Antiquity

The Roman Origins of Bordeaux Wine

How the Bituriges Vivisci and a frost-hardy grape called Biturica turned a Roman trading port into a wine region, from the 1st century AD to Ausonius.

When Rome absorbed Aquitania in the 50s BC, Burdigala, the town that became Bordeaux, grew no wine. It drank it, and had done so for generations. The first vineyard there dates from roughly a century later, in the first century AD, and it was almost certainly planted by the local population rather than by legionaries. The order matters. Bordeaux did not become a trading city because it made wine; it began making wine because it was already a trading city.

The version repeated across many websites runs the other way: Roman legions conquer Gaul, plant vines along the Garonne, and Bordeaux wine begins. It is a tidy account, and on that central point it is wrong.

Burdigala before the vineyard

The Bituriges Vivisci, a Celtic people, founded Burdigala on a bend of the Garonne at some point before the Roman conquest. The site suited trade. The river gave access to the Atlantic and to the tin and lead routes of the northwest, while overland and river routes through Toulouse connected the town to the Mediterranean.

Wine arrived along those routes. Elites across pre-Roman Gaul drank Italian wine long before they grew any, and the Bituriges Vivisci were no exception. The earliest archaeological layers at Burdigala contain large quantities of Italian wine amphorae, the standard transport jars of Mediterranean trade. For perhaps a hundred years after the conquest the pattern held. Burdigala was an emporium importing southern wine for its own consumption and for the surrounding region.

Roger Dion built a general argument out of cases like this one. In Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France (1959), still the foundation of French wine historiography, he held that in France the vineyard follows the market: commerce, cities and the demand of buyers decided where vines were planted, not some prior gift of the soil. Burdigala fits his thesis closely. The trade came first, and the vineyard was its consequence.

The legionary story

The popular dating has soldiers of the conquest planting the first Bordeaux vines around 60–56 BC. It survives because it is convenient. It reduces a slow, local process to a single scene and adds about a century to the vineyard's age. Tourism copy repeats it, one page copying the next, until the wrong date looks like consensus.

Historians date it later. There is no evidence of viticulture at Burdigala in the first decades of Roman rule. The written sources and the archaeology converge on the first century AD, under the early Empire, and on a Gallo-Roman population that had paid for imported wine for a long time before it acquired the means, and the right vine, to stop.

Biturica

Pliny the Elder gives that vine a name. In Book XIV of his Natural History, written in the 70s AD, he describes a variety called Biturica, after the Bituriges themselves. Its merit was hardiness rather than finesse. It withstood frost, wind and rain, and it ripened where the tender varieties of the Mediterranean failed.

That was the technical step Bordeaux needed. The Garonne estuary has a damp, cool Atlantic climate, and Mediterranean vines had not succeeded there.

Ampelographers consider Biturica a probable ancestor of the Cabernet family. The word "probable" carries weight: the link rests on a chain of names and shared traits, not on a laboratory pedigree. If it holds, the grapes that define modern Bordeaux are distant descendants of the variety that started the vineyard.

Amphorae, dolia, barrels

Local production changed the town's equipment. Imported wine had come in amphorae, sealed and stackable for a sea voyage. Making wine on site called for dolia, the large earthenware storage jars of Roman wineries, built to ferment and hold wine where it was made rather than to ship it. In Gaul both vessels eventually gave way to a regional invention the Romans admired: the wooden barrel, lighter and tougher than either, and better suited to river trade.

Wine in Roman Burdigala

Burdigala grew into a substantial provincial capital, and wine was part of its urban culture. Mosaics and carved reliefs excavated in the town carry Bacchic imagery: vines, harvest scenes, the god of wine himself. This was the ordinary decorative vocabulary of a society in which wine stood for civilisation.

One structure from the Roman city still stands. The Palais Gallien is a ruined amphitheatre, and its brick-and-stone arches are the only Roman monument of Burdigala still visible above ground. The name is a medieval invention. The building was never a palace, but its walls are the last architecture the Roman town left.

Ausonius

In the fourth century AD the Bordeaux vineyard gained its first major literary witness. Ausonius (c. 310–395) was born at Burdigala and taught rhetoric in the city's well-known schools. He was summoned to the imperial court as tutor to the future emperor Gratian, and under his former pupil he rose to the consulship, the highest office in a Roman public career.

He remained a Bordeaux landowner throughout, and a poet of particular places. He praised his native city. In his best-known poem he described the vine-covered banks of the Moselle. He also wrote with affection about his own modest inherited estate and its vines.

Château Ausone in Saint-Émilion takes its name from him, on the strength of a tradition that places one of his estates there. The evidence has limits. His writings show that vines were a normal, valued part of an aristocratic estate near fourth-century Burdigala, a vineyard established enough to be taken for granted in verse. They do not show exactly where his properties lay, and no modern château can demonstrate descent from them. The name is an homage, not a title deed.

After the fifth century

From the fifth century the Western Empire broke apart. Invasions and insecurity spread through Aquitaine. The long-distance Mediterranean trade that had first brought wine to Burdigala declined, and the city shrank behind hastily built walls.

The vine stayed. Viticulture continued on a local scale, sustained by the needs of the church and by established farming habits. Turning it back into an export vineyard took a new economy. That came with the medieval Atlantic trade, above all the English market, which centuries later made this small Gallo-Roman survival into the Bordeaux known today.