There are few brands that measure up to the resonance that the British have down the years given claret, the red table wine from Bordeaux. In cars, one can colloquially acquaint Rolls-Royce
with power or a Cadillac, somewhat anachronistically, with luxury. With
watches, there might be Rolex, but there also have to be a dozen other names that I'm
sure tell time just as well and look flash on your wrist. In wine, at the elite
level, there are those who swear by the top red burgundies, but realistically
the pride of place has always gone to bordeaux. From plain appellated bordeaux
bizarrely available at practically every off-license for eight quid, to the
cherished classified growths that might be cautiously produced to meet an
occasion such as Christmas dinner, the British have a lingering attachment to
the red wines of the Gironde estuary. The question may be asked, is why?
I suppose one response might be that it is simply bloody tasty, and it
certainly is. The handful of classified growths (that is, the sixty odd chateaux demarcated into five tiers in 1855 based then on price) I've had the opportunity to try
(none being first growth) are far
and away the most delicious wines I've tasted. Some Brunellos di Montalcino
would be second. Granted, I haven't yet dabbled in what would be regarded as
some of the prime competitors: top shelf stuff from Napa, Barossa , Chateuneuf-de-Pape or burgundy. But that in of itself is an example of what I'm talking
about. Why is it that anytime I've been a part of a dinner in Canada or Britain
where a truly noteworthy bottle of wine was in the offing, it was inevitably a
bordeaux?
The terroir can only be part of the story. The gravel topsoil along the
gentle inclines of the Medoc, with the best estates in view of the river; the
temperate ocean breezes with a goldilocks like mixture of sun and cloud through
the growing season. Surely these qualities can theoretically be replicated
elsewhere on planet Earth. The true narrative of the dominance of claret around
the world has as much to do with English history and the vagaries of business.
Grape vines are attested as being introduced to Aquitaine by the Romans in
the first century AD, but for our purposes the story really begins at the
height of the medieval period. (I tend to wonder what Bordelais peasants eight
hundred years ago would have thought of their wines. Would they have any
concept that their grapes were anything special than compared to the next
estuary over, Armagnac, say?)
In 1151 Henry of Anjou, keen to press his claim as King of England (this
was the tail end of the time period known as 'the Anarchy' as profiled in Ken
Follett's Pillars of the Earth) arranged to marry Eleanor, the duchess
of Aquitaine, formerly the wife of King Louis VII of France, which would set off the first in a seemingly interminable number
of squabbles across the Channel.
Aquitaine, on the Atlantic south west side of the country became Henry
II's, and England's, toehold on the continent. (Henry II would also be forever
remembered in a certain country's textbooks for taking the advice of the only
English Pope of all time, Adrian IV, and figuratively planting his three lion
and fleur-de-lis quartered standard into the Wexford shoreline, but we'll leave
that story of a horribly named cider called Strongbow for another time). By the
time of the succession Henry and Eleanor' son Richard Coeur-de-lion to the
English throne (Sean Connery in Prince of Thieves, obviously),
Aquitaine, and it's buzzing harbour on the Gironde, Bordeaux, was creating a
direct pipeline for the export of lovely red wine to the ports of England.
After all, the more obvious geographical candidate of Normandy hasn't been
known for much more than its calvados.
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| Bordeaux harbour in the 19th century |
During the late medieval period claret, thought to be derived from clairet
or 'clear' (in English it is never pronounced with a French inflexion; instead
like the claret & blue of the West Ham Utd. strips, if that helps) was in
fact quite a light, fruity wine. Perfect for every day consumption, and streets
away from the majestic long lived classified growths of the modern period. In
those days Graves, just up-river from the city, were the preferred vineyards of
the region; the Medoc, situated on the estuary, was still marshland. A veritable
patchwork of red grapes were originally planted in Bordeaux, and over time
Cabernet Sauvignon, Petite Verdot and Malbec were observed to thrive on the
left bank. The age of Merlot dominating the right bank would be some time in
coming.
At the outset of the lazily named Hundred Year's War in 1338 (triggered by
dynastic squabbles of course... I'm slightly surprised there was never an
all-out European war of Mongolian succession at some point) England was
importing some 20,000 tuns of claret from the docks of Bordeaux. Having
consulted charts on imperial measurement and dusted off the 'ole Texas
instrument, and about fifteen minutes later of fumbling about with my brain
processing arithmetic (not easy for this historian) that comes to a whopping
thirty million, five hundred and thirty five thousand, six hundred and eighty
bottles worth (or 30,535,680). Off the top of my head that seems like a lot of wine to be
venturing up the Atlantic coast at harvest time in the fourteenth century. This
accounted for 31% of all English imports, of any description.
By the end of the war in 1453, the kingdom of France had recaptured Gascony
and Aquitaine for good and the duty free advantages of shipping wine from Bordeaux
dried up. Nevertheless the English appetite for easy drinking claret was set.
It was readily available in the better supplied taverns, while lords and
bishops vied to get their hands on the scant cache of darker, richer aged (for
one year- hurray!) clarets.
Despite the British tending to carry a certain disdain for
the French generally, the Bordelais were almost like those transplanted cousins
whose eccentricities you deep down admire, and kind of wished to see more
often. By contrast, the import of wine from elsewhere in France and Spain was
paltry; while having to make the long journey from the Mediterranean, Italian wine was
virtually non-existent. Additionally, the 'little ice age' of the 15th century
ended any hopes of indigenous viticulture.
The 17th century saw the beginnings of the golden age of British claret
drinking alongside the tentative baby steps the nation was taking towards
modern, consumer driven society. We can thank the Dutch (always handy in a fix)
for draining the land of the Medoc and encouraging the planting of vines. After
the Reformation, under a puritanical re-assessment of anything a bit swish,
claret came under its first challenge of respectability. In his recent
published work, the fantastic The Politics of Wine in Britain: 1649-1860,
Charles Ludington argues that for near one hundred years the drinking of
claret, it being French and all, carried with it a specific political
association with the Cavaliers, the Restoration court, Tories and Jacobites.
Being suavely coiffed suspected Catholics who lazed about and dueled with
swords (essentially living the life of a Musketeer) was not what 17th century
bowl haircutted, bible reading John Bull wanted to be like, so he drank ale or
beer.
This paradigm was likely true to some extent, as the import duty on French
wine had basically put the libation beyond the reach of the typical individual
and for several centuries (arguably until near enough to the dawn of the 21st
century) wine drinking would be the preserve of the upper and middle classes. Samuel
Pepys, as what might be called an urban middle class individual in the 1660's,
carefully kept notes of his wine purchases in his diary, a healthy plurality of
which was claret for his cellar. With the advent of a recognizably modern
political apparatus with ministers and public policies and the like, perpetually
threatening war with the Sun King's France led to a series of embargoes on
French wine. This was the era of 'mercantilism' and the delightfully simple
theory that national wealth was generated by out-exporting your rivals; and so
why the hell should the English nation keep sending its hard earned guineas and
shillings into Bordelais coffers.
In 1703 a treaty was arranged with Portugal whereby they would give
preferment to the importation of English cloth in return for a cut rate duty on
exporting Portuguese wine. Within a decade the landscape shifted enormously with
a complete reversal in the lion's share of the British wine market going from
France to Portugal (more on the cultural impact of this another time). What
this meant was that claret then became even more of a premium item to be,
literally, lorded over. The tabulations of a number of the cellars of British
elites of this era, Whig grandees included, show almost ruinous investment in
staggering amounts of claret.
Robert Walpole, regarded as the first prime
minister, organized a regular shipment of roughly 1,500 bottles worth of
Margaux, and 300 odd bottles of Lafite and Haut-Brion to his country estate
(these would have come in casks known as hogsheads). Jonathan Swift reckoned
his own annual consumption of claret at a hogshead per year, and Margaux was
his wife's favourite. As a fun, and entirely unhelpful point of comparison, Chateau Margaux can now sell for well over a thousand dollars a bottle or from £3,000 to
£7,000 a case at auction.
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| Chateau Margaux, completed in 1812 |
This was the period when claret from the famous chateaux achieved its current
texture and flavour, carefully produced and discernibly superior in quality. On
11 April 1663 Pepys noted in his diary that the evening before he had ventured
with some friends to the Royal Oak pub on Lombard Street in the City and there
"drank a sort of French wine called Ho Bryan [Haut-Brion], that hath a
good and most particular taste that I never met with". Ever the empiricist, John Locke, while in exile, traveled to the Graves to inspect the gravel and
white sand soil, and the rising slope of the sun-exposed Haut-Brion vineyard
for himself.
Into the 18th century, and despite wars, occasional embargoes and relative
high duties, England still brought in virtually all the top class claret that
was being produced, leaving nothing for the Parisian market. A London Gazette
advertisement of 22 May 1707 announced the arrival at the Brewer's quay near
the Tower of "an entire parcel of New French Prize Clarets, lately landed,
being of the growths of Lafitt, Margouze and Latour". Meanwhile in
Scotland, 'traditionally' made claret, ie. the lighter and ready-made to drink
stuff, was the regular tipple both in aristocratic homes and rustic taverns (where
it was delightfully served by the pint drawn from casks). From Inverness, an
English army officer in 1725 wrote that "French claret is to be met with
almost everywhere in Public Houses of any note, except in the heart of the
Highlands, and sometimes even there". It was indeed a British drink.
The popularity of wine has ebbed and flowed in society since the heyday
of the 'three bottle man', as purveyors of the Georgian take on the three
martini lunch were famous for. The advent in the 20th century of the professional
wine connoisseur has meant that brilliant clarets have always been available
for those who knew how and where to look. That said, anything generically
labeled 'claret' in a shop window even up until the 1970's was likely to be
from goodness knows where.
Funnily enough, it has been in part due to the rise of supermarket shopping
that swathes of the British public has an awareness of wine buying these days.
An accompanying revolution in the production technology of claret in the last
few decades and the emergence of the wonderful right bank Merlots of Saint
Emilion and environs has meant that there is better, more consistent bordeaux on sale
than ever before. The snag of course is the price. Demand from around the world
has sprinted past supply for the all the highly regarded chateaux. Still, there they are,
in so many corner liquor shops and supermarkets in Britain. They may not be the
best wine you can buy for under a tenner, but given a good review and a decent year,
there's something satisfying in tucking into a pleasant young claret alongside
your evening meal, like so many days gone by.
