Food & drink
Pauillac, a village with five classified growths and one spire
The English called it claret long before the French bothered to argue, and the reason traces back to a royal marriage eight centuries ago. A cruise up the Gironde still lands you in the middle of the story.
By Arthur Penhallow26 September 20264 min read
Pauillac is not a large place. It is a working wine village on the left bank of the Gironde estuary, a few streets of stone houses behind a modest quay, with a population that would not fill a decent-sized football stand. And yet within its boundaries or close to them sit three of the five wines given first-growth status in the most famous classification in the history of French wine: Château Lafite Rothschild, Château Latour and Château Mouton Rothschild, an extraordinary concentration of reputation and price for a village most visitors could walk across in ten minutes.
A marriage that gave England a taste for it
The English fondness for Bordeaux wine, still audible in the word claret, has a plain historical cause. In 1152, Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose lands included Bordeaux and the surrounding Gascon vineyards, married Henry of Anjou, who became Henry II of England two years later. Aquitaine passed under English control as a result, and stayed there, on and off, for the next three hundred years, during which Bordeaux's wine trade with England grew into one of the most important commercial relationships of the medieval world. English merchants shipped the region's pale red wine, then a lighter style than the deep reds Bordeaux produces today, home by the barrel-load, and the trade survived, adapted and eventually flourished long after Aquitaine itself reverted to the French crown in 1453 at the end of the Hundred Years' War.
The classification that never officially updates
The system that ranks Pauillac's grandest estates dates to 1855, when Emperor Napoleon III asked Bordeaux's wine brokers to rank the region's best red wines for the Paris Exposition Universelle, using, essentially, the prices each château's wine had commanded on the market over the preceding decades as the measure of quality. The result, the 1855 Classification, sorted sixty-one châteaux into five tiers of "growths", from first to fifth, almost all of them from the Médoc, the peninsula of gravel soil running north from Bordeaux city along the Gironde's left bank, with Pauillac at its centre.
Within a village most visitors could walk across in ten minutes sit three of the five first-growth wines in the history of French wine.
The classification has barely changed since, promoting exactly one château in a century and a half, which makes it either a remarkably stable judgement of quality or a fossilised snapshot of 1850s Bordeaux commerce, depending on which wine merchant is asked. Either way, it is why a gravel lane in Pauillac carries more prestige per metre than almost anywhere else growing grapes, and why the village's own church spire, modest by any standard, sits within sight of vineyards that sell their wine by the case at prices that would buy a small car.
Bordeaux, the city the wine built
The city of Bordeaux itself, some fifty kilometres upriver, owes its grand eighteenth-century waterfront, the Place de la Bourse chief among its set pieces, to the wealth the wine trade brought it during the same centuries the English market was at its height, along with a less creditable share of profit from the slave trade that financed some of the same merchant fortunes. The old harbour quarter, long given over to warehouses, has been restored and reopened to the river over the past two decades, and cruises calling here generally spend a day in the city before or after the shorter run downriver towards Pauillac and the open Gironde.
Sailing up the Gironde
Several Fred. Olsen sailings make a point of combining Bordeaux with the harbours and vineyards along the estuary. Harbours & Vineyards of France, eight nights from Liverpool, calls at Honfleur before heading south to Bordeaux and Pauillac, and Vineyards & Harbours of France, ten nights from Rosyth, follows a similar route by way of Belle-Île and Cherbourg.
Rivers, Harbours & Vineyards of France, nine nights from Southampton, extends the idea further, adding Rouen and a passage up the Seine to the Gironde leg, so that a single cruise covers both of France's great river wine regions.
Summer sailings time their arrival for when the vines are at their fullest and the light over the flat, gravelled Médoc landscape is at its best; the grapes themselves are not picked until September, a detail that has disappointed more than one visitor expecting a harvest scene in July.
By Arthur Penhallow, the name Atlas & Passage’s editorial team writes under. Prices and dates in the trips below come from the operators and can change.
