Few gastronomic rivalries can compare to the competition between the wines of Burgundy, those fabulous descendants of Cistercian devotion, and the wines of Bordeaux, the product of more earthly incentives and innovation. It is a battle not merely for profit but for the hearts of wine drinkers worldwide. Attempts to codify their divergent tastes are often underlaid with more abstract notions of their character: the subtle, complex, somewhat unpredictable flavors of Burgundy are said to capture the bohemian soul of the French countryside, while the more dependable and polished Bordeaux wines represent the best of France’s bourgeois modernity. It is an irresolvable debate, as are so many of the debates that French people love. One might adopt the position of a magistrate friend of the renowned gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who, when asked whether he preferred the wines of Burgundy or Bordeaux, replied, “That is a trial in which I have so much pleasure weighing the evidence that I always put off my verdict.”1
For hundreds of years, there was a clear favorite in the Anglo-Saxon world: the red wines of Bordeaux, known as claret to the English upper classes. In the fourteenth century, for example, a flotilla of two hundred ships would sail for Bordeaux every spring and fall just to carry back enough wine to satisfy the enormous English demand.2 But like so many preferences in the world of gastronomy, the affection for Bordeaux was based less on taste than on politics, business, and war. To understand the English proclivity for claret, one must begin with the life of one of the most influential, romantic, and adventurous women of medieval Europe: Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Eleanor was probably born in 1122, although records are not entirely clear about that. Her father, William X, was the Duke of Aquitaine, a vast territory in the southwest of France, extending from Poitiers and the Loire Valley in the north to the Pyrenees in the south, and from the Atlantic coast to the Auvergne in the east. Since Roman times, Aquitaine had been a distinct and mostly autonomous territory, and even though its dukes were now vassals of the king of France, they controlled a larger and more prosperous amount of land than he did. Just before William X died in 1137, the duke sent a note to the French king, Louis VI, asking him to look after his daughter, Eleanor, whom he named as his heir. Louis then had to find her a suitable husband, who would reign as Aquitaine’s new duke, as it would have been unimaginable for a woman to rule in her own right. It was a fabulous opportunity for Louis, who quickly arranged for Eleanor to marry his own son and heir, Louis. (Here we have to add that French kings definitely lacked originality in naming their sons, hence the nightmare of distinguishing among the many Louis, Henrys, and Philips.)
Eleanor, about fifteen years old at the time of her wedding, was described as a beautiful and energetic woman with blond hair and green eyes. She was raised in the vibrant and joyous court in Aquitaine, where troubadours, poetry, and all sorts of entertainment were highly popular, and the court in Paris must have seemed very bland to her eyes. Her husband was around sixteen years old, the second son of the king, and had been destined for a clerical career before the death of his elder brother. He was a very pious and, some say, boring man—so much so that Eleanor later complained she had married a monk. His father died shortly after their marriage in August 1137, and so Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, very quickly became queen of France as well.
Eleanor was perhaps justifiably blamed for encouraging her husband into a few fruitless military campaigns against some of her unruly subjects in Aquitaine and also against the Count of Toulouse. But what attracted the most criticism was her inability to give the king a son, which at the time was considered the main worth of a queen. In 1145, when she finally did give birth, it was to a daughter. Thus far, Eleanor was a failure in many eyes.
Relations between the king and queen really took a sour turn when Louis decided to join the Second Crusade, after Edessa fell to the Turks. Eleanor accompanied him, and in 1147 they reached Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium. There it is said that she experienced exotic dishes such as caviar, fried frogs, artichokes, and eggplant, as well as sauces redolent of cinnamon and coriander. What she must have thought of the funny Byzantine utensil called a fork, then unknown in France, is anyone’s guess.
In March 1148, the Crusaders finally reached their stronghold of Antioch, which was ruled by Eleanor’s uncle, Raymond of Poitiers. Raymond tried to persuade the king to reconquer Edessa straightaway, but Louis decided to go to Jerusalem first (as a pious man, he considered it to be the main objective of his pilgrimage). Eleanor sided with her uncle, and whether Louis was jealous of the complicity between Raymond and Eleanor or angry with her defiance is unknown, but there was clearly a Before Antioch and After Antioch in their relationship. When the couple left the Holy Land, after a disastrous campaign, it was in separate boats.
The pope tried to save the royal marriage. His efforts seemed successful at first, as Eleanor fell pregnant again, but she gave birth to another daughter. In 1152, Eleanor and Louis were both happy to have their marriage annulled on the grounds of consanguinity, claiming that as cousins, they should never have wed in the first place.
But Eleanor had a follow-up scheme in mind, and very shortly after the annulment she married Henry Plantagenet, who was not only the Count of Anjou through his father, but the Duke of Normandy and future king of England through his mother. (He was in fact the founder of the legendary Plantagenet dynasty in England, which would rule until the death of Richard III three hundred years later.) Henry was a decade younger than Eleanor, and a much more energetic partner than Louis. Apart from the obvious political advantages of the union, he seemed to have a genuine affection for Eleanor, and she was granted a much more active role in political affairs during her second marriage.
Two years after their marriage, Henry acceded to the throne of England (as Henry II). It was a disaster for Louis. Now the king of England, with his hereditary French lands and the acquisition of Aquitaine through marriage, controlled about half of the landmass of France and most of its coastline, from Normandy and the Channel all the way down to the Pyrenees. To add insult to injury, Eleanor, although in her thirties, gave Henry five sons and three daughters. Louis bitterly summed up his situation to the archbishop of Oxford thus: “Your lord, the king of England, lacks for nothing: he has men, horses, gold and silk, gems, fruits, wild beasts, and everything. But in France we have nothing but bread, wine, and joy.”3
Some of that French wine was also destined to be claimed by England. Aquitaine was now an English territory, and its wines began wending their way north in much greater amounts. Eleanor played her part in this, regularly ordering wine from her homeland, and her son Richard made Bordeaux wines the daily fare in his household, an excellent boost for the region’s winemakers. But perhaps the main driver of Bordeaux wines’ rocketing popularity was the fact that under the English, the city of Bordeaux became one of the great European ports. With the rise of continental trade networks, it grew into one of the largest and wealthiest cities under the English crown, second only to London. Bordeaux wine merchants were exempted from export taxes, a clever tactic for encouraging the region’s loyalty to the English rather than French crown. This made Bordeaux one of the cheapest sources of wine for English drinkers, and demand exploded. Bordeaux also took advantage of its geographical position on the mouth of the Garonne River, just before the Gironde estuary and the Atlantic coast, to restrict the export of wines produced farther inland.
The medieval claret so beloved in England bears almost no resemblance to the magnificent vintages produced today. Yet the English role in building up the great port of Bordeaux and gulping down its local wines is an essential element of this success story. Of course, many others played a role, including the local nobles and merchants who built up their great estates, and the Dutch who drained the region’s swamps and revealed some of Bordeaux’s finest terroir (including the famed Médoc).
Credit must be given to Eleanor as well, given that it was her bold leap into divorce and remarriage that brought Bordeaux and the rest of Aquitaine into the English fold. Unfortunately, her initially happy union was derailed when King Henry began an affair with a woman named Rosamund, one that went far beyond his usual dalliances. Eleanor spent most of her time in Aquitaine governing her lands, alongside Richard (the Lionheart), her favorite son. Eventually she turned fully on Henry, supporting her sons when they rebelled against their father. Their revolt was unsuccessful, and while Henry showed mercy on his sons, he could not forgive his wife. Eleanor spent most of the next fifteen years imprisoned in the royal castle in Winchester. Only when her husband died, in 1189, was she released, when Richard became king. He gave Eleanor the regency of England while he spent much of his reign fighting in France or the Holy Land.
In the late twelfth century, a vast amount of northern and western France was claimed by Henry II, king of England and Duke of Normandy; the domains of King Louis VII of France were reduced to the shaded territories shown here. Louis’s son, Philip II (Philippe Augustus), spent several decades dismantling the Angevin dynasty and reclaiming its territories, so that by the mid-thirteenth century, English possessions were reduced to Bordeaux and a large portion of southwest France. From Élisée Reclus, L’Homme et la terre, vol. III (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905), 92.
Eleanor proved a successful regent in his absence, while also thwarting the ambitions of her youngest son, John (later known as the villain king of Robin Hood). In 1199, Richard was slain in France while besieging a rebellious vassal in the Limousin region. As he died childless, John inherited the throne. He was a terrible king, and the elderly Eleanor frequently tried to rescue him from his missteps. She finally died in 1204, at more than eighty years old, and was buried in her beloved Abbey de Fontevraud, which remains a beautiful and moving site to visit today. Not long after her death, John lost most of England’s possessions in France to the powerful French king Philip Augustus. For the first time in the Capetian dynasty, the French king had an extensive amount of territory under his control.
But the English kept their grip on Bordeaux and the region of Gascony, one of the many factors that helped lead to the Hundred Years’ War between France and England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. When that war finally ended, Bordeaux was French once again, but the French king let the Bordeaux merchants keep their favorable export arrangements, and shipments to England continued. The nature of the English demand began to shift in the seventeenth century, when some enterprising Bordeaux winemakers created new and more expensive varieties that captured the higher end of the English market. In 1663, Samuel Pepys noted in his diary what many consider to be the “first wine tasting note in history,” about a new French wine “called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I ever met with.”4 Haut-Brion, the prototype Bordeaux château wine, remains one of the most luxurious products of the region, a Premier Cru Classé that costs hundreds of dollars a bottle.
Within France itself, it took a bit longer for Bordeaux wines to attain the same reputation they enjoyed in England—but today, of course, Bordeaux wines are appreciated in France as much as anywhere else, and they make up more than a quarter of all French AOC wine production.5 But the English still have a special fondness for the old duchy of Aquitaine. In fact, many English expats have elected to live in Dordogne, an area east of Bordeaux located bang in the middle of the former duchy. (Because of this new English invasion, Dordogne is now regularly referred to as Dordogneshire.) In a way, it is simply the latest chapter in the centuries-long love/hate story between the English and the French. As much as these two peoples squabble and fight, they appear to be unable to live without each other, and this is true in the realm of food and wine as much as any other.
The royal tombs in Fontevraud Abbey: Eleanor of Aquitaine and King Henry II (rear); Richard the Lionheart and Isabelle, the wife of King John (front). © Neil Harrison (Dreamstime Photos).