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.

The system that still sells most Bordeaux wine was built outside Bordeaux. Its home was the Quai des Chartrons, a once-marshy strip of Garonne bank beginning a few hundred metres downstream of the city walls, named after a monastery and settled from the seventeenth century by foreign merchants the city would not fully admit. Dutch, English, Irish and German traders there created the négociant: a merchant who bought young wine from the estates, matured it in his own cellars and sold it abroad. With him came the broker who supplied him and the contracts that tied him to the châteaux. The quay has lost its merchants and its port, but the arrangement they set up still operates under the name place de Bordeaux.

A monastery in a marsh

In 1381, during the Hundred Years' War, Carthusian monks from the Périgord took refuge on an unhealthy, marshy stretch of the Garonne just north of the city and founded a charterhouse there. A hamlet grew up around it, and Bordeaux named the place after the monks: the Chartrons. For two centuries it stayed a swamp with a monastery in it. Two things made it valuable later. It had a long river frontage where sea-going ships could moor, and it lay outside the walls, beyond the direct reach of the city's commercial law.

Outside the walls

That law was restrictive. Bordeaux reserved the core of its wine trade for its own bourgeois. The privilège des vins gave citizens' wines priority in the port, and the rules attached to it hedged the intramural trade with rights no foreigner could hold. When northern merchants began arriving in numbers in the seventeenth century, they settled in the faubourg des Chartrons because they could not settle inside the gates. They were Flemish, English and Irish, and above all Dutch, whose purchasing was already changing what Bordeaux produced.

The exclusion gave them room. Outside the walls there was space for quays where ships loaded directly, and for large ground-floor cellars, the chais, where most of the trade's work would be done. Over the eighteenth century the drained marsh filled with merchants' houses. Their river façade is still one of the major urban ensembles of that century, and behind it the chais ran back from the quay in rows. Bordeaux society watched these Protestant and foreign families grow richer than its own elite and gave them a nickname, half envious and half mocking: the aristocratie du bouchon, the aristocracy of the cork.

The merchant families

The eighteenth century was the quay's peak, and its merchants came from most of Atlantic Europe. Thomas Barton left County Fermanagh and settled in Bordeaux in 1725. Known as "French Tom", he built the leading high-end wine business of his time and dominated the top of the trade until his death in 1780. Abraham Lawton came from Cork in 1739. The German house Schröder & Schÿler was founded the same year and still trades. The Johnstons, an Ulster family, built a firm that operates today as Nathaniel Johnston & Fils and dates its founding to 1734.

Charles Ludington, in a 2019 article in Global Food History, counts a whole Irish colony around them: Lynch, Kirwan, MacCarthy, Boyd. Several of those names later appeared on châteaux and on street signs. In 1802 Thomas Barton's grandson Hugh took his French manager, Daniel Guestier, into partnership. Barton & Guestier is the oldest wine house still operating in Bordeaux.

Paul Butel's 1974 study of this milieu, Les négociants bordelais, l'Europe et les Îles au XVIIIe siècle, states its main finding in the title. These were general Atlantic merchants, trading with northern Europe and with the Caribbean sugar islands alike. Wine was the base of a much wider business.

Élevage

The Chartrons houses did more than resell wine. A négociant bought it young, in barrel, in the months after the harvest, and then raised it in his chais. The trade's word for this is élevage. It meant topping up barrels to replace what evaporated (ouillage), racking the wine off its lees (soutirage), burning sulfur matches in empty casks, and keeping the best wines in wood for years. According to Ludington, first growths bound for Britain and Ireland could spend five to seven years in barrel on the quay before they were shipped.

Travail à l'anglaise

They also blended. To suit British buyers, merchants added fuller southern wines to young Bordeaux: Hermitage from the Rhône, Alicante and Benicarló from Spain. They added stum, unfermented grape juice, to liven the cask. Ludington quotes one merchant's recipe. In a good year a first or second growth received "1 pot stum, 5 to 6 pots hermitage... 3 to 4 pots Alicante". A poor vintage needed twice as much.

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 the job over. It was not hidden. When the Parlement of Bordeaux moved against the practice in 1755, it named Barton, Johnston, Coppinger and Gernon, and the ban was never enforced.

Ludington draws a larger conclusion. In his reading, the reputation of the grands crus was made first in England and Ireland, and part of what made it was the consistency produced in the Chartrons cellars: a wine that tasted recognizably like itself from one vintage to the next. That is one historian's interpretation, not a measured result, but it is hard to square with a purely terroir-based account of Haut-Brion, Bordeaux's first brand, whose name sold more wine than its vineyard could grow.

The courtiers

Between the châteaux and the quay stood a third party: the courtier, the sworn wine broker. Brokerage was an old royal institution, regulated by edict. Stéphanie Lachaud-Martin, writing in the Revue historique in 2018, shows that it withered in Champagne and Burgundy during the second half of the eighteenth century but survived in the Bordelais. There the courtiers made themselves indispensable by becoming the people who defined the hierarchies and qualities of the wines. They knew every parish, tasted in every cellar, and could say what a given 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. Its handwritten registers of vintage assessments and prices have been kept without a break since the eighteenth century and form one of the longest commercial series in the history of wine. In 1855 the Chamber of Commerce asked the brokers' syndicate to rank the wines of the Médoc. The syndicate worked from records of this kind, and the classification it produced still stands. It is a ranking by price, drawn up by the people who had been recording those prices for a century.

The abonnement

The tie between estate and négociant could run far longer than one harvest. In difficult periods, châteaux signed abonnements: contracts that committed the whole crop to one merchant for up to ten years at a fixed price. The wine merchant FINE+RARE, in its history of en primeur, notes that this included "even the most fabled addresses". The owner gained an income guaranteed whatever the vintage and gave up any gain if prices rose. The contract shows where eighteenth-century power lay. The estates grew the wine; 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 emptied the old Chartrons. From the 1960s and 1970s, bottling at the château became standard for the great growths, which ended the négociant's role in raising the classified wines. The port moved downstream. By the end of the century the merchant houses had left the quay for warehouses elsewhere in the Gironde. The quarter now belongs to antique dealers and galleries.

The structure outlasted the buildings. By the figures the retailer La Grande Cave publishes, the place de Bordeaux counts about 400 négociant firms. They market roughly 70% of the production of the Gironde's appellations and 80% of its exports, and a courtier stands between grower and merchant in about three transactions out of four. Each spring, during the en primeur campaign, the châteaux sell the new vintage to the négoce, which sells it on through allocations, the modern descendants of the abonnement. The great châteaux still reach their buyers through the place, not directly.