The Dutch & the New Médoc

The Dutch Revolution: Drainage, the Sulfur Match, and Why Sweet Whites Came First

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

The first wines Bordeaux growers set out to make better, rather than simply more of, were sweet and white, and they were made for buyers in Amsterdam. The historian Sandrine Lavaud, a specialist of the early Bordeaux vineyard, places this seventeenth-century turn toward quality sweet whites for the Dutch market before the rise of premium red Médoc and Graves at the end of the same century. By quality she means deliberate choices of site, method and grape. Popular accounts, when they mention the Dutch at all, usually reduce them to a line about drained marshes. The record shows more than that. Dutch merchants changed how Bordeaux wine was made and who it was made for.

A northern customer

For about three centuries of the Middle Ages, Bordeaux's export trade was organised around one main client. England drank young claret, shipped within months of the harvest. By the seventeenth century the main demand came from further north. The United Provinces had become the leading maritime carriers of Europe, and Dutch merchants now dominated the wine traffic out of the Gironde. Many of them settled downstream of the old city, in the district that became the Chartrons quarter.

They bought in volume and for different ends. They wanted white wine more than red; sweet wine for a prosperous home market; cheap wine to distil; and cargoes that would survive long voyages and a spell in a warehouse. The medieval trade had valued freshness: a new wine, drunk within the year. Dutch buyers needed wine that would keep. Most of what follows comes from that one requirement.

The sulfur match

The tool most closely tied to the Dutch in Bordeaux is the allumette hollandaise, the "Dutch match". It was a sulfur wick burned inside the empty barrel before filling, which left the wood coated with sulfur dioxide. The fumes suppressed the microbes that turn wine into vinegar. For sweet wines they did something more important still: they kept the residual sugar from refermenting in the cask. Lavaud describes the match as a Dutch invention of the sixteenth century, whose use in Bordeaux spread until it was general by the early eighteenth.

The claim has limits. Sulfur was known as a wine preservative elsewhere in Europe well before the Dutch, so their part in Bordeaux was to bring the practice in and make it the norm. The effect was large all the same. Wine that could be stabilised could be stored and shipped over long distances, and in time it could be aged. Everything the region was later known for depends on that.

The end of the blending ban

Medieval Bordeaux regulated its wine closely. One of the rules that protected the reputation of the vins de ville, and the taxes levied on them, prohibited blending. Mixing wines of different origins was treated as adulteration. The Dutch had no stake in the city's regulations and cared about what would sell. They pushed for the opposite: vins d'assemblage, composed on purpose from different lots to reach a consistent style at a consistent price.

Lavaud counts the breaking of the medieval blending prohibition among the main Dutch contributions. Assemblage, the composition of a wine from separate lots and varieties, later became the defining craft of Bordeaux winemaking and the clearest difference between Bordeaux and the single-variety traditions of other regions. It arrived as a merchant's expedient, against the letter of local law. It ended as local orthodoxy.

Brandy for the north

Distillation was already known before the Dutch arrived. What Lavaud credits them with is making eau-de-vie production general across the Bordeaux trading area. The reasons were commercial. Spirit took less space in the hold than wine, did not perish, and could not spoil the way a wine cargo could. The Dutch word for it, brandewijn ("burnt wine"), is the origin of the English "brandy".

For the region, distillation put a floor under the market. Thin, rough or surplus wine that could never have travelled as wine could now travel as spirit. Whole districts of the wider South-West turned to supplying Dutch stills, and the eau-de-vie trade became a lasting second branch of the Atlantic wine economy, alongside wine itself.

Sweet whites first

Most histories date Bordeaux's pursuit of quality from its red wines. Lavaud's research, which traces the birth of the Bordeaux liquoreux in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, puts an earlier episode first. The first time growers worked deliberately toward a finer product for a demanding market, the product was sweet white wine for Dutch buyers, and in her chronology this comes before premium red Médoc and Graves appeared in the late seventeenth century.

Dutch demand redrew the map of production. On the right bank of the Gironde, Blaye and Bourg turned to white wine for the northern market, as did the large Entre-Deux-Mers between the two rivers. Upriver, on the left bank of the Garonne, the sweet-wine country from which Sauternes descends took shape in the same period. The liquoreux tradition, Lavaud's main subject, began as a response to Dutch taste. When Bordeaux reds later won the London market, they were following a route to quality that the sweet whites had opened.

Draining the Médoc

Drainage is the part of the story that usually gets told, and it did matter. In 1599 an edict of Henri IV gave Humphrey Bradley, an engineer from Brabant, a royal commission to drain the kingdom's marshes. In the first half of the seventeenth century, Dutch engineers and Dutch capital were at work on the wetlands of the Gironde's left bank. They cut channels through the marshes of the Médoc and reclaimed the riverside palus with the polder methods they used at home.

Drainage made the Médoc peninsula workable and opened the land on which the great red-wine estates of the following century were built. The Dutch contribution people remember best is therefore the one that made red Médoc possible. Red Médoc then overshadowed the sweet white Bordeaux the Dutch had bought, both in reputation and in the way the region tells its own history.

Two ways of dating the change

Seen from today's classified growths, the seventeenth century is a prologue to luxury claret: Haut-Brion appears in Samuel Pepys's diary in 1663, followed by the London market of the early eighteenth century. Historians read the period differently. Roger Dion argued in 1959 that vineyards are shaped by commerce and human decisions rather than by soil alone, and Lavaud has worked in the same line. In their account the Dutch period is a turning point in its own right, as consequential for Bordeaux as the medieval English trade that came before it, and it puts the region's first fine wines in the white and sweet column. The famous reds came second.