Jeroboams Education is a new series on our blog providing you with the lowdown on the most iconic wine producing regions of the world. Led by our super buying team, Peter Mitchell MW and Maggie MacPherson will introduce you to the key facts and a little history of all the regions you recognise but perhaps don’t know too well. To help really further your education, why not drink along?

Introduction

Bordeaux is the largest fine wine district on Earth, on average making over 70 million cases of wine annually out of a French total of nearly 500 million cases. Between 85-90% of this is red wine, 5% is rosé, 1.5% is sweet and the remainder dry white. Whilst well over half of this wine is labelled as Bordeaux or Bordeaux Supérieur AC, the part that gets the attention of wine lovers and commentators the world over comes from the great communes of the Médoc, from Graves and Pessac-Léognan, from the Libournais communes of Pomerol and St.Émilion and for sweet wines, from Sauternes and Barsac.

The vineyard area has remained fairly stable at around 112,000 hectares (two thirds the area that the whole of Australia has under vine) for over a decade.

Bordeaux wine (with the exception of some dry whites) is a blend of grape varieties, with the dominant grape varying depending on local soil conditions and climate. In general, the wines of the Médoc (the left bank) are dominated by Cabernet Sauvignon, those of the Libournais (right bank) by Merlot and, to a lesser extent, Cabernet Franc.

History

Bordeaux’s vineyard history is different to other regions in that this has never been the domain of the peasant farmer. By the 17th century, vineyards here were already an investment and the owner was seldom the winemaker (or even present). The region was first planted by the Romans around St.-Émilion, but after the fall of the empire, viticulture seems to have largely ceased until the middle ages. Bordeaux was ruled by the English from 1152 until 1453 and with the importance of the port for international trade, the wines gained an international audience. After the English lost Aquitaine, trade suffered somewhat, but other merchants arrived, notably from Holland and Germany, which kept exports going.

At this time, Graves was the most important area, with Haut-Brion first planted in the 1530’s and within a hundred years it had become the first château to be sought by name. The Médoc was still a swamp at this time with only a few scattered vineyards and it was only when Dutch engineers drained the land in the mid-17th century – primarily to grow cereals to feed the expanding city – that viticulture became possible.

In the early 18th century, a newly wealthy class of professionals bought up much of the land and planted most of the vineyards we know today and it did not take long for the reputation of the wines from here to eclipse that of the Graves.

Courtiers, who had a knowledge of the estates, appeared at this time to act as middle men between the châteaux and the merchants in the city, with the Dutch concentrating on the cheaper wines and the British on the more expensive ones (this was not down to good taste, but down to the high British import duties that made cheap wine uneconomic).

By 1800, the hierarchy of château was essentially as it is now, although after the revolution the ownership had changed to mostly bankers and Bordeaux merchants, with properties, as today, often bought by wealthy men as trophy assets.

At this time, the dominant variety was Malbec, covering as much as 60% of the vineyard area (and considerably more at Lafite). Cabernet Sauvignon first appears in the late 18th century, but was not important in the region until the late 19th century (and it is likely that much was confused with the older variety of Cabernet Franc, of which Cabernet Sauvignon is an offspring).

Wines from Bordeaux had long been ‘improved’ with addition of riper wines from outside of the region (Hermitage was the choice for the top estates, something from Spain or the Languedoc for the vast majority of lesser properties), but when Phylloxera arrived in Bordeaux in 1869, this practice accelerated.

The next decade saw the vineyards slowly dying and quantities of wine produced falling off.  The cure was replanting on resistant American rootstocks, but this was expensive and did not happen overnight.

At this time (and indeed up until the 1960’s) most of the top wine was aged and bottled by merchants, rather than at the châteaux, indeed it is not uncommon to see older bottles that were bottled in Holland or the UK. Cycles of boom and bust continually occurred (only 3 estates remain in the families that owned them in 1855 – Léoville-Barton, Langoa Barton and Mouton-Rothschild) and the properties were not generally very profitable.  This selling of wine early in barrel helped with their cash flow.

The early 20th century saw many properties being sold owing to bankruptcy, then came the First World War, a brief respite in the 1920’s then the crash and great depression of the 1930’s. Bizarrely the Second World War was not a disaster for the châteaux, as the Germans already had an appetite for Bordeaux wines and business survived. Post-war, money was very tight and although some outstanding vintages came along, proprietors made little return over the next 2 decades and many properties fell once more into disrepair.

To take back control, châteaux started to age and bottle their own wine in the late 1960’s and in the early 1970’s, commercial pressures and a scandal of adulterated wine saw many of the négoce go out of business and the structure of the trade settled more as we know it today. Ownership of châteaux began to change at this time as rich businessmen and corporations began to purchase top estates (and put in much needed investment). The 1982 vintage and a little known (at the time) critic’s views on it helped shape Bordeaux for the next 30 years. The sudden success of this fruit driven vintage, backed by Robert Parker’s scores which made it so easy for ‘non-experts’ to understand, revolutionised the way wines would be made and in time the prices that would be paid for them. This in turn has led to vast amounts of money coming into the region, at least at the top levels and the wines made now have never been better or more consistent.