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The Other Bordeaux: Libourne, Fronsac and the Long History of the Right Bank

From Charlemagne's fortress at Fronsac to Pétrus: how Libourne, Saint-Émilion and Pomerol built a Bordeaux apart, on the right bank of the Dordogne.

Until well into the nineteenth century, the most expensive wines of the Libournais came from Fronsac, not from Pomerol or Saint-Émilion. That ranking, documented by the geographer Henri Enjalbert in his 1983 monograph on the area, is one sign that the right bank of the Dordogne ran on its own terms. It had its own port at Libourne, some fifty kilometres upstream of Bordeaux, and its own saint, institutions, merchants and order of vineyards. Historians of the region, from Yves Renouard and the Bordeaux school of Charles Higounet to Enjalbert, have treated the Libournais as a distinct commercial and human unit rather than a suburb of Bordeaux, whose left bank on the Garonne held the city, the large merchant houses, the Médoc estates and the 1855 classification.

A fortress and a hermitage

The right bank's first written record is military. The Royal Frankish Annals state that in 769, on his first campaign as king, Charlemagne marched against Hunald of Aquitaine to the Dordogne and built a fortress there called Fronsac (Fronciacum). The tertre of Fronsac, a steep hill above the confluence of the Isle and the Dordogne, overlooks the river traffic of the whole valley. Castles stood on it for a thousand years, and a duchy was later attached to the name.

A few kilometres east, tradition places the Breton monk Émilion in the eighth century, living as a hermit in the limestone caves of the hill that now bears his name. The same tradition has him die there in 767. Religious communities formed around his tomb: Benedictine monks first, then Augustinian canons from 1110. In the early twelfth century a large monolithic church was cut downward into the limestone plateau. The vineyard grew up around the monasteries and the town, on slopes that have been worked without interruption since.

The famous Médoc, by comparison, is largely a creation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when parliamentary and merchant fortunes drained its gravel banks and planted them. The right bank's landmarks (a Carolingian fortress, a hermit's tomb, a rock-cut church) date from the early Middle Ages. Calling it "old Bordeaux" is accurate in the literal sense.

1199: the Jurade of Saint-Émilion

On 8 July 1199, John Lackland, king of England and duke of Aquitaine, sealed the charter of Falaise. It confirmed the liberties of the burgesses of Saint-Émilion and created the Jurade, a sworn body of jurats with political, judicial and economic powers. Wine was part of its remit. The Jurade proclaimed the ban des vendanges that opened the harvest, inspected barrels, and pursued poor quality and fraud. This was municipal wine regulation, six centuries before appellation law. The medievalist Frédéric Boutoulle showed in a 2011 study that the Jurade's first decades (1199 to 1253) were the high point of Saint-Émilion as a bonne ville. The town was walled in the 1220s, stayed loyal to its king, and ranked second among the towns of the Bordelais, after Bordeaux itself.

The Revolution abolished the Jurade along with every other corporate privilege. Winegrowers revived it in 1948 as a ceremonial brotherhood, and it still parades in red robes. The medieval territory itself was given official standing in 1999, when UNESCO inscribed the Jurisdiction of Saint-Émilion on the World Heritage List as a cultural landscape: the town and the eight communes of its old jurisdiction, 7,847 hectares in all. It was the first vineyard landscape in the world to be listed.

1270: Libourne, the English bastide

The right bank's main town was planned. In the 1260s the English crown, which was then founding new towns across Gascony, decided to build a bastide where the Isle meets the Dordogne, on the site of the old Gallo-Roman landing place of Condate. Henry III's lieutenant Roger de Leyburn completed the foundation in 1270, and the town took his name, later gallicized as Libourne. Boutoulle notes that the new bastide's growth quickly checked that of its older neighbour, Saint-Émilion.

The site decided Libourne's trade. It stands at the practical upper limit of seagoing navigation on the Dordogne, which makes it an ocean port nearly a hundred kilometres inland. Ships loaded there and sailed straight for England. During the English centuries and long afterwards, the wines of Fronsac, Saint-Émilion and their hinterland were shipped from their own quays. They never passed under the walls of Bordeaux, or through its middlemen.

Inside and outside the privilège

That independence mattered because of the rules described in the article on the privilège des vins. From 1241 until the Revolution, Bordeaux reserved the main autumn sailings for wine from its own sénéchaussée and made the Haut-Pays wait until Christmas. The Libournais fell between the two. Its wines were not among the privileged vins de ville of Bordeaux, but they did not share the fate of the Haut-Pays either, because Libourne had its own port and, in time, privileges of its own.

The town's heritage panels describe how those privileges worked. Wine grown in Libourne's territory was sold first. Wine from Bergerac and Sainte-Foy, further up the Dordogne, had to wait for winter before it could come to market. The rule caused constant disputes, which were settled by the seneschal of Guyenne and the Parlement of Bordeaux.

So the privilege was not simply Bordeaux against everyone else. It ordered trade along a river, and Libourne applied the same model on the Dordogne against the growers upstream: the right bank was subject to the system and used it.

When Fronsac outranked Pomerol

In 1663 the duchy of Fronsac passed to the Richelieu family. In the eighteenth century its best-known holder, the maréchal de Richelieu, courtier of Louis XV, who had earlier borne the title of duc de Fronsac, built a pleasure pavilion (a folie) on the tertre. He entertained there on a scale that made the name fashionable at court, and the wines benefited. Historians of the appellation record that Fronsac then had the highest reputation in the Libournais, and Enjalbert documents that its wines sold for more than those of Saint-Émilion or Pomerol well into the nineteenth century.

Pomerol, today the most expensive name on the right bank, was for most of its history an obscure hamlet of smallholders next to Fronsac. The order has since reversed. The interactive map shows, era by era, how far Bordeaux's rankings have moved.

Why there is no right-bank 1855

The right bank is missing from the 1855 classification for commercial reasons, not because its wines were judged inferior. The list was drawn up for the Paris Universal Exhibition by the brokers of the Bordeaux marketplace, from their own price records. It ranked the wines that passed through that marketplace: the Médoc estates, plus Haut-Brion, plus Sauternes. The Libournais traded through Libourne, with prices set by another town's brokers. Its wines were not rejected; they were never in the ledger.

The two banks were also different societies. The left bank's classified growths were large estates built with parliamentary and banking money. The right bank stayed a country of peasant and family holdings of a few hectares, closer in structure to Burgundy than to the Médoc. Pomerol is the extreme case: barely 800 hectares shared among some 140 properties, with an average of around six hectares and some under one.

Pomerol has never had a classification: too few large proprietors wanted one, and the market ranked the wines anyway. Saint-Émilion did the opposite. In 1955 its growers' syndicate, supervised by the INAO, published the appellation's first official classification: 75 estates, eleven of them premiers grands crus classés. Unlike the 1855 list, which has barely changed, it was designed to be revised roughly every ten years. There have been several revisions since, the latest in 2022, each bringing promotions, demotions and lawsuits.

The Corréziens of Libourne

Much of the right bank's twentieth century was shaped by merchant families from the Corrèze, on the poor plateaus of the Massif Central. The Écomusée du Libournais records the pattern. Antoine Moueix arrived from Liginiac by bicycle in 1902. Jean-Baptiste Audy founded his house in 1906. The Janoueix and others followed, buying struggling properties for cash in bad years.

The central figure came a generation later. Jean-Pierre Moueix, born in the Corrèze in 1913, founded his négociant house on the Libourne quays in 1937 and staked it on right-bank appellations that the market then undervalued. In 1945 he obtained the exclusive right to sell Pétrus from its owner, Madame Loubat, and in 1964 he bought a half share in the estate. Under the family, a small Pomerol property with no grand château became one of the most expensive wines in the world. Its prices pulled up the rest of the appellation, and then the right bank as a whole. No official list was ever changed to reflect this; Pomerol's standing rests on prices alone.

Fronsadais, Bourg and Blaye

Most of the right bank lies outside the famous appellations. Downstream, Bourg and Blaye face the Gironde estuary. Blaye began as a Roman castrum guarding the approach to Bordeaux. Both towns shipped wine in the Middle Ages, long before the Médoc on the opposite shore was planted with large estates. Between 1685 and 1689 Vauban closed the estuary with three works: the citadel of Blaye, Fort Pâté and Fort Médoc. UNESCO inscribed them in 2008 as part of the Fortifications of Vauban.

Behind the tertre of Fronsac lies the Fronsadais proper, a plateau of villages including Saillans, Galgon, Vérac and Saint-Germain-de-la-Rivière, whose wine filled Libourne's barrels for centuries. It is still an area of small family estates. Château de Brague, at Vérac, founded in 1937, is one of them.