The Dutch & the New Médoc

The New French Clarets: How Haut-Brion in London Invented Luxury Wine, 1660–1760

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.

On 22 May 1707 the London Gazette carried an advertisement for "an entire Parcel of New French Prize Clarets … being of the Growth of Lafitt, Margouze, and La Tour". England and France were at war. The wine had been taken from French ships and was being auctioned cask by cask, and the London buyers it was aimed at clearly knew what those three growths were and why they were worth bidding on. Between a royal cellar book of 1660 and this notice, a new kind of product had appeared: wine sold under the name of the estate that made it, at a price set by that estate's reputation. The trade policy that produced it had been designed to keep French wine out of England.

A name in the king's cellar

For most of its history, the Bordeaux wine England drank was claret, a generic word for a generic product. It was bought by the fleet-load and graded by broker and by vintage, never by vineyard. The royal household accounts give the first exception. The cellar book of Charles II records 169 bottles of "Hobriono" served at court in 1660–61. Hobriono is Haut-Brion as an English clerk heard it, and it is one of the first Bordeaux estate names to appear in English at all.

Three years later the name turns up again. On 10 April 1663, Samuel Pepys left the Exchange with Sir John Cutler and Mr Grant and went "to the Royall Oak Tavern, in Lumbard Street". There, he wrote in his diary, he "drank a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with". Pepys drank claret all the time and rarely wrote about it. He recorded this one because he could identify it: a particular taste, attached to a particular name. That is a working definition of a brand, written down some 250 years before the word came into use in the wine trade.

The Pontacs in London

Haut-Brion belonged to Arnaud III de Pontac, first president of the Parlement de Bordeaux and one of the richest men in the province. He had the capital to make wine differently and the connections to sell it differently. Instead of selling his crop into the general claret trade, he sold it under its own name to the biggest spenders he could reach: the court and the wealthy of Restoration London.

In 1666 Pontac sent his son François-Auguste to London. According to the Bordeaux writer Jane Anson, he opened a tavern there under the family sign, known as Pontack's Head, with the family's wine as its main attraction. Haut-Brion sold there for about seven shillings a bottle, at a time when ordinary wine cost about two, and the high price was part of what customers paid for. Anson's list of regulars includes John Evelyn, Christopher Wren, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and John Locke. Swift complained that he "found the wine dear at seven shillings a flagon".

Consider what the arrangement involved. A landowner sold wine from his own estate, under his own name, at three times the going rate, through a shop he controlled in his customers' own capital. Nothing organised this way existed anywhere else in the wine trade.

Locke inspects the vineyard

In May 1677 the philosopher John Locke, travelling through France and taking notes on everything from vines to taxes, rode out to the gravel rise outside Bordeaux to see what justified the price. What he found puzzled him. The soil of the famous vineyard was "noe thing but pure white sand, mixed with a little gravel", ground that "one would imagin … scarce fit to bear any thing". His explanation for the price did not mention the soil. The price had risen, he wrote, "thanks to the rich English who sent orders that it was to be got for them at any price". Locke put it down to demand, which makes his note an early entry in the argument over what terroir is, one historians have not settled.

The same notebook is now evidence in a newer dispute. Leary, writing in the Journal of Wine Research in 2025, reread Locke's figures on the estate's output and concluded that a large share of what was sold as Haut-Brion may not have come from that vineyard. The claim and the objections to it are covered in our article on Haut-Brion and the 2025 authenticity debate. For this article the relevant point is narrower. By 1677 the wine was well enough known, and expensive enough, that Locke made a detour to look at the sand it grew in.

Prohibition and tariffs

In 1678, as relations with Louis XIV broke down, the English Parliament passed an act prohibiting French goods, wine included. In 1679 Charles II complained to Parliament of "the loss I sustain by the prohibition of French Wines and Brandy". Another embargo followed during the Nine Years' War (1689–1697), and duties on French wine were raised repeatedly through the later seventeenth century. The Methuen Treaty of December 1703 completed the structure. England admitted Portuguese wines at a duty at least one-third lower than French wines paid; in return Portugal let English woollens in duty-free.

Charles Ludington, the historian of wine in Britain, has traced the effect. Prices and legislation pushed claret out of the mass market, and by about 1700 Portuguese and Spanish wines had replaced it as the ordinary drink. At the top of the market the same policy worked differently. Any claret that still arrived, legally or not, was expensive by definition, and an expensive French wine had to give buyers a reason to pay. The producers who could were those, like the Pontacs, selling a recognisable, concentrated wine made on one estate to customers who treated a high price as a mark of quality. The tariffs shrank claret's English market to a small, costly niche and left that niche to the New French Clarets. On this reading, luxury wine was made as much in Westminster as in Bordeaux.

Prize auctions and the first growths

The War of the Spanish Succession cut direct trade further. Much of the best claret now reached London as prize cargo, taken from captured French ships and auctioned, with the sales advertised in the press. Ludington finds Haut-Brion in London Gazette advertisements from May 1705. The notice of 22 May 1707 added the other three: "New French Prize Clarets … of the Growth of Lafitt, Margouze, and La Tour".

In that notice Margaux, Lafite and Latour appear in English as named growths rather than as claret, each expected to mean something specific to a London bidder. With Haut-Brion, the wartime auction lists already contain the four estates that the 1855 classification would rank as first growths, 150 years later. The auction format mattered too. Competitive bids on named lots produced public prices that differed from one estate to the next, printed in the Gazette in war after war. In practice this was the first published price list for fine wine.

What changed

Before the New French Clarets, wine was sold by port of origin and by colour, and its quality was whatever the broker said it was. Afterwards the top of the market worked on different terms: a named estate, a proprietor who answered for the wine, a style made dense and long-lived on purpose, and a price openly detached from what ordinary wine cost. Buyers valued the name because few could have it. Classification, château bottling, brand names and the price hierarchy all derive from this model.

The model depended on earlier technical change. The wine itself came out of the Dutch-led changes to Bordeaux winemaking in the seventeenth century: casks sterilised by burning sulphur, new plantings, and wines made to survive a sea voyage and to age. Without them no estate could have promised a consistent house style. The Pontacs supplied the selling; the techniques came from the wider trade.

The dating dispute

Historians disagree about when luxury claret took hold. The standard account, associated with Ludington, dates it to 1704 and after: the tariff wall and the Methuen settlement pushed claret into its luxury niche, and the prize auctions named its leading estates. A 2025 study in Notes and Records of the Royal Society challenges the sequence. Its authors read Robert Boyle's claret experiments of 1669–74 together with the 1660 royal cellar book and Pepys's tavern entry, and argue that the dark, concentrated new style existed before the tariff regime. If they are right, the luxury product came first and legislation only confirmed its position. Whether Westminster created luxury claret or entrenched it is an open question. The evidence on both sides, mostly seventeenth-century notebooks and accounts, is set out in the Haut-Brion authenticity dossier.

Neither side disputes the outcome. By the middle of the eighteenth century four named growths led the market England had built for them, at prices no other wine commanded. The Bordeaux brokers of 1855 drew up their ranking from a century of those prices.