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Where Bordeaux Wine Went: Trade Routes from Roman Amphorae to Container Ships

From amphorae bound for Britannia to container ships — a route-by-route history of how Bordeaux wine travelled, and how the journey shaped the wine.

Wine is a heavy trade. The standard Bordeaux cask of the Middle Ages, the tonneau, held 800 to 900 litres and weighed roughly a tonne when full; a great year at the medieval port meant finding ships for the equivalent of a hundred thousand of them. The history of Bordeaux wine is therefore also a history of freight — of who owned the ships, which seas they could safely cross, how fast the cargo spoiled, and how much of its value the journey consumed. The vineyard changed slowly; the routes changed constantly. This article follows them era by era, as they are drawn on our interactive map, from Roman amphorae to the container ports of today.

Amphorae up the Atlantic: the Roman routes

Bordeaux entered history as a port before it was a vineyard. Burdigala, founded by the Celtic Bituriges Vivisci at the lowest convenient crossing of the Garonne, was a fortified trading town, and in the age of Augustus the geographer Strabo could still report that no vines grew in the country around it: wine arrived there as cargo, not as local produce. Within a century the direction of trade had reversed. Pliny the Elder, writing in the 70s AD, attests vineyards at Burdigala and names the grape the locals grew — Biturica, a hardy variety that ampelographers connect to the ancestry of today's Cabernet family.

By the middle of the second century the reversal was industrial. Archaeology shows amphorae being mass-produced around Bordeaux to carry local wine to foreign markets — above all Britannia, where the garrisons and towns of the Roman north drank Gascon wine carried up the Atlantic coast and across the Channel. The clinching evidence is a stone altar erected in Bordeaux in 237 AD by Marcus Aurelius Lunaris, a merchant and priest of the imperial cult at York and Lincoln, in thanks for a safe voyage — a businessman's receipt, in effect, for the Bordeaux–Britain run. The same coastal corridor served Spain, northern Gaul, the Low Countries and beyond. The Roman layer of the map shows how early the essential geometry was fixed: a river mouth facing the Atlantic, and customers to the north.

The tun and the English fleet

The marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the future Henry II in 1152 bound Gascony to the English crown, and the French capture of La Rochelle in 1224 left Bordeaux as England's privileged supplier — a three-century relationship told in full in our article on the English centuries. What matters here is the machinery. Once a year, in October and November, a fleet gathered in the Gironde to load the new vintage and carry it to England before winter; a smaller sailing returned in February and March for the racked wines — the vins de rek — drawn off their lees. Margery K. James, the historian of the Anglo-Gascon trade, reconstructed fleets several hundred ships strong in the peak years of the early fourteenth century, when the port's own registers recorded 93,452 tonneaux exported in 1306–07 and a record 102,724 in 1308–09 — figures that include the wines of the Haut-Pays, floated down the Garonne, Tarn, Lot and Dordogne to the quays. Roughly a quarter of the flow went to England, to London above all, but also Bristol, Hull and the Irish ports of Cork and Galway; English cloth and grain came back as return cargo.

The trade even left its mark on the language of shipping. English merchants reckoned a ship's capacity by the number of Bordeaux tuns — casks of about 900 litres, or 252 gallons — it could stow, and in 1347 Edward III levied a "tunnage" of three shillings on each tun of imported wine. Tunnage became tonnage: the standard measure of the world's shipping still carries, fossilized inside it, the wine cask of medieval Bordeaux. The Angevin layer of the map traces the fleet's track from the Gironde to the English ports.

Convoys, pirates and the Scottish exception

War made the route dangerous. During the Hundred Years' War the wine ships were preyed on by Breton, Norman and Castilian raiders who knew exactly when the fleet would sail; kings responded by ordering the fleet to sail in convoy under armed escort, financed by an additional levy on each tun landed in England. The trade's vulnerability shows in its worst years: in 1348–49, with plague in both ports, a mere 74 ships carried just 5,923 tuns — a twentieth of the traffic of forty years earlier.

The French reconquest of 1453 ended English rule but not, in Sandrine Lavaud's phrase, the commercial order the English had built: Bordeaux kept its privileges, and English buyers gradually returned as customers rather than compatriots. The most distinctive route of the era, though, ran further north. Under the Auld Alliance, Scottish merchants enjoyed a privileged position at the Bordeaux quays — by tradition the first pick of the new wines, shipped home in cask to Leith, the port of Edinburgh — and they were still exercising it in the 1670s, long after the alliance's political content had faded. Claret, not burgundy, became the drink of the Scottish elite for centuries.

Dutch bottoms, northern seas

In the seventeenth century the ships changed flag. The Dutch Republic had built Europe's cheapest merchant marine, and its capacious, lightly crewed cargo ships made Amsterdam the entrepôt through which French wine reached the Baltic and the North — a traffic whose mechanics historian Henriette de Bruyn Kops has reconstructed for the years 1600–1650. The Dutch did not just carry Bordeaux; they reshaped it around their routes, as we tell in our article on the Dutch revolution. For long hauls and northern palates they wanted sweet whites, blended wines given "strength or colour", and above all eau-de-vie: distillation, as Lavaud notes, reduced the volume of wine by four fifths or five sixths — the single greatest freight optimization in the history of the trade, condensing a hinterland's thin white wine into cargo that improved rather than spoiled at sea. The Dutch layer of the map shows the routes stretching, for the first time, past the British Isles to the Baltic.

To the islands: the Atlantic century

In the eighteenth century Bordeaux became France's leading port, and wine became one cargo among many. The great growth was colonial: Paul Butel, the historian of the Bordeaux merchant class, showed how trade with the Caribbean — Saint-Domingue above all — came to represent around half the port's activity. Outbound ships carried wine, flour and salted provisions to the islands; they returned with sugar and coffee, which Bordeaux re-exported to northern Europe. In 1783 the port's principal European customers were the Hanseatic cities and the Prussian and Dutch ports — the wine and the colonial goods travelling north together in the same hulls. The century has its dark chapter: Bordeaux shipowners also outfitted slave-trading expeditions, and merchant fortunes built on the Atlantic system later flowed into wine estates. It was in these decades, too, that Irish trading families — Barton, Lynch and others — settled on the Chartrons quay and became Bordeaux négociants. The eighteenth-century layer of the map shows the route network at its widest: Europe, Africa, the Americas.

Rails on the quay

For six hundred years, access to market had meant access to the sea. On 18 July 1853 that monopoly ended: the first passenger train from Paris-Austerlitz rolled into the gare d'Orléans at La Bastide, opposite the old port, after a journey of thirteen hours and ten minutes. The Paris–Bordeaux line, conceded by law in 1844 and completed section by section, put the capital — and through it the whole continental market — a day from the quays, and barrels that had always gone downriver could now go overland. The railway did not replace the sea trade, but it broke its exclusivity, and it knitted Bordeaux into the national market just as the crises and reconstructions of the late nineteenth century were about to remake the vineyard. The nineteenth-century layer of the map marks the turn inland.

The end of the barrel trade

Through all of this, one thing had never changed: Bordeaux left Bordeaux in a cask. For centuries the wine was shipped young and raw, to be matured, blended and bottled by merchants — in the cellars of the Chartrons, of London, of Amsterdam. The unwinding began in 1924, when Baron Philippe de Rothschild had the entire Mouton Rothschild vintage bottled at the château to guarantee its authenticity; the other first growths followed, and between 1967 and 1972 château bottling became compulsory for the region's classified growths. What travels today is glass: cases on pallets in intermodal containers, the cask trade reduced to a residue. The economics of the split are stark — worldwide, bulk wine still accounts for about a third of the volume of wine crossing borders but only 7% of the value, against 67% for bottled wine (OIV, 2023) — and Bordeaux sits overwhelmingly at the bottled end of that divide. Two thousand years after the Lunaris altar, the modern layer of the map still shows the one constant in the whole story: an estuary, open to the north, with wine moving down it.