The Rise of Bordeaux and Burgundy

Two Regions, One Destiny

Ask a wine professional to name the two most important wine regions in the world and the answer, for the past three centuries at least, has been almost invariable: Bordeaux and Bourgogne. These neighboring regions in southwestern and eastern France have defined what fine wine means — its quality benchmarks, its classification systems, its economics, and its cultural prestige — for the entire modern wine world.

Their rise to dominance was not inevitable. It was shaped by geography, climate, religion, trade routes, and the specific historical accidents that gave each region a powerful customer base willing to pay premium prices for premium wine.

Bordeaux: Trade Makes the Region

The English Connection

Bordeaux's ascent to international prominence began with a marriage. In 1152, Eleanor of Aquitaine — duchess of the province that included Bordeaux — married Henry Plantagenet, who became Henry II of England two years later. For the next three centuries, Bordeaux was an English possession, and the English became the primary customers for Bordeaux wine.

The trade was mutually beneficial on an enormous scale. Bordeaux shipped wine north to England, and English merchant ships returned with wool, tin, and silver. By the thirteenth century, Bordeaux was the busiest wine port in Europe. Ships carried what the French called clairet — a light, pale red wine quite different from the deep, tannic wines we call claret today — across the Channel in vast quantities. London, Bristol, and Southampton had thriving wine trades built almost entirely on Bordeaux imports.

When the English lost Bordeaux in 1453 at the end of the Hundred Years' War, the trade diminished but never disappeared. The English taste for Bordeaux red wine — which they called "claret," an anglicization of clairet — became embedded in British drinking culture. By the seventeenth century, wealthy English families were specifying individual Bordeaux estates in their orders, and the concept of the Château as a quality brand was taking shape.

Dutch Influence and the Médoc

The seventeenth century brought a new set of influential customers: the Dutch. Dutch merchants were the great trading empire of the 1600s, and they had specific needs. They needed wine that could survive long sea voyages without spoiling — which meant wine with higher alcohol and lower tendency to oxidize than the light clairet of the medieval period. The Dutch also drained the marshlands of the Médoc, the strip of gravelly land on the left bank of the Gironde estuary north of the city of Bordeaux, making it suitable for viticulture for the first time.

The Médoc's deep gravel soils — free-draining, warm, and relatively infertile — proved ideally suited to Cabernet Sauvignon, a thick-skinned grape that produces tannic, long-lived wines. The great estates of the Médoc — Haut-Brion (established 1525), Margaux, Latour, Lafite — began to emerge as recognizable quality brands by the late 1600s. Samuel Pepys noted in his diary for April 10, 1663, that he had drunk "a sort of French wine called Ho Bryan that hath a good and most particular taste" — the first recorded reference to a specific Bordeaux estate wine by name.

The 1855 Classification

The classification that still governs Bordeaux's hierarchy of prestige was commissioned by Napoleon III for the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855. Brokers from the Bordeaux wine trade were asked to rank the leading red wines of the Médoc (and, separately, the sweet wines of Sauternes and Barsac) by quality and price into five tiers, called growths (crus). The result was a list of 61 Cru classé estates, divided into Premier Cru through fifth growths, that has remained essentially unchanged for 170 years.

The classification was not purely arbitrary — it was based on the prices estates had commanded over many preceding decades, which in turn reflected genuine quality differences rooted in terroir. The five premier crus — Lafite Rothschild, Latour, Margaux, Haut-Brion, and (added in 1973) Mouton Rothschild — have consistently produced wines that justify their classification. The system's remarkable stability suggests it captured something real about the relative quality of Médoc terroir.

The En Primeur system — in which collectors buy wine as a future before it has finished aging — developed naturally from Bordeaux's structure. Châteaux needed cash before their wines were ready for market; buyers willing to wait gained access to futures prices. This system still drives the annual Bordeaux release calendar and attracts global attention each spring.

Burgundy: Monks Map the Landscape

The Cistercians and the Clos

While Bordeaux was building its trade empire, Burgundy was developing something entirely different: an almost obsessive understanding of its own landscape. The key figures were not merchants but monks.

The Benedictines of Cluny, who controlled significant Burgundian vineyards from the tenth century, began the systematic observation of which plots produced the best wine in which years. But it was the Cistercians, founded in 1098 at Cîteaux in the heart of what is now the Côte de Nuits, who refined this observation into something approaching science. The Cistercians were extraordinary agrarians — their reform movement emphasized manual labor and self-sufficiency, which meant farming, which meant vineyards.

The Cistercians enclosed their best plots with stone walls, creating the clos (literally "enclosed") that became a mark of premium Burgundian wine. Clos de Vougeot, still one of Burgundy's most famous vineyards, was established by the Cistercians in the twelfth century and enclosed by the stone wall that surrounds it today. The monks kept records. They noted which parcels of the limestone hillside consistently ripened Pinot Noir to perfection and which produced inferior wine in most years. Over centuries, this observational database built the foundation of Burgundy's extraordinarily detailed terroir classification.

The Vineyard Hierarchy

Burgundy's classification is entirely different in character from Bordeaux's. In Bordeaux, the classification ranks estates (Châteaus). In Bourgogne, the classification ranks vineyard plots. This distinction matters enormously. A Bordeaux chateau can expand its production by planting more land; its classification travels with the estate. A Burgundy Grand Cru is fixed to a specific piece of ground — no matter who owns it or how many owners share it, the vineyard retains its classification.

Burgundy's official classification was codified in 1935 with the establishment of the AOC system. The hierarchy runs from regional appellations (Bourgogne Rouge) through village-level wines (Gevrey-Chambertin) through premier crus (identified vineyard sites of superior quality) to the 33 grands crus that represent the pinnacle of the appellation system. The grands crus — Chambertin, Musigny, Romanée-Conti, Montrachet — can produce some of the most expensive wines in the world.

Fragmentation and the Négociant

The French Revolution of 1789 created a peculiarity of Burgundian wine ownership that persists today. The Church's vineyards, which included the finest Burgundian plots, were confiscated and sold off in small parcels. Napoleonic inheritance law, which required equal division of property among all heirs, fragmented these plots further with each passing generation. Today, a single prestigious Burgundian vineyard may be divided among dozens of owners, each farming a few rows of vines.

This fragmentation created the Négociant — a merchant who buys wine or grapes from multiple small producers, blends them under a house label, and sells the result under the vineyard's name. Grandes maisons like Louis Jadot, Joseph Drouhin, and Bouchard Père et Fils built businesses on this model, providing consistent supply to international markets when individual growers could offer only tiny quantities.

The Domaine model — in which the grower makes and bottles wine exclusively from their own vineyards — became standard only in the twentieth century. The shift was partly inspired by Henri Gouges of Nuits-Saint-Georges and, most influentially, by the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, which began Estate Bottled production in the 1930s and set the template for the domaine-bottled, single-vineyard Burgundy that collectors now covet.

The Twin Templates

Bordeaux and Burgundy created the two templates from which virtually all fine wine culture descends.

The Bordeaux model: large estates producing consistent quantities of blended wine under a recognizable brand name (the Château), with a clear classification hierarchy that signals quality to buyers. This model influenced Napa Valley, Stellenbosch, and most of the New World's premium wine regions.

The Burgundy model: tiny plot-level wines expressing the unique character of a specific piece of ground, with quality determined by the vineyard rather than the producer. This model influenced Oregon's Willamette Valley, New Zealand's Central Otago, and winemakers worldwide who believe that the finest expression of a grape variety comes from a single, carefully farmed site.

Both models reflect genuine truths about wine. Quality can come from consistency and blending skill. It can also come from the meticulous expression of a single, exceptional piece of ground. The history of wine since the eighteenth century has been, in many ways, a continuous argument about which model is superior — an argument that generates great wine on both sides.