Montesquieu: Philosopher, Writer, Wine Merchant

by Charlie Leary

“It is, I believe, useful to grant me permission to plant,” wrote Charles Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu (1689-1755, also known as Baron de la Brède), “in the same way as those producing a wine of very great price.”

This was in 1727, and Montesquieu was wanting to plant on land that he had recently acquired near to Chateau Haut-Brion. “I have a patch of moorland in the parish of Pessac quite near Haut-Brion . . . I would like to clear part of it to plant it with vines.” His letter advocated hard against 1725 royal restrictions on new vineyards, and he had set his sights on winegrowing for the English market. Embellishing a bit, he continued, “The land is completely sterile and unsuitable for any other use,” but then admitted, “that is to say that, for whatever other use I put to it, I would not recover my costs . . .”

This turned into a very public confrontation with the new royally-appointed Intendant of Bordeaux, Claude Boucher, and has been recounted numerous times as an early building block of Montesquieu’s political philosophy concerning central state power. It is also one of the earliest examples of Montesquieu as a direct-to-consumer salesman of his estate wine. In the end, the Baron of La Brède got his way and planted vines on his “patch of land” in Pessac.

Baron de Montesqueiu, one of the great political philosophers of the Enlightenment, has long been one of the most celebrated figures of Bordeaux history (the main image of this article shows crowds gathered for the inauguration of his statue in the Place de Quinconces, 1858). Although it was his political treatises that made him famous, it was vine-growing that supplied the majority of his cash flow, and he proved a devoted viticulturalist and winemaker, and perhaps more than anything else, an astute marketer. Over his lifetime, he rebelled not only against monarchical power but also the mighty syndicate of Bordeaux courtiers and négociants, some of them his close acquaintances, in a compelling example of 18^th century wine trade entrepreneurialism.

Born at Chateau La Brède, in Graves, Charles de Secondat inherited the local barony from his father, and only later the more far-flung one of “de Montesquieu” from his uncle. His family had practiced winegrowing since at least the 16^th century. Throughout his life, La Brède and its vineyards were Montesquieu’s pride and joy.

Montesquieu the wine merchant
A huge amount of Montesquieu’s prolific correspondence remains intact, though the snippets regarding wine lay scattered among thousands upon thousands of pages. Unfortunately, his grandson burned many papers in the early 19^th century, surely among them more detailed accounts of his business affairs. What remains, though, provides a unique window into Bordeaux wine business from the 1720s through the 1750s.

Throughout his life, Montesquieu had great friends and contacts among Bordeaux’s négociants, such as Francois Risteau, who directed the Compagnie des Indes and joined the Royal Society of London. When young, he was contracted to a marriage in 1715 with Marguerite Denis, daughter of Bordeaux négociant Daniel, co-founder of the Chartrons trading company Denis et Piécourt, which sold fine wine to Holland, Martinique and Santo Domingo. The marriage never happened, as he quickly tore up the agreement and betrothed a Huguenot in La Brède with a larger dowery. He was pragmatic.

An Irish wine merchant named D’Arcy reportedly served as his personal secretary for a time. Historian Charles Ludington says such Irish négociants purchased “almost all of Bordeaux’s best wines from their French producers” in the 18^th century. While no one firm had a monopoly, the courtier and négociant system itself became entrenched and all-encompassing. Fine wine did not leave Bordeaux except through it, at least that is the common perspective.

Montesquieu keenly observed international markets. In the 1720s, in response to Intendant Boucher’s attempt to control vine cultivation, Charles wrote: “Guyenne [ Bordeaux …] must provide different kinds of wines abroad, depending on the diversity of its terroirs. However, the taste of foreigners varies continuously, and to the point that there is not a single kind of wine that was fashionable twenty years ago that is still fashionable today; instead, the wines that were then being discarded are now highly esteemed. It is therefore necessary to follow this inconsistent taste, planting or grubbing up in accordance.” He also gave examples, detailing the vinous tastes of the English versus the Dutch and the Caribbean, dry versus sweet, strong versus light, appealing to different markets.

Montesquieu didn’t tie himself solely to international sales, but his wine income underpinned his lifestyle. Planning a trip, on January 1, 1724, he explained: “the sales of my wine are so poor that I am not sure I can leave when I intended to.” On October 24, 1734, he declared to the London-born Comte de Bulkeley: “I have been at La Brède for a fortnight […] As for your servant, he is busy dispatching his wine to the kingdom of Ireland, whose inhabitants he prays to God to increase their thirst.”

Did these sales go through the negociant system? It’s hard to tell, but the general picture that emerges is one where he used merchants for wine sales earlier on, but as his fame and social relations expanded, he fastidiously avoided them in selling La Brède’s wine, which originally included three distinct vineyard sites, including Rochemaurin for claret, later expanded through well-contemplated land acquisitions like the one near Haut-Brion, now known as Domaine de Bacalan.

Direct Sales Begin
Montesquieu sold wine to his Parisian friends in the 1730s and 1740s. An undated 1730s letter from Madame de Tencin reads: “If you knew friendship and all its delicacies, my dear friend, you would not deprive me of the pleasure of asking you for wine.” In 1744, he shipped La Brède wine to the famous beauty Madame Dupin, a salonist who hired a youthful Rousseau as her secretary. President Hénault of the French Academy placed an order with his friend Charles on November 4, 1748: “They say, my dear colleague, that the year is admirable. I commend myself earnestly to you, and beg you to order me some wine, as great it can be, and all [of it] the best. I promise to wait for you to start [drinking] it: non alia bibam mercede”(“on no other condition will I drink”, a quotation from Horace).

His focus in the 1750s turned to future vintage wine sales and ensuring that his product scarcely landed with Bordeaux’s contaminating merchant network. He monitored international markets’ vagaries, including wars, taxes, and blockades, a situation perhaps aggravated by relying on urban Bordeaux traders.

In 1742, referring to the War of the Austrian Succession, he wrote to Abbe de Guasco: “I am very much afraid that, if the war continues, I will be forced to plant cabbages at La Brède. Our trade in Guyenne will soon be at bay; our wines will remain on our hands, and you know that is all our wealth.” Conditions improved. In 1749, he penned to Prior Solar: “The Bordeaux trade is recovering a little, and the English even had the ambition to drink my wine this year; but we can only recover well with the islands of America, with which we carry on our principal trade.” That changed quickly. By 1750, he intended his English clients to receive his wine, from specified vineyards, unadulterated. Moreover, he began to use loss-leader techniques and to sell futures.

Future Sales and Loss Leaders
Reviewing Montesquieu’s correspondence, it’s tempting to figure out if he was the earliest known practitioner of sur souche and en primeur sales. (Purchasing wine before harvest is called buying sur souche, while en primeur is after the harvest but before bottling). I concluded that trying to apply these precisely modern concepts to Montesquieu’s wine trading proves mostly fruitless, but clearly both areas were of interest.

International wine marketing, particularly to the British Isles, came to preoccupy him. He conducted direct-to-consumer (maybe direct-to-smuggler) sales to foreign customers of his pure vintage wine, often from a distinct vineyard. This was unusual in 18^th century Bordeaux. Historian Ludington has concluded “it was only during the second half of the nineteenth century that Bordeaux wines shipped [by negociants] to the British Isles began to arrive in something like their pure state,” that is, uncut, unblended, especially with Spanish wine.

1752, at the request of close friend Abbe de Guasco, Montesquieu sent well-regarded author and economist Lord Elibank, Peerage of Scotland, a tonneau (about 900 litres) of red wine from the 1751 vintage. “He is to pay me for it what he pleases,” wrote Charles in March. “Pray let him know, that he may keep it as long as he pleases, even to the extended term of fifteen  years, if he should fancy to do so; but it must not be mixed with any other wines. He may be assured that he has it in the same state of purity in which I received it from the deity. It has not passed through the adulterating hands of wine merchants.”

In October, he reported: “I have received from England news about the wine you had me send to Lord Elibank. He gives a most favourable account of it. I have received an order for fifteen tonneaux more, which will allow me to finish my rustic house.” (That “rustic house” was Chateau La Brède, moats, turrets and all). Sending one tonneau produced an advance order for fifteen more of the next vintage, and Lord Elibank surely did not consume that quantity solo. Montesquieu had more than those 13,500 litres to sell, however, noting in another 1752 letter: “I have no more of last year’s wine, but I will save a tonneau of this year’s wine” for two English clients, emphasising yet again, “I have received considerable orders from England for this year’s wine.”

At another time, Charles certified to Guasco: “The success of my work in that country contributes, I perceive, not a little to the success of my wine.” Here he referred to the translated 1748 Spirit of Laws, and indeed his fame as a writer, and the personal network of wealthy readers he cultivated by sending books and wine abroad, clearly aided his direct marketing. Montesquieu developed his brand, not just for philosophy but for wine. He mentioned in a letter to Guasco “the spreading reputation which my wine has acquired through Europe for these three or four years past.”

In 1754 he received another advance “commission” from Lord Pembroke, specifically for the produce of his favourite vineyard, Rochemaurin, which now lies within the Pessac-Leognan appellation (and is called Rochemorin). This was claret. Writing on November 3, 1754, from La Brède, Charles said to Guasco: “I begin by thanking you for your memory of Roche-Maurice wine, assuring you that I will give the greatest attention to the commission of Lord Pembroke.”

The Elibank shipment produced greater results. In October 1754, natural philosopher James Douglas, Earl of Morton, wrote regarding shipping the latest red wine release: “I recently had occasion to see a gentleman who told me he had tasted very good red wine from your vineyards, which you had sent to Lord Elibank.”

Sending a loss-leader of the 1751 vintage to one member of the Scottish Enlightenment resulted not only in a huge sale of the 1752, but also word-of-mouth, ending in further sales of wine yet untasted. “[A]nd,” continued Lord Morton, “as I find it very difficult, if not impossible, to get me pure and unmixed wine, as soon as it has passed through the hands of a wine merchant, I should be infinitely obliged to you to order the person who directs your cellar to send me eight casks (barriques) of the best red wine of your last harvest.” At least among Scottish intellectuals, in the 1750s a thirst existed for uncut, single-vineyard vintage wine. While I avoid calling the October 1752 order from Lord Elibank, the November 1753 order from Lord Pembroke, and the October 1754 order from Lord Morton en primeur, they were commissions of wine in barrel for future shipment based on reputation.

Lord Morton went on: “The wine must be completely racked and put in double barrels, because captains and sailors are very capable of falsifying wines which they know are intended for private consumption, and merchants encourage them to these dishonest practices.” This points to a negative reputation for the 18^th century English/Irish “wine trade” that is rarely remarked upon.

The Legacy
Wine, trade, publishing, and philosophy intertwined in Montesquieu’s world, each element embellishing the other. Aside from intellectual accomplishment, Charles’ history as a vintner and merchant illuminates the contemporary Bordeaux wine scene, posing questions about the role of the courtier-negociant system, its practices and reputation. In Montesquieu’s case, at least, it was not the only route to market, and selling direct was clearly seen as a way to protect the purity of a vineyard’s production.

The de Secondat de Montesquieu clan continued with winegrowing. By 1790, the family owned 1454 hectares in ten jurisdictions, including numerous vineyards. The French Revolution almost caused the public sale of La Brède, but for family influence and Charles’ fame. It did, however, disrupt Charles’ bequeathed male primogeniture. The title Baron de Montesquieu multiplied. Charles’ numerous and vast domains eventually fell victim to division among family members, generation by generation.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Alain de Secondat de Montesquieu (1873-1945), one of ten Barons of Montesquieu listed in the social registry, had married Jeanne Delbos of the long-established wine making and négociant family. They owned Chateau Palmer in Cenon (not Chateau Palmer in Margaux) and Chalet des Pins in La Brède, very near Charles’ eponymous Chateau. Cru Palmer produced many tonneaux of wine into the 20^th century. Although now in other hands, Charles’ vineyards of La Brède and Rochemaurin continue to produce wine. And it seems that his family continues to be inspired by their famous ancestor: a Google search finds that Loic de Secondat de Montesquieu penned a treatise entitled Vigne et vin: éléments botaniques, phytochimiques et pharmacologiques, published in 2014.

 

Charlie Leary earned his doctorate in history from Cornell University and taught briefly at Tulane University before becoming an organic farmer, artisan cheesemaker, chef, and wine director. He is now based in Panama.