July 11, 2016

Imagine a world without Lafite…

It is seemingly taken for granted nowadays that the Médoc has always been the heartland of Bordeaux’s most sought-after wines. In fact it wasn’t always thus. During the English crown’s possession of Bordeaux, it was the Graves that constituted the main body of the English maritime trade in Gascon wine. This changed in the 17th century as canny Dutch merchants sought a way of providing the Claret-thirsty British public with alternative fixes to their favourite Graves and Portuguese wines. In order to feed this need the Dutch had first to find large tracts of land on which to plant vines. It was this market energy that irreversibly changed the Médoc landscape from one of estuarine salt marsh to viable viticultural land. Hitherto much of this swamp land had been used for grazing cattle and sheep.