The Middle Ages

Survival: Bordeaux Wine from the Fall of Rome to 1152

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

Between the fall of Roman Gaul and the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152, the written evidence for wine around Bordeaux comes down to a few poems, a handful of chronicle entries, a saint's legend and a fortress. That covers roughly seven hundred years. Before it lies the Roman vineyard that the poet Ausonius knew in the fourth century; after it, the export trade of the Anglo-Gascon centuries. Almost nobody writes about the stretch in between, because there is so little to write it from. The medievalist Sandrine Lavaud, in her survey of the vineyards of medieval Aquitaine, puts the period in one sentence: the Roman substrate of the vineyard was preserved through the early Middle Ages, but in relative stagnation. The surviving fragments say something about who kept it going.

Visigoths and Franks

Roman rule in Aquitaine ended over several generations, not on a single date. In 418 the emperor Honorius settled his Visigothic federates on land in Aquitaine. Bordeaux passed into the orbit of their kingdom, ruled from Toulouse, and the institutions of Roman provincial life faded around it. Visigothic rule ended in 507, when Clovis and his Franks defeated King Alaric II at Vouillé, near Poitiers. Alaric was killed. The Visigoths withdrew toward the Mediterranean, and Clovis went south to spend the winter of 507 in Bordeaux, which had been one of the great wine cities of the Roman west.

What these changes of ruler meant for the vines, the sources do not say. Merovingian Aquitaine has left no production figures, no trade accounts, nothing like the customs registers that document the later Middle Ages. Lavaud's reading is as far as the evidence goes: something of the Roman vineyard endured, and nothing suggests it flourished. Bordeaux was a frontier possession that changed hands between kingdoms, far from the centres of Frankish power on the Seine and the Rhine. Its wine had once moved across an imperial economy. Now it had mostly local reasons to exist.

The bishop's vineyard

The most durable of those reasons was the bishop. In a 1954 article in the Revue historique, "Viticulture ecclésiastique et viticulture princière au Moyen Âge", Roger Dion argued that in the early medieval centuries the vine depended above all on the social function of the bishop. Every see needed wine for the Eucharist, for the bishop's own table, and for the hospitality his rank required. Around every episcopal city, therefore, a vineyard was kept up whatever happened to the wider economy.

Later tradition gave the credit to monks, and medievalists have since corrected that shorthand. Léa Delautel, writing in 2022, points out that the pages of Gregory of Tours show bishops paying close attention to the vineyards attached to their churches, and that lay aristocrats and kings kept vines too, out of piety as much as for prestige and profit. On her reading, monasteries were one kind of vineyard owner among several.

In Bordeaux this episcopal viticulture has a name attached to it. In the 560s the Italian poet Venantius Fortunatus crossed the Alps into Merovingian Gaul and found a patron in Leontius, the wealthy bishop of Bordeaux and a builder of churches. Fortunatus's first book of poems is partly a portrait of Leontius's world: the basilicas he raised or restored, and his country estates at Bissonum, Vereginis and Praemiacum, where he lived much as a Gallo-Roman aristocrat would have. The poem on Praemiacum, an estate near Bordeaux, mentions the vine itself: a vine with thick foliage, Fortunatus writes, still shading the earth that feeds it. It is one line of verse. It is also the clearest surviving description of a working vine in the Bordeaux countryside between the fall of Rome and the age of Eleanor, and it stands on a bishop's estate, in a poem the bishop paid for.

Émilion at Ascumbas

Monks do appear, later and mostly through legend. According to tradition, Émilion, a Breton monk from the region of Vannes, came south in the eighth century and settled as a hermit in a rock shelter at a place then called Ascumbas, on the limestone slopes above the Dordogne valley. The traditional account dates his death to 767. The community that formed around his hermitage gave the place his name: Saint-Émilion.

The details of his life are hagiography rather than history. The wine reputation came much later, too: Saint-Émilion's wines made their name in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, under Plantagenet rule. What the legend does preserve is a sequence common in the early Middle Ages, in which a religious community settles on a hillside and vines are planted to supply its altar.

769: a fortress at Fronsac

The Carolingians took the Bordeaux country by force. Pippin the Short spent nearly a decade breaking the autonomous duchy of Aquitaine, and when he died in 768 the duchy rose again under Hunald II. The next year the young Charlemagne, on his first independent campaign, marched south to end the revolt. According to the Royal Frankish Annals, he advanced to the Dordogne and built a fortress at Fronsac (Fronciacum), commanding the river a few miles from its confluence with the Isle. Hunald fled to Gascony. Its duke, Lupus, handed him over. Aquitaine was absorbed into the Carolingian order and, from 781, made a kingdom for Charlemagne's son Louis.

Fronsac's mound still stands above the Dordogne, and the name now belongs to a wine appellation on the same slopes: a fortress built to hold a river gave its name, centuries later, to the wine grown around it. The Carolingians also legislated on vines. The Capitulare de villis, the estate ordinance associated with Charlemagne around 800, told royal stewards to look after the vineyards on crown estates. This is what Dion called princely viticulture, alongside that of the bishops.

Vikings on the Garonne

In 844 a Viking fleet entered the Gironde and rowed up the Garonne, raiding as far inland as Toulouse, in one of the first long river ascents of the Viking age. Four years later the raiders came back for Bordeaux. In 848, after a siege, the city was taken, plundered and burned, and the Annals of Saint-Bertin recorded it. Raids on the Gascon coasts and rivers went on for generations.

The features that made the lower Garonne and Dordogne good for trade made them easy for raiders: deep, slow water, navigable a long way inland. Whatever small river trade in wine had lasted through the Merovingian centuries now used the same waterways the attacks came up. For much of the ninth and tenth centuries Bordeaux lived behind its walls, and that explains a good deal of the early medieval vineyard's stagnation. The raided rivers, the episcopal city and the Fronsac fortress are marked on the Dark Ages layer of our interactive map.

What 1152 changed

The usual end point for this period is a wedding. In 1152 Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry Plantagenet, the future Henry II of England, and her duchy, Bordeaux included, passed into the Angevin orbit. The three English centuries begin here.

At first the marriage changed less than the textbook version suggests. Roger Dion, the founder of French wine historiography, was explicit about this. The first great Atlantic wine port of the Plantagenet empire was not Bordeaux but La Rochelle, which shipped the wines of Aunis and Saintonge. The decisive growth of the Bordeaux vineyard came only in the thirteenth century, above all after the French captured La Rochelle in 1224. That removed the rival port and left Bordeaux as England's privileged supplier. In Dion's account, the vineyard that then became Europe's largest wine trade was a new commercial creation, built for export, and not simply an enlarged version of what the bishops had kept alive. What it did inherit from the seven centuries before was a vineyard that had never been abandoned: a bishop's tenants at Praemiacum, monks on a limestone hill and stewards on royal estates had gone on pruning vines through the Visigothic and Frankish conquests, the Carolingian wars and the Viking raids.