Two thousand years of Bordeaux wine, in maps and data

How the Bituriges Vivisci and a frost-hardy grape called Biturica turned a Roman trading port into a wine region, from the 1st century AD to Ausonius.

Medieval claret was a pale, briefly macerated clairet drunk within the year: Bordeaux's dark reds came centuries later, with the Dutch and Haut-Brion.

Visigoths, Viking fleets and vine-tending bishops: how Bordeaux wine survived the seven obscure centuries between the fall of Rome and 1152.

Eleanor's 1152 wedding gets the credit, but Bordeaux's medieval wine boom was a 13th-century trade story: from the fall of La Rochelle to the 1308–09 record.

From 1241 to the Revolution, the privilège des vins blocked Haut-Pays wines until Christmas, giving Bordeaux a monopoly on the English fleet.

The 102,724 tuns of 1308–09 come from a tax record, not a harvest report. What the Bordeaux customs accounts actually counted, and what they cannot show.

How 17th-century Dutch merchants remade Bordeaux: sulfured barrels, blending, brandy, drained marshes: and why sweet whites came before the famous reds.

From Charles II's cellar to wartime auctions of Lafite, Margaux and Latour, how London tariffs and the Pontacs turned claret into the first luxury wine.

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

In 1855, Bordeaux's brokers ranked the Médoc by decades of prices in under two weeks for a world's fair. The list they called an unofficial sketch barely changed.

How three imported vine diseases reshaped Bordeaux between 1851 and 1900: oïdium, phylloxera and mildew: and the treatments that answered each.

After phylloxera, Bordeaux was replanted vine by vine on American rootstock. The dead ends, the grafting debate, and the 41B that beat limestone chlorosis.

Raisin wines and fake "Bordeaux" forced France to define wine itself: from the 1905 fraud law to the 1935 AOC decree and Bordeaux's appellations of 1936.

February 1956's great frost devastated Bordeaux. Émile Peynaud's oenology, stainless steel and château bottling then built the modern vineyard.

How Bordeaux lived through 1914–1945: the pinard ration, the unsold 1930s, AOC rules born mid-crisis, the weinführer years and the frost of 1945.

Overproduction, subsidized uprooting, climate stress and new grapes: Bordeaux's 2020s crisis in verified numbers and historical perspective.

From Parker's 1982 call to the Lafite bubble: how en primeur, the 100-point scale and Asian demand turned Bordeaux wine into a global financial asset.

1855, Graves, Saint-Émilion, Crus Bourgeois: what each Bordeaux classification ranks, how it revises, and why the revisable ones keep ending up in court.

Seven centuries of wine economics in verified numbers: medieval export records, the phylloxera collapse, the consumption crash and the export pivot.

From the Roman grape Biturica to a Merlot-dominated vineyard: how the varieties of Bordeaux changed over two thousand years, with modern data.

Two 2025 studies reread Locke's 1677 journal and Boyle's claret experiments, reopening how Haut-Brion became Bordeaux's first brand: and what it guaranteed.

From Charlemagne's fortress at Fronsac to Pétrus: how Libourne, Saint-Émilion and Pomerol built a Bordeaux apart, on the right bank of the Dordogne.

Roger Dion called terroir a social fact; Enjalbert and Pijassou answered with the soil. A century of scholarly debate over what makes a great wine great.

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.

A critical reading of Roger Dion's Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France (1959), the self-published masterwork that argued French vineyards were made by markets and power, not by soil.

A critical reading of Wine and the Vine (Routledge, 1991), the historical geography that explains the world's wine map by politics, trade and capital.