The Middle Ages

How Bordeaux Rigged the Market for 500 Years: The Privilège des Vins

From 1241 to the Revolution, the privilège des vins blocked Haut-Pays wines until Christmas, giving Bordeaux a monopoly on the English fleet.

Between 1241 and the French Revolution, wine from Cahors, Gaillac and the rest of the upper Garonne basin could not be sold through Bordeaux until Christmas. By then the English wine fleet had loaded and left. The rule was the core of the privilège des vins, a set of trading privileges the city's merchants first asserted in 1241 and kept until the Revolution abolished them. Enforced through a wider body of regulation called the police des vins, it reserved the autumn sailing, the best-paying market of the year, for Bordeaux's own wine. Upriver growers were left to sell late, sell cheap or not sell. For five centuries, a rule about the calendar did as much to rank the wines of the Southwest as their soil, climate or grape varieties.

A city between two rivers and one customer

Bordeaux sits where the Garonne widens toward the sea, downstream of its confluence with the Dordogne. The interior drained by those rivers was known as the Haut-Pays, the "upper country": Cahors on the Lot, Gaillac on the Tarn, Bergerac on the Dordogne, Agen on the Garonne. Every barrel made there had to float past Bordeaux's quays to reach the Atlantic. Whoever controlled that bottleneck controlled the wine trade of an entire quarter of France.

The customer came from politics. In 1152 Eleanor of Aquitaine married the future Henry II of England, and Gascony passed to the English crown. In 1224 the French took La Rochelle, the main rival port on the Atlantic coast, and Bordeaux became England's privileged supplier. Roger Dion dated the decisive growth of the Bordeaux vineyard to the thirteenth century and attributed it to Atlantic shipping and northern demand. That is the period in which English ships began filling the river every autumn, and in which the city's merchants moved to make sure the wine those ships carried home was theirs.

1241: the burgesses claim a right

From 1241 the burgesses of Bordeaux claimed, and gradually obtained, a set of exemptions and priorities over the wine passing through their port. Their own wines received favourable customs treatment. More important, they gained the right to sell those wines before anyone else's could reach the market.

No single charter created the privilege. It accumulated, concession by concession, from English kings who depended on Bordeaux's loyalty, its harbour and its customs revenue, and who paid for them in commercial favours. Over the following century, customary advantage hardened into written law.

1373: Edward III's Christmas rule

The formal version came in 1373, under Edward III. The medievalist Sandrine Lavaud gives its central clause as "le Haut Pays ne pourra descendre ses vins avant Noël": the Haut-Pays may not bring its wines down before Christmas.

The date is what made the rule effective. Medieval wine was perishable. It was at its best, and fetched its highest price, in the months just after the harvest, and nobody had a reliable way to keep it through the following summer. The English fleet therefore sailed in autumn. Ships gathered in the Gironde, loaded the new vintage and carried it home for the winter; a smaller second sailing in spring took what was left.

Keeping Haut-Pays wine off the river until Christmas gave Bordeaux's own wines, those of the city's sénéchaussée and its immediate hinterland, an effective monopoly on the autumn fleet. When the wines of Cahors or Gaillac were finally allowed down, the large ships had sailed and the best prices had gone with them.

The police des vins

The Christmas rule sat inside a broader set of regulations that historians call the police des vins, the city's control over everything touching the wine trade. Its principle was separation and priority. Rules fixed when outside wine could enter the port, where it could be landed and stored, and how it had to be kept apart from Bordeaux wine, so that the privileged product could always be told from the tolerated one.

Blending was prohibited: Haut-Pays wine could not go into Bordeaux barrels. Lavaud has shown that the ban held until Dutch merchants broke it in the seventeenth century. Enforcement lay with the city's own authorities, which meant the merchant oligarchy the rules were written to enrich. The privilege was therefore more than a tariff or a tax. It was an administrative system that sorted wine into first and second class by origin, centuries before anyone spoke of appellations.

The Haut-Pays

The port's customs accounts give the scale. The registers of the Grande Coutume record 93,452 tonneaux of wine exported through Bordeaux in 1306–07 and 102,724 tonneaux in 1308–09, the highest figure on record. A tonneau held 800–900 litres. Lavaud describes this as the all-time peak of the port before the modern era. These totals count everything that passed through Bordeaux, Haut-Pays wine in transit included. The privilege governed the order of sale in one of the largest trading circuits of medieval Europe, and it placed the upriver growers last.

Those growers were Cahors, whose dark, strong wine the English knew well; Gaillac, one of the oldest vineyards in the Southwest; Bergerac; and Agen. Each had river access, established production and buyers. What each lacked was the right to reach those buyers in season.

Over the long run the effect was structural. A region that could sell freely into the autumn fleet could invest, plant more and build a name. A region that could not stayed in a subordinate position in the Atlantic trade for as long as the privilege lasted. The commercial map of Southwest France, with an internationally known vineyard at the river mouth and less famous ones upstream, is in large part the map the privilege drew.

After the English

The privilege outlasted the political order that produced it. The French victory at Castillon in 1453 ended three centuries of English rule. The kings of France now held a city whose loyalty they needed and whose trade they taxed, and they maintained and confirmed the arrangement instead of dismantling it.

It went on to survive the loss of the English market, the arrival of Dutch buyers and the reorganisation of the trade around new products and new customers. Henri Kehrig, the nineteenth-century historian who documented the institution, titled his study Le privilège des vins à Bordeaux jusqu'en 1789, and the date is exact. Only the Revolution, which abolished privileges of every kind, ended it. By then the rule of 1373 had governed the river for more than four hundred years, and the claims behind it went back five and a half centuries.

Markets and terroir: the Dion debate

The privilège des vins is central to the oldest argument in Bordeaux historiography. In his Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France (1959), Roger Dion argued that terroir is a social fact more than a geological one. On his reading, the great growths of Bordeaux owed their wealth to commercial strategy and to elite demand going back to the Middle Ages; soil and climate were necessary but never sufficient. The privilege fits his thesis closely, since it ranked vineyards by a date on the calendar and not by their gravel.

The opposing school, from Henri Enjalbert to René Pijassou, has argued for the primacy of soils, and the question is still open. Any account of why Bordeaux rose while Cahors and Gaillac waited still has to include the five hundred years in which a wine's access to the English fleet was decided at the customs post on the river, not in the vineyard.