The Middle Ages

What "Claret" Actually Was: The Pale Wine Behind Bordeaux's Most Famous Name

Medieval claret was a pale, briefly macerated clairet drunk within the year: Bordeaux's dark reds came centuries later, with the Dutch and Haut-Brion.

Medieval claret was pale. The wine England bought from Bordeaux by the shipload in the fourteenth century was closer to a deep rosé than to any modern red. It spent a few days at most on its skins, was sold within weeks of the harvest, and had to be drunk before the next one, because it would not keep that long. In modern British usage "claret" means red Bordeaux: dark, tannic, built on Cabernet and Merlot, and at its best after years in bottle. For three centuries the same word named a wine that no drinker today would take for Bordeaux. The meaning shifted in the seventeenth century, with Dutch cellar practice and a new style of red from Haut-Brion.

Vinum clarum

The name refers to clarity more than to colour. In the Latin of the port's documents the wine was vinum clarum, in Gascon vin clar, and in the English of its largest buyers claret. The medievalist Sandrine Lavaud traces the terms in her 2013 survey of Aquitaine's medieval vineyards.

The name set this wine apart from two minority products of the same harvest. True white wine needed a press, an expensive piece of equipment that confined it to well-funded estates and a small, prestigious clientele. Dark red was largely a by-product of the main vinification, kept for blending or drunk at home. The clear, pale wine between the two was, in Lavaud's words, the only one produced in quantity, exported, and sold on the northern markets. When a fourteenth-century Londoner said "claret", the word named neither a region nor a shade. It named the standard product of the largest wine port in the world.

Pale by design

The pale colour was the specification. It was not a primitive technique waiting to be improved.

Lavaud reconstructs the method from the Bordeaux documents. Red and white grapes went in together (the sources do not say which varieties), were trodden without destemming, and the must fermented on skins and stems exactly as a modern red does. The difference was time. Fermentation and maceration lasted "six jours au plus", six days at the outside, and Lavaud writes that this brevity was "the guarantee of the light colour that characterizes this wine". Extraction was stopped on purpose. A few days on the skins gave a translucent, ruby-tinged wine with a light body and little of the tannin that lets a wine age. Nobody intended to age it.

A wine that did not keep

Nor could anyone have. Medieval clairet, Lavaud notes, had to be drunk young "because it ages badly and sours easily". There was no sulfur stabilization, and no reliable way to carry a delicate, low-tannin wine through a warm summer in cask. Wine behaved like fresh produce on a twelve-month clock: worth most in the months just after fermentation, and worth less with every month that followed.

That calendar, rather than taste, set the rhythm of the Anglo-Gascon trade described in the English centuries. Margery K. James quantified the trade in 1951 from the customs registers that survive from 1305; the record campaign of the period, 1308–09, counted 102,724 tonneaux. The new wine, "à peine fait" ("barely made") and known in the trade by the English word vintage, was loaded at Bordeaux from September onward. Some ships did not clear the river until mid-November.

A second, smaller fleet came in spring, once the winter storms had eased, for what was left. These were the "rack" wines, also called Easter wines: racked off their lees to buy them a little more life, and drawn from leftover Bordeaux stock and from upriver wines that had come down late. The trade's own vocabulary records the ranking. Autumn carried the vintage; spring carried the remainder.

Robert Blackmore has reconstructed wholesale prices at Bordeaux and Libourne between 1337 and 1466. His series show how widely the value of a perishable wine could swing with war, weather and currency. In that market, the date of sale decided most of the price.

The Christmas rule

The short life of the wine explains the trade's oddest institution. In 1373 Edward III made it law that the wines of the Haut-Pays (Cahors, Gaillac, Bergerac, Agen) could not come down the river before Christmas, which reserved the autumn fleet for Bordeaux's own wine. This was the privilège des vins. A monopoly on the autumn sailing was worth having because autumn was when wine had value. Holding rival wines upriver until Christmas cost them, in an economy of new wine, the months in which they would have sold best.

Roger Dion argued that the medieval Bordeaux vineyard owed more to its market, meaning Atlantic shipping and northern demand, than to its soils. The clairet style fits that argument closely. The wine was at its best in its first months, and the export trade was organized to move it within those months.

When Bordeaux turned dark

The pale wine gave way in two stages, both after the Middle Ages.

The first was technical, and it came from the Dutch. In the seventeenth century the merchants of the Dutch trade brought the allumette hollandaise, the practice of burning sulfur in casks so that wine could be kept and shipped. They also broke the old Bordeaux prohibition on blending, as Lavaud has shown. Their own interest was sweet white wine, not red. The techniques they spread still changed what any Bordeaux wine could do: for the first time, keeping it became possible.

The second stage was deliberate product design. In the 1660s the Pontac family, owners of Haut-Brion in the Graves, began making and selling in London a new kind of red. It was darker, more extracted and higher in tannin, it travelled well, and it improved with age, especially in corked bottles. A 2025 paper in Notes and Records of the Royal Society describes this "new French claret" as largely replacing the lighter, rosé-hued clairet that had dominated Bordeaux's exports to Britain since the Middle Ages.

The written record of its arrival is well known. Charles II's cellar accounts for 1660 list 169 bottles of "Hobriono", and Samuel Pepys recorded drinking "Ho Bryan" on 10 April 1663. In 1666 François-Auguste de Pontac opened the Pontack's Head in London, a fashionable tavern that also served as the showroom for the family's wine.

Robert Boyle ran experiments on claret between 1669 and 1674. The Royal Society paper reads this as evidence that the dark style existed well before the Anglo-French tariff wars that older accounts credited with creating it. Exactly when "quality claret" appeared, in the 1660s or only after 1704, is still argued over. Leary's 2025 study of John Locke's journal of his 1677 visit to Haut-Brion has reopened the question. The direction of change is not in dispute.

By the eighteenth century claret had become a party marker in Britain. Charles Ludington's The Politics of Wine in Britain (2013) shows Whigs and Tories quarrelling over it as a matter of political identity. By then the word meant what it means now: a dark, expensive wine made to last.

Two words, two wines

English and French then used the same word in opposite ways. English kept the name and moved it to the new dark wine, so that "claret" now simply means red Bordeaux. French kept the old meaning. Clairet survives as an official category of the Bordeaux appellation, which the INAO defines as a dark rosé drawn off after a short maceration. Of the wines made under the appellation today, it is the closest to what the medieval fleets carried down the Gironde.