds that in good years Hermitage is a lively wine, full-bodied, dark-colored, round, and fruity, “and from which we use the principal growths to help our Médoc wines for the English market.” Stum, or the “vins muets” that is used to restart fermentation in the blending process, is white wine that has been reduced by boiling them with a good deal of sulfur.

According to Lawton, stum was usually made from Bergerac white wines, which have a bit of fattiness in their flavor. Benicarlo, said Lawton, was almost always a common wine, although it had much color and fullness, while Alicante wines were distinguished by their fine, delicate, and elegant taste, which tended toward sweetness. All of these wines, of course, were the necessary ingredients for “travail a l’Anglaise,” which, in agreement with the other authors, Lawton says was done according to the quality of the Bordeaux wine. In describing this process, Lawton stated “Our great wines never receive Benicarlo alone, and very often we limit ourselves to helping them with only Hermitage and Alicante.”

Blending occurred after the Bordeaux wine had been racked off its gross lees, and a pot of stum was thrown into the blended barrels in order to commence a new fermentation. The wines were then left to settle, which could take months, but when they did finally settle they were ullaged for protection against spoiling. They were then fined with egg whites to remove any remaining sediment. Another racking was required to remove the clarified wine from the egg whites once these had settled at the bottom of the barrel, but finally, the wine was ready to age. By the time Lawton wrote his “Observations,” in 1815, aging of Bordeaux’s best wines was a remarkably long process. “The wine of Haut Brion” said Lawton, “could not be put in bottle until six or seven years after the vintage, while the other first growths are drinkable beginning at five years [in barrel].” However, Lawton added that Chateau Lafite needed a year more in barrel than Chateau Latour to achieve its maturity.

The wines of St. Estephe, wrote Lawton, being “light, agreeable, and aromatic, can be put in bottle at the end of three years in barrel.” It should be remembered by the modern reader, however, that the wines were almost always shipped in barrel, and thus were usually aged both in Bordeaux and then in Britain and Ireland after shipping. Nevertheless, it is important to note that Lawton’s recommended aging lengths are remarkable compared to both the early- and mid-eighteenth century, when they were usually half as long, and compared to today, when most Bordeaux wines are bottled from twelve to twenty-four months after the harvest!

 

Consistency and Reputation

It should be clear at this point that cutting Bordeaux grands crus wines with wines from Hermitage and Spain was not an exceptional practice in the eighteenth and earlynineteenth century, it was standard operating procedure. But that leads to the question of why this was done to wines that were already famous for their quality by the beginning of the eighteenth century.

The answer to this question is threefold. First, many vintages in Bordeaux were simply not that good and the resulting wines were thin. Second, and related to what was just said, customers in the British Isles demanded wines that were full-bodied, dark in color, and smooth, and the merchants were responding to those demands as best they knew how; wine-production techniques of the nineteenth and twentieth century were obviously unknown to them and to the producers from whom they purchased the wine. Third, it is important not to confuse the cause and effect of Bordeaux’s reputation, especially when they are so deeply intertwined as to be symbiotic.

To put that another way, the fame of Bordeaux grands crus developed first in England and Ireland, in part because of the inherent merits of Bordeaux’s best vineyards, but also in part because travail a l’Anglaise had made, and was continuing to make them famous. Bordeaux is certainly hot compared to the British Isles, but in terms of wine-making regions of the world, Bordeaux is far more temperate than lands bordering the Mediterranean for example, where ripening grapes is as easy as growing olives. Indeed, until 1980 – since which time the effects of global warming have made ripening grapes in Bordeaux less chancy – Bordeaux wine makers could count on perhaps two or three outstanding vintages in a decade, as well as perhaps five decent vintages, and two or three wretched ones.

Of course, wine producers and wholesalers might have commercial reasons to deceive buyers about a particular vintage, but they are probably more likely to emphasize the positive than the negative. Thus, Thomas Barton, who was both a wine-maker in St. Estephe and a wholesaler in Bordeaux, described the 1768 wines as “poor” and “thin”, and gave faint praise to the 1769 vintage, whose “wines have more colour, body, and firmness, but cannot at the same time cannot be called a good wine.”

 

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Conclusion

This essay has attempted to show with a great deal of new and newly understood archival evidence, that in the long-eighteenth century the best growths of Bordeaux were purchased mostly by Irish wholesalers who then exported them to the British Isles, which was nearly the only market for them. These Irish merchants blended the wines in good year and bad, in order to satisfy the demands of British and Irish consumers, who in turn trumpeted the greatness of Bordeaux’s grands crus wines.

Any given vintage of a Bordeaux grand cru wine was slightly different based upon the merchant who made up the wine for sale, but cutting these wines hardly ruined their character. Rather, as Wellington’s 1842 purchase shows, these blended Lafite, Latour, Margaux, and Haut Brion wines, and a host of slightly less exalted growths, while not “pure” or even legal by today’s standards, were precisely the wines that made Bordeaux’s reputation. Thus, Irish merchants’ contribution to the invention of Bordeaux grands crus wines may seem today like an undignified and even embarrassing part of Bordeaux wine history, but without them, it’s impossible to imagine any Bordeaux grand crus wines at all.

Charles C Ludington is a professor within the Department of History, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA. This article originally appeared in Global Food History  5:1-2 (2019), 25-44.and the full version can be read here. Professor Ludington has been giving wine history talks and tastings for years, and has now turned it into a business. He offers many different talks, and each one examines the history of specific wines (how and why they came to be, and why they taste as they do), and is accompanied by wines that approximate the historical development that is being explained. His personal website is charlesludington.com