Vintages, Wine Labels and the History of Taste

by Charlie Leary

In Bordeaux, a wine’s vintage is supremely important. The region’s annual weather variations have a great impact on wines from a particular appellation, terroir or even individual estate, making the year on the label a signifier of many things.

Sociologist David Inglis says that “vintage” forms part of wine’s “consecration” with cognoscenti  “defining which vintages . . . are worthy of appreciation, and thereby commanding higher prices.” Vintage, too, holds a critical place in the work of pioneering wine economist Orley Ashenfelter, who confirms that “knowledge of the chateau and vintage provides most of the information needed to know the quality of the wine.  . . . Good vintages produce good wines in all vineyards and the best wines are produced in the best vineyards in all vintages.”

A vintage wine assures purity, being the produce of a single harvest, and acts like a time capsule for that year, recording the growing conditions through the resulting aromas and flavours, tannins and acidity, and even contributing to a history of climate change. As a result, price differences between wines of different Bordeaux vintages can be extreme.

But vintage was not always so important in Bordeaux. Three-hundred years ago, vintage didn’t have the meaning or status it does today.

We know that on one occasion, the ancient Romans celebrated the wine from a single grape harvest in a single place. The fabled Falernian vintage of 121 BC reflected perfect growing conditions. However, if we fast forward to 1660, when King Charles II ordered dozens of bottles of wine from Haut-Brion for his royal cellar, the age of that wine, and if it came from a single year’s harvest, remain a mystery. Nobody really took note; it was an insignificant detail.

What did “Vintage” Mean?

Hugh Johnson has written that today “vintage year and its quality are historical facts that gradually permeate or wine-loving consciousness,” but initially “vintage” was much simpler to understand. The English word “vintage” derived from the French vendange, or harvest, which itself derived from Latin.

One of the books making the most comments about vintage is Arthur Young’s Travels During the Years 1787, 1788, & 1789, where he provided detailed geographic and economic descriptions of France, including Bordeaux (though he preferred the wine from Cahors).

Even as late as the 1780s, when Young wrote “vintage” he meant literally the harvest, including the work involved and the quantity of grapes. Vintage did not have any connection to “a usually superior wine all or most of which comes from a single year” (Merriam-Webster). Thus, Young recorded the cost of producing various wines, including “labour exclusive of vintage.” “Vintage” could cost three livres tournois the barrique. The word meant the grape harvest, nothing more.

Introducing his chapter on “vines” in France, he wrote that the difference in “the average produce” between one year and another could be “enormous.” “This year they yield nothing; in another, perhaps, casks are wanted to contain the exuberant produce of the vintage; now the price is extravagant high; and again so low, as to menace with poverty all who are concerned in it.”

Young was also keenly aware that keeping wine, even for three to six months after the vintage (that is, the vendange), resulted in higher profits. Time spent in barrel maturation resulted in greater gains for the merchant or the owner of the wine. “The difference of profit is exceedingly great between the sale in the vintage, and that of six months later,” he wrote. His observations reflected changes already afoot in vintage consciousness.

Vintage and the Rise of Discrimination, 1660-1750

Until the 18th century 99% of Bordeaux wine sold abroad came from the previous year’s fall harvest. Vintage really didn’t matter too much if a wine could not last for one year without turning to vinegar. Most wine didn’t survive eight months into the next year thanks to oxidation and other spoilage mechanisms.

Two mutually intertwined events explain the rise in importance of a wine’s vintage, as well as the change in the meaning of the word.

The first was Bordeaux’s production of more extracted, darker red wine resulting from longer maceration times and extended skin contact. This change took place gradually in Graves and then the Médoc, taking on prototypical form in the early 1660s. Vintners also began using Sulphur matches in barrels, killing acetobacter and contributing to stability. Second, and obviously relatedly, this darker claret could age without spoiling, and, in fact, would improve after years of careful maturation. Keeping Bordeaux claret over longer periods meant that the merchants and then their clients learned to distinguish the qualities of wines from different harvests.

Vintage, then, eventually came down to discrimination, which became important when a linkage between estate terroir and wine quality occurred between 1660 and 1720. Commencing with King Charles II’s purchase of Haut-Brion and then extending to sales of Lafite, Margaux, and Latour, the growth or cru of the wine became important, exceedingly so in terms of price. In the international wine market, distinguishing the cru preceded the distinction of the vintage. But the top crus were producing wine that could improve with age, which meant that vintage inevitably took on increased significance.

Suddenly, age-worthiness became a notable feature of pricey Bordeaux claret in the 1660s. This is when darker red claret from Graves started to appear in London. And it’s no coincidence that Charles II received bottled wine from Haut-Brion and Graves. With little to no air contact, claret softened and opened up.

Thus, in June 1670, the natural philosopher Robert Boyle tested a pint of “good” French claret, undoubtedly from 1669’s vendange. He aged the wine in a hermetically sealed jar, opening it and tasting the wine on a somewhat haphazard annual schedule over the next five years. It remained good, never turning sour, and in fact improved in taste, also losing its young tannic roughness. Still, Boyle never conceived that one year’s wine might be better than another’s. Claret was claret.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that by 1746 “vintage” became a means to discriminate between particular wines using the year of harvest, applied to wine from a particular and particularly good harvest. In 1735, Dyche’s New General English Dictionary was already noting that vintage “sometimes means the time of gathering, and sometimes the fruit of the vine gathered at a proper time of ripeness.” The idea that a vintage could define good quality (rather than the act of harvest and/or its quantity) was arising.

In 1749, Udal Ap Rhys noted that “Wine of the same Place and Vintage” from Benicarlo, Spain, kept in the “Vault at Peniscola” for international trade was of higher quality than wine kept elsewhere. By 1749, Benicarlo wine figured prominently in English commerce because, perhaps ironically, Bordeaux merchants often blended it with local wines to produce a consistent claret, year after year. So, in the 1740s, “vintage” marked a wine’s distinct quality characteristics within the merchant community.

The 1750s: The Discerning Public Embraces Vintage

By the 1750s, elite British and Irish wine drinkers had caught on to the importance of vintage. So had the négociants, for whom the capacity to store wines from different vintages became important. One early 19th century analysis reported that by the 1780s, wines from a good vintage would be “kept at Bordeaux 3 years, sometimes 4, 5, or 6 years,” before being shipped, “during which time the greatest care and attention are paid to them in fining and drawing off the lees and preventing fermentation.”

In 1750 Dublin, an advertisement appeared from Christopher Quin, “lately arrived from Bordeaux.” He had “imported a parcel of Choice Claret of different growths, the vintage of 1747 and 1748, . . . at the following reasonable rates, viz:—neat Claret of the 1^st growth of Obrejone [Haut-Brion] at £18 per hogshead and 18s per dozen. Neat Margoux and Medoc Claret, at 16s per dozen. Graves Claret at 14s per dozen.” Notably, while Quin noted the vintage, it did not necessarily indicate a difference in quality or price. That changed.

In 1753, Patrick Murray, Lord Elibank, tasted single-estate, single-vintage 1752 wine and then ordered 15 additional tonneaux—obviously a huge quantity of wine that would be stored away for years. Word spread, and in 1754, James Douglas, Lord Morton, ordered eight barriques of single-vintage 1753 wine from the same source. In 1754, the Duke of Newcastle’s purchasing agent, Richard Turner, was informed by negociant Theodore Hay about 1752 vintage clarets, the most expensive of which sold for £30 per hogshead. He counselled buying more moderate priced non-vintage claret, which he described as “smooth and mellow.” 

1770-1830: The Primacy of Vintage

By 1774, references to vintage quality were standard. In December, John Black IV in Bordeaux wrote to his customer, the British ambassador, Lord Grantham, in Madrid with a report on the last vintage, “not more than 1/3 usual quantity, poor quality, wanting body, ripeness and mellowness,” however this didn’t stop “prices out of all reason.” Black wrote:  “Still have wines of 1771, 1772 and 1773, the first being the best tho’ I could wish they were older, but such are not to be had.” Vintage wines were popular, and the merchants kept them in stock. Black’s prices ranged from £28 to £15 for a dozen bottles, the cheapest being “a sound good common wine.” In general, the older the wine, the better.

By 1834—21 years before the famed 1855 classification— an official report made by wine merchants to the British Parliament classified Bordeaux wines using vintage. Trade in first-class wines was “generally in the hands of English houses of great respectability and wealth.” Intriguingly, the classification of wines from first to fourth class hinged on the wine’s destination market and the vintage quality.

• First class – Great Britain and Ireland.
• Second class – Holland and the north of Europe, first quality.
• Third class – Holland and the north of Europe, second quality.
• Fourth class – Cargo and interior consumption.

Vintage was absolutely pivotal. “None of the first houses purchase wine unless the vintage turns out good.” “First class” wines included only “the first four growths [Haut-Brion, Latour, Lafite, Margaux] of the best quality only of a good year.”  So, a bad vintage meant no first-class wines. “The second class takes those growths in quality immediately after the English wines in a good year, and, when there is demand, it takes the higher growths of an inferior year, at low prices.”

The merchants provided Parliament with a vintage quality chart that went back to 1781, giving the prices for the first through fourth class wines as well as brief observation on the vintage quality and quantity.

“A first growth, in a good vintage, has been sold for fr. 3,500 per tun; and wine of the same growth of a bad vintage has been sold for fr. 600 per tun.” Notably, the courtiers Tastet & Lawton also started keeping vintage charts around 1795.

The penchant for inscribing vintage notes indicates how, within a few decades, vintage had become extremely significant to Bordeaux commerce. Its use would remain dependent on the quality of the harvest in a particular year, together with wider market conditions, until the mid 20th century, but it would never again be seen as unimportant.