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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.

A medieval Bordeaux tonneau held 800 to 900 litres and weighed about a tonne when full. In a peak year the port had to find ships for roughly a hundred thousand of them. Much of the history of Bordeaux wine is therefore a history of freight: who owned the ships, which seas were safe to cross, how quickly the cargo spoiled, and how much of its value the voyage used up. The vineyard changed slowly. The routes changed often, and this article follows them in the order they are drawn on the interactive map, from Roman amphorae to the container ports of today.

Roman routes up the Atlantic

Bordeaux was a port before it was a vineyard. The Bituriges Vivisci, a Celtic people, founded Burdigala as a fortified trading town at the lowest convenient crossing of the Garonne. In the reign of Augustus the geographer Strabo could still report that no vines grew in the surrounding country; wine arrived as cargo. Within a century the flow had reversed. Pliny the Elder, writing in the 70s AD, records vineyards at Burdigala and names the grape grown there: Biturica, a hardy variety that ampelographers connect to the ancestry of today's Cabernet family.

By the middle of the second century, the archaeology shows amphorae being made in quantity around Bordeaux to ship local wine out. The main market was Britannia. Its garrisons and northern towns drank Gascon wine carried up the Atlantic coast and across the Channel. The firmest single piece of evidence is a stone altar set up 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. It is a dated, named record of one man working the Bordeaux–Britain run. The same coastal corridor served Spain, northern Gaul, the Low Countries and beyond. On the Roman layer of the map the basic layout is already fixed: a river mouth facing the Atlantic, with the customers to the north.

The tun and the English fleet

Two events made Bordeaux England's privileged wine supplier. The marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the future Henry II in 1152 attached Gascony to the English crown, and the French capture of La Rochelle in 1224 removed the competition. The three centuries that followed have their own article. This section is about the logistics.

Each October and November the main fleet gathered in the Gironde, loaded the new vintage and tried to reach England before winter. A smaller sailing returned in February and March for the vins de rek, wines racked off their lees. Margery K. James, the historian of the Anglo-Gascon trade, reconstructed fleets of several hundred ships in the peak years of the early fourteenth century. The port's own registers record 93,452 tonneaux exported in 1306–07 and 102,724 in 1308–09, the highest figure on record. Both totals include the wines of the Haut-Pays, floated down the Garonne, Tarn, Lot and Dordogne to the Bordeaux quays. About a quarter went to England. London took most of it, with Bristol, Hull and the Irish ports of Cork and Galway behind, and the ships came back with English cloth and grain.

English merchants measured a ship's capacity by the number of Bordeaux tuns it could stow, a tun being a cask of about 900 litres, or 252 gallons. In 1347 Edward III levied a "tunnage" of three shillings on every tun of imported wine. Tunnage became tonnage, the word still used to measure the world's shipping. The Angevin layer of the map traces the fleet's track from the Gironde to the English ports.

Convoys, pirates and the Scottish exception

The Hundred Years' War made the crossing dangerous. Breton, Norman and Castilian raiders knew when the wine fleet would sail. The crown's answer was to order it into convoy under armed escort, paid for by an extra levy on each tun landed in England. The worst years show how exposed the trade was. In 1348–49, with plague in both ports, 74 ships carried 5,923 tuns: a twentieth of the traffic of forty years earlier.

The French reconquest of 1453 ended English rule. It did not end, in Sandrine Lavaud's reading, the commercial order the English had built. Bordeaux kept its privileges, and English buyers gradually came back, as foreign customers now rather than fellow subjects.

The most distinctive route of the period ran further north. Under the Auld Alliance, Scottish merchants held a privileged position on the Bordeaux quays, by tradition the first pick of the new wines, which they shipped home in cask to Leith, the port of Edinburgh. They were still exercising that right in the 1670s, long after the alliance had lost its political content. For centuries the Scottish elite drank claret, not burgundy.

Dutch hulls and the Baltic

In the seventeenth century the ships changed flag. The Dutch Republic had built the cheapest merchant fleet in Europe, roomy cargo ships that sailed with small crews, and Amsterdam became the entrepôt through which French wine reached the Baltic and the North. Henriette de Bruyn Kops has reconstructed how that traffic worked between 1600 and 1650.

The Dutch also reshaped what Bordeaux made to suit their routes, as the article on the Dutch revolution describes. Long hauls and northern buyers called for sweet whites, for blends given "strength or colour", and above all for eau-de-vie. Distillation, Lavaud notes, cut the volume of the wine by four fifths or five sixths. No other change in the trade's history saved as much freight. It turned the thin white wine of a whole hinterland into a cargo that improved at sea instead of spoiling. The Dutch layer of the map shows the routes running past the British Isles to the Baltic for the first time.

The Caribbean century

In the eighteenth century Bordeaux became France's leading port, and wine became one cargo among many. Most of the growth was colonial. Paul Butel, the historian of the Bordeaux merchant class, showed that trade with the Caribbean, Saint-Domingue above all, came to account for around half the port's activity. Ships left with wine, flour and salted provisions for the islands and returned with sugar and coffee, which Bordeaux re-exported to northern Europe. In 1783 the port's main European customers were the Hanseatic cities and the Prussian and Dutch ports, so wine and colonial goods travelled north in the same hulls.

Bordeaux shipowners also fitted out slave-trading expeditions, and merchant fortunes made in the Atlantic system later went into wine estates. In the same decades Irish trading families, the Bartons and the Lynches among them, settled on the Chartrons quay and became Bordeaux négociants. The eighteenth-century layer of the map shows the network at its widest, across Europe, Africa and the Americas.

Rails on the quay

For six hundred years, getting Bordeaux wine to market had meant getting it to the sea. That changed on 18 July 1853. The first passenger train from Paris-Austerlitz pulled into the gare d'Orléans at La Bastide, across the river from the old port, after a journey of thirteen hours and ten minutes. The Paris–Bordeaux line had been conceded by a law of 1844 and completed section by section. It put Paris, and through Paris the continental market, a day from the quays. Barrels that had always gone downriver could now go overland.

The railway did not replace the sea trade. It ended its exclusivity, and it tied Bordeaux into the national market just before the crises and reconstructions of the late nineteenth century remade the vineyard. The nineteenth-century layer of the map marks the turn inland.

From cask to bottle

Until the twentieth century, Bordeaux left Bordeaux in cask. It was shipped young and raw, and merchants matured, blended and bottled it in their own cellars on the Chartrons, in London and in Amsterdam. The change 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. Between 1967 and 1972 château bottling became compulsory for the region's classified growths.

What travels now is glass: cases on pallets in intermodal containers, along the routes on the modern layer of the map. The cask trade survives as a residue. The OIV's report for 2023 gives the scale of the split. Worldwide, bulk wine still accounts for about a third of the volume of wine crossing borders but only 7% of its value, against 67% of the value for bottled wine. Bordeaux sits almost entirely at the bottled end.