The Golden Age

The Chartrons: How a Quay of Outsiders Invented the Bordeaux Wine Trade

Barton, Johnston, Lawton, Schÿler: how foreign merchants outside Bordeaux's walls built the négociant system that still runs the fine-wine trade.

For most of its history, the capital of fine Bordeaux was not, strictly speaking, in Bordeaux. It was a suburb: a strip of once-marshy riverbank beginning a few hundred metres downstream of the city walls, named after a monastery and settled, from the seventeenth century onward, by foreigners the city would not fully admit. On the Quai des Chartrons, Dutch, English, Irish and German merchants invented the profession that still governs the sale of great Bordeaux — the négociant, who bought young wine from the estates, raised it to maturity in his own cellars and sold it to the world — together with the broker who supplied him and the contracts that bound him to the châteaux. Kings, revolutions and the port itself have come and gone; the commercial architecture drawn on that quay still runs, under the name of the place de Bordeaux.

A monastery in a marsh

The name is monastic. In 1381, in the midst of the Hundred Years' War, Carthusian monks from the Périgord took refuge on an insalubrious, marshy stretch of the Garonne bank just north of the city and founded a charterhouse there. A hamlet grew up around the convent, and Bordeaux named the place after its monks: the Chartrons. For two centuries the faubourg remained roughly what it looked like — a swamp with a monastery in it. Its assets were invisible ones: a long frontage on the river where sea-going ships could moor, and a location outside the walls, which meant outside the direct grip of the city's commercial law.

Outside the walls — and better off there

That law mattered enormously. Bordeaux reserved the core of its wine trade for its own bourgeois: the privilège des vins gave the citizens' wines priority in the port, and the rules around it fenced the intramural trade with rights a foreigner could not share. So when the northern merchants began to arrive in force in the seventeenth century — Flemish, English and Irish traders, and above all the Dutch, whose buying power was already transforming what Bordeaux produced — they settled where they could: in the faubourg des Chartrons, outside the gates.

The constraint turned out to be a gift. Outside the walls there was space — for quays where ships loaded directly, and for the vast ground-floor cellars, the chais, in which the new trade's real work would be done. Over the eighteenth century the drained marsh filled with merchants' houses whose river façade remains one of the great urban ensembles of the century; behind the façades, the chais ran back from the quay in ranks. Bordeaux society, watching Protestant and foreign dynasties grow richer than the city's own elite, coined a nickname half in envy and half in derision: the aristocratie du bouchon, the aristocracy of the cork.

The nations of the quay

The eighteenth century was the quay's golden age, and its census reads like a map of Atlantic Europe. Thomas Barton left County Fermanagh and settled in Bordeaux in 1725; "French Tom" built the leading high-end wine business of the age and dominated the top of the trade until his death in 1780. Abraham Lawton arrived from Cork in 1739. The German house of Schröder & Schÿler was founded in 1739 and trades to this day; the Johnstons, an Ulster family, built a firm that still operates as Nathaniel Johnston & Fils and dates its founding to 1734. Around them the historian Charles Ludington counts a whole Irish colony — Lynch, Kirwan, MacCarthy, Boyd — names that would end up on châteaux and street signs. In 1802, Thomas Barton's grandson Hugh took his French manager Daniel Guestier into partnership: Barton & Guestier, the oldest wine house still in operation in Bordeaux.

Paul Butel's classic study of the milieu, Les négociants bordelais, l'Europe et les Îles au XVIIIe siècle (1974), says the essential in its title: these were general Atlantic merchants, in business with northern Europe and with the sugar islands of the Caribbean alike, for whom wine was the anchor of a much wider commerce.

Wine finished in the cellar

The Chartrons houses did not simply resell wine; they finished it, and often they remade it. A négociant bought wine young, in barrel, in the months after the vintage, and then raised it — the word is the trade's own, élevage — in his chais: topping the barrels against evaporation (ouillage), racking the wine off its lees (soutirage), burning sulfur matches in the empty casks, holding the great wines in wood for years. Ludington notes that first growths destined for Britain and Ireland could spend five to seven years in barrel on the quay before shipment.

And they blended. To suit British palates, the merchants strengthened young Bordeaux with fuller southern wines — Hermitage from the Rhône, Alicante and Benicarló from Spain — plus stum, unfermented grape juice, to liven the cask. One merchant's advice, reported by Ludington: in good years a first or second growth received "1 pot stum, 5 to 6 pots hermitage... 3 to 4 pots Alicante"; a poor vintage needed double. The trade called this the travail à l'anglaise — working the wine the English way — because importers in London and Bristol had done the same in their own cellars before the Chartrons took over the job. Nor was it clandestine: when the Parlement of Bordeaux moved against the practice in 1755, it named Barton, Johnston, Coppinger and Gernon openly, and the ban went unenforced. Ludington's conclusion is arresting: the fame of the grands crus was made first in England and Ireland, and the consistency achieved in the Chartrons cellars — vintage after vintage tasting recognizably like itself — was part of what made it. The same finding unsettles any pure-terroir reading of Haut-Brion, Bordeaux's first brand, whose name sold more wine than its vineyard could grow.

The courtier, the man between

Between the châteaux and the quay stood a third figure, discreet and impossible to remove: the courtier, the sworn wine broker. Brokerage was an old royal institution, framed by edicts; as Stéphanie Lachaud-Martin has shown, it withered away in Champagne and Burgundy in the second half of the eighteenth century but not in the Bordelais, where the courtiers carved out a durable place precisely by becoming the men who defined the hierarchies and qualities of the wines — who knew every parish, tasted every cellar, and could say what a wine was worth. Abraham Lawton, the Cork emigrant of 1739, moved from shipping into brokerage; the firm he founded in 1740 still practises as Tastet & Lawton, and its handwritten registers — vintage judgements and prices kept continuously since the eighteenth century — form one of the longest commercial series in the history of wine. It was from records of this kind that the brokers' syndicate, asked by the Chamber of Commerce in 1855 to rank the Médoc, compiled the classification that still stands: a hierarchy of prices, drawn up by the men who had spent a century recording them.

Ten harvests at a stroke: the abonnement

The relationship between estate and négociant could go far beyond a yearly bargain. In hard times, châteaux — "even the most fabled addresses," as one history of the system puts it — signed abonnements: contracts committing their entire crop to a merchant for up to ten years at a fixed price. The proprietor bought security, a guaranteed income whatever the vintage, and surrendered the upside if prices rose. The abonnement captures the eighteenth-century balance of power in a single document: the estates grew the wine, but the quay carried the risk, held the stock, owned the customers and set the terms.

From the quay to the place de Bordeaux

The twentieth century dismantled the old Chartrons physically. From the 1960s and 1970s, bottling at the château became the rule for the great growths, ending the négociant's role as éleveur of the classified wines; the port moved downstream; and by the end of the century the merchant houses had left the quay for warehouses elsewhere in the Gironde. The quarter today belongs to antique dealers and galleries.

The system, though, never left. The place de Bordeaux now counts some 400 négociant firms, which market about 70% of the production of the Gironde's appellations and 80% of its exports; courtiers still stand between grower and merchant in roughly three transactions out of four. Every spring, in the en primeur campaign, the châteaux sell the new vintage to the négoce, which sells it on to the world through allocations — the modern descendants of the abonnement. Three and a half centuries after the first northern merchants' cellars went up in the marsh, fine Bordeaux is still sold the way the outsiders on the quay decided it should be: not by the château, but through the place the Chartrons built.