ILPB- Ep6: A Brief History of the Place de Bordeaux

In the global world of fine wine, so many threads are connected by one single place, La Plas de Vordo. For 800 years La Plas de Vordo's unique trading system has brought the fine wines of Vordo to merchants and collectors around the world. But what was for so long an exclusive local club is now the hub of the international world of fine wine. But despite its huge influence on the world of fine wine today, we don't really know much about La Plas de Vordo. I mean we don't really know what the Plas de Vordo is and what happens behind what appears to be closed doors. The most important and influential wine market place in the world remains shrouded in mystery. How does La Plas work? And maybe more importantly, why? And when does it work? Who's behind it? And who gets to be in the club? And one of the questions that we hear most often from wine makers around the world is, will my wines be successful if they go through the Plas de Vordo? I am Bullen Vigel, co-founder and director of a reneglobal, and after hearing these questions over and over, we decided to explore exactly what La Plas de Vordo is, who the people behind it are, and explore the role that the Plas is likely to play in the future fine wine distribution. And I'm Felicity Carter, the editorial director of a reneglobal. For me, this is a fascinating journey into a place that's growing in importance, but yet remains poorly understood. So come with us as we enter La Plas. Welcome to this six episode of Inside La Plas de Vordo. We've come in a long way already and we've explored a lot from the role of the Courtais and the Negotiant, the mechanism of the Enprimer, and of course the impact of the Beyond Bordeaux wines. And our last episode is coming. We're already working on it, and it will be dedicated to the future of La Plas, and it's role in the future of fine wine globally. To predict the future, one needs first to understand the past, and Felicity you've been very quiet for the past two weeks, any reason for that? Yes, I have been porring through Dusty Archives researching the history of Bordeaux. Dusty Archives, I thought you were interviewing people. Ah yes, I was, but I also had to go into my bookcase and pull out my books on Bordeaux, so I would know what to ask them. And I've barely stopped coughing from all the dust. Do you remember my cat, Sloan Chek? I don't know how he's left all his fur behind in there. I hope it was worth it. I mean, allergy season and all the books. Yes, okay. What did you learn? Ah, look, it was so worth it. I learned lots of interesting things about the history of Bordeaux. For example, what do you think the 1855 classification represents? Well, I'd say that it's a quality pyramid, right? Based on people identifying the best wines. That's what I thought, but it's not. It's effectively a price list, though you could argue that the prices are a proxy for quality. And even more surprisingly, it turns out that the 1855 classification was only one of many classifications that people came up with. It's been the one that survived for the quirkiest of reasons. All right, it sounds like we have a lot to listen to and, you know, buckle up for this episode, because I've known you for long enough to know that you like to find out, like, weird and wonderful facts, so I'm sure the next hour will be full of surprises. And my first question is, you know, you mentioned the quirkiest reason for the 1855 classification survival. What was it? Ah, because of where it was printed. But to explain that, I need to go back to the beginning of the story. But before you go off in loads of directions, you know, we set up our objective for this episode was to understand the origins of La Plouse. Did you manage to find that? Do you know how La Plouse started? I do and I don't. It turns out that the really, the deep roots of it are somewhat shrouded in mystery. But I've also did learn that if you want to understand the historic foundations of the world of fine wine, you have to understand the history of trade. And to get a grip on that, you have to understand that the most important piece of land in Bordeaux isn't the Vignan Tervoir. It's the port. But the vineyards are important to you, right? Yes, sure. But Bordeaux's history is a wine region really begins with its history as a trading port. But instead of me explaining it, I'm going to let Rod Phillips speak. Based in Ottawa, Canada, Rod Phillips is a wine writer, wine historian and wine judge. And he's also a professor of history at Carl's University where he teaches courses on European, particularly French history and the history of alcohol and food. He's also the author of a number of books on wine and wine history, plus the one, including the one I hauled out from my bookcase, French wine, a history which starts with the Greeks and Romans and moves all the way to the modern world. Published in 2020, it's a book I can highly recommend to anybody interested in wine. So I began by asking him about the origins of Laplace. I think the first thing I want to say is that a lot of the history of the trade or the commerce is not really clear. I haven't been focusing a lot on Bordeaux. I've been working mainly for the last few years and last ten years actually in Burgundy, which is completely different. And the whole system, which culminates in La Place de Bordeaux, is utterly different from many worlds in France. Now quite where it comes from is not to be to my mind, it's not really very clear. I mean, what you have at the beginning is, first of all, the emergence of Bordeaux as a major trading port for wine. But I mean, as you know, I'm not telling you anything, you don't know. But not initially for what we would think of as Bordeaux wines, but for wines from other parts of the southwest, wines from the Mamma de, for example, and even as far back as the Guyac and so on. Those were the areas where wine was being grown in the early Middle Ages. I mean, yes, there was wine around Bordeaux itself and the modern Bordeaux region. But most of the wine that was being shipped through Bordeaux was not what we would now think of as Bordeaux wine. And what you see is that the, you know, the, you know, the growth of exports and Bordeaux was really sort of unique in this respect as well. And I think this is an important piece of the story. Is that Bordeaux began to export large amounts of wine by the 13th century, whereas in the rest of France, most of the wine that was produced was being consumed in France itself. So it's this export element that's really important. Was it just because Bordeaux had a port that it was exporting it wines? Yeah, apparently, according to Rod, that was pretty much the story. He said that moving wine from Burgundy was very difficult even as far as Paris. And the thing about the thing about, you know, before the, before the 19th century is that moving wine in barrels over land was very slow, very cumbersome, risky, you know, barrels just broke apart. As, you know, these carts with either wooden wheels or later steel wheels, you know, just, shook barrels apart. There was all the, the opportunity for, for adulteration and fraud on the way. And it was very, very expensive. I mean, you can, if you had, if you had to move, move wine over land, it increased the price dramatically. So moving wine by, by water was far, far cheaper and it didn't matter whether the water was, was the canal or river or in the case of the case of Bordeaux, you know, a river and, and then around the coast. So it had, it had, you know, that advantage. And the advantage was initially to, as I said, you know, initially to the, to the, to the wines have produced outside the modern Bordeaux region, not the Bordeaux wines themselves. Now, you find that, you know, during the, during the Middle Ages, the, the city of Bordeaux then began to encourage the, the cultivation of vines, the, and production of wine in the immediate area. And then they put it in place restrictive laws to try to prevent a competition with the, with the, the producers outside Bordeaux. So it sounds like Bordeaux's wine trade was a commercial proposition right from the start. So I guess the accountants down by the water side could literally see all the money being shipped through the port in the form of wine. Yeah, that's right. So they understood that if they made the wine themselves and stopped everybody else from using the port, they would capture all of the revenue. But there were other things going through the port like bull, right or cereals or, but, but the world was really important. So how come we don't know about Bordeaux as a sheep area? Yeah, well, I spoke to a second story about this. Charles Leary did a PhD in history at Cornell University and afterwards went into the restaurant and hospitality trade, including a stint as a restaurant wine director. He's also lived in the city of Bordeaux and is now based in Panama, where he's writing about wine and going back to doing research. So he told me that while there was trade in other goods going on, wine was the most important. I believe there was certainly trade in other goods going back to the medieval period, including wool and things like that. But mostly, as we're talking about the trade with England, I would put wine in the top category. Ever since Eleanor, I've been a Criterion, married, and England, and the Criterion. region basically became one. Trade was facilitated and wine as the English, they were actually producing wine at first, that declined and Bordeaux became the major supplier of wine. So it was very, very important commercially, fairly on and that continued to evolve. At this point in the conversation I was like, what England was making wine and I speculated rather than Astalie on how bad it probably was. That doesn't surprise me. But going back to the question of wine from other regions, did they just stop accepting wine to ship and if so, what did that mean for other regions? Ron Phillips said it had a huge impact, but I'll let him speak for himself. Well, there's nothing they could do. I mean, you've got to think of France at this time. It's not really France. France has made up of a number of provinces. It's made up of cheese of principalities and that kind of thing. I mean, there is a king and the king has a certain amount of influence, but these small regions, in fact the cities themselves, had a great deal of power. And so they could just bring in regular basis like this. These are protectionist rules and they can bring them in and really there's nothing anyone can do about them. Just bear in mind that these are walled cities at this time. Wine had to come in through the gates of the city. Wine was wine and all goods were charged duties, taxes as they came through the gates. So they could allow stuff, you know, they could prevent stuff from coming in. So they had a real high level of control of what came into what came into Bordeaux. At this, led to a number of these regions outside the Bordeaux region going into decline for some time. I can think of regions like Cah and a Gaiac, Mamonde and so on. Going into decline just as the wine industry, if we call them industry, just as the wine industry in Bordeaux was ramping up. So if people at the waterfront were imposing duties or whatever they were doing, was someone else making sure that Lennonos were planting wines. Well, Ron said they didn't seem to be a formal system of encouraging people to plant vines. So there wasn't sort of central planning with finance officials telling people what they had to do. But he did say the aristocrats who owned the land were actually pretty smart. He said, and I quote, "The nobles have had a pretty bad press. People tend to think of them are sitting around eating chicken, drinking wine and not doing very much and living all the hard labor to the peasant. But it was the nobles who were at the forefront of agricultural reform increases in productivity." Yeah, I think sometimes the elites do have their worst. But I guess, I mean, if I want to be cynical, one can also see that they could see the potential for profit, right, especially at the time. They were mostly planting cereals. So after the wine left the port, where did it go? England, I suppose, right? Yep. That's right. It went to Bristol and then to London. Some of it went to Scotland and Ireland and some of it was forwarded to the Baltic regions. And who was buying? Who were the buyers? The supermarkets equivalent of today who send over buyers to tell the growers what they want? Yeah, they did send agents and many of those families are still there, like the Barton family who were originally from Ireland. And what style of wine were they buying? Well, for the British market, Rod says it was light red wine and that wine makers would add in white wine if the vintage produced wines that were too dark. He said the borderline were very conscious of their market and they produced what the market wanted. So when did the heavier red styles begin to appear? Well, partly that was the preferred style of the Dutch who were up to me reckoned with in the 17th century. The trading empire was expanding and of course, that meant that Dutch people had more money to spend on wine. So to be clear, the Dutch have been trading with the borderline since the medieval period, but they really began to move in during their own expansion during the 1600s. So I've got some historical review of my own to contribute because the Dutch also liked sweet white wines. They used to add sugar and syrup to their white wines and may have been some of the earliest customers for sort of helping to drive that particular style. That's interesting because I always thought it was a 19th century thing. There's these couple of different stories about this person or that person not picking their grapes in time and then Betrice has settled in and they went, "Oh, it's wonderful." Yeah, while those stories might also be true, but they can still discover that. If there's no market and no one is buying that style, then it's an invention for nothing. So it could also be that those specific wines attracted a lot of attention, but it's clear that style actually existed by the late 18th centuries because Thomas Jefferson shipped some back to America in 1789. Ah, okay. All right, so let's go back to the topic of Bordeaux as a commercial entity. One of the things that the Dutch did was they drained the swan plants, including exposing the gravel of the meadowk, which I suppose been more than available to Plain vineyards. That's right. And it also apparently made it easier for the Dutch to transport wines. Now, it's a fantastic piece of trivia. The guy who drained the swan was named Jan Adriass Leaguewater, which means something like empty water. It sounds it was born for the job. But my next question is with all this trading going on to boast the Netherlands and the UK, and we see there was two stars with the two markets. Did the trading system, as we know it already existed? You know, whether already that triumvirate of, of course, the shadow, but the courtyards and the negotiator because I'm guessing the aristocrats didn't really want to have their hands into commerce and price and bootkeeping. That's not what the class do, right? Right. So first of all, I have to apologise to any Dutch listeners to the podcast over the way that I'm mangled, that I am a drainer. But going back to the courtyards and negotiators. So we know that there were trading firms already operating in the early 18th century, and some of them are still around today. Nathaniel Johnson. But I did ask Rod when the three-part system negotiator and negotiators and producers began to crystallise as the formal system we know now, and this is what he had to say. Well, my sense is they come into the picture in the 17th century, but to my mind, the picture is not as clear as it's sometimes represented. The example, when do you think of I'll know the Pontac, right, who, you know, with what became opening up, you know, when he started, he opened his tavern in London in 1665. I think, I mean, he didn't use his pros, I know he didn't use Courtyard, he didn't use the negotiator, he didn't use anyone, he simply had a single supply chain which went from his winery or his vineyards, his winery straight to retail in London. There's no there's no evidence that he used intermediaries at all. So it's possible then to, you know, to sell directly to appears to have been possible to sell directly to a retailer. And how many producers actually used intermediaries is not altogether clear? So we should clarify that he's referring to Lord Arnors III of the Pontac, the owner of Obrejo at the time, who opened the tavern in London that was called the Pontac's head. Did Rotse, when was known for certain, the Negotiator Producer System existed? Yes, he did. I think probably sometime in the 18th century, but certainly in the 19th century. I mean, I think it's more recent, I think, you know, the integrated stable system that, you know, we call Laplace is more recent than many people think. I mean, I've seen references to it being 800 years old, and I think that's just wrong. And so, from what I see, I've been doing some research in Bordeaux for my book. In the last few months, I haven't been able to find good records of the internal trade in Bordeaux yet for anything much earlier than the 19th century. And you do find them clearly in the 19th century. And what's about the classification system? I mean, it's difficult to talk about the history of Bordeaux without talking about classification. Yes, I asked him about that too. Right. Well, the earliest classification of Bordeaux that I know of is sort of the mid-17th century, around 1647, I think, is the first one. And they're not all sort of official classifications. I mean, people will throw in, for example, Thomas Jefferson's rankings of the wines. So this is a sort of personal, a personal judgment on the part of Jefferson. But you do find that wines were classified right from the middle of 1600s. But again, just like 1855, these classification to base on price. They're not based on quality. And I think, and this is really the interesting thing about the history of these classifications is that people assume that they're based on quality. That there was somehow grand tasting, primer, or tasting of the finished wines. Over. for many years and that people came up with these classifications but they're based on price and they were always based on price. If you look at these classifications, mostly in manuscript, well yeah, mostly manuscript up until the 19th century, you can see that the ranking of the name of the of the Chateau or the name of the producer is always accompanied by a price. It's not a score, it's not a you know a score out of a hundred or anything like that, the number there is the price. So did everybody have their own prices or was there one agreed price for everyone? They're pretty they're pretty consistent actually, they have a certainly consistent at the top. You've got you've got the four, the four more original premier crew at the top and they just appear over and over and over again and I think it I mean I look at this and I think I say in the book I'm not really sure but but it it became a kind of an orthodoxy that you put these four at the top because they're the ones that these are the wines that fetch the highest prices. And in a sense you know what in a sense these these these these classifications, we're not classifications of well I mean they were they were classifications of wine but they were more classifications of the success of producers or the success of the state and even at the beginning they're not really concerned about I mean some quite a few of these classifications don't list particular estates but they they list regions or you know districts within within Bordeaux. So for example and and Middok for example Basak for white but and then then they gradually as as they become more refined they begin to isolate or isolate and and indicate particular particular estates like like Obrionne and and Lafitte and and the Tour and Margot. I mean those those four I just always there and I you know as I looked at the as I looked at these you can see from I mean there are dozens of these rankings from you know 1647 to 855 and then beyond I mean here you get these same four and that district struck me as weird to be honest I mean why is it that these four domains these four chateaux as they later become oh you know why why are they fetching the highest prices and so either because like they're they're wines were just consistently outstanding judged by the changing personnel who were who were drawing up these classifications and you know and that no one thought to say well you know look Margot hasn't been all that good for the last few years you know maybe we should promote someone else up or or we should promote someone else up because their wines are being performing extra you know extra ordinary well. So what are the other things I asked him was whether the price was the way it was because it reflected the actual quality or because you know those chateaux had a specific reputation and maybe they were powerful people or whatever and he said it was important to remember that it was only rich people who could buy the wines and they tended to be pretty discriminating so other people could trust their taste. It's it's funny because it's something similar happened in Burgundy when you know Philippe Luebouard he decided that they needed to butte gamet out of Burgundy that gamet wasn't wasn't the right taste and that pinot know I was the good taste so it's really funny across France how nobility actually influenced style but if various merchants were dealing with different clients though they would have been some differences between their individual classification I suppose we've seen that it in like the same wine so when did the big classification the 1855 coming to being the 1855 Paris exhibition oh yes of course I see so the 1855 Paris exhibition was a massive exhibition called Exposition Universale des Prodruits de L'Agriculture de l'industrie et des bauxaires de Paris so it was the first of ten commissioned by Napoleon III, Napoleon III that showcased art and products from more than 30 countries and I'm just going to translate the title because it showcased product from agriculture industry and art and it's it's really interesting to see the French putting all of those three forward as as one of the things that advanced civilization but Napoleon at the time was actually trying to outdo London's great exhibition of 1851 yes and so because of that he wanted the best of everything including the best wines of Bordeaux which meant that the merchants had to choose which ones to send and so by definition you know has a question well you know what which are our best wines so they clearly went back and here we have a number of a number of Courtiers who responsible for doing this they went back and they looked at previous previous classifications and clearly what they could see is there's there's there's consistency you know right from the right through the first half of the 19th century there's consistency in in the classifications so there was no reason for them to change it so what you what you get in 1855 is essentially what you know what was being what was in the classifications of the of earlier in the 1850s and then further back through through to about 1818 11 18 18 13 I think is the process so in a sense the 1855 class specification was building on those earlier classifications yeah and as I said to Rod can you imagine the whites that they must have had I said the Courtiers must have had you know fantastic diplomatic skills because can you imagine the you know the struggle over who got to be present at the exhibition well I mean first of all that you know they didn't want to put producers names on them they didn't want to use the labels in the in the exhibition they just wanted them labeled by by district and then then it was decided I forget one of one of the producers appealed to Napoleon the third directly and and he said yes we'll put the we'll put the labels on so you can show your labels and I think what was different was was that the the 1855 exposition in Paris was a it's a consumer show for the first time now this is this is the time when you know that when you know hundreds of thousands of people would come to an exhibition and not look just at wine but they look at you know product of all kinds clothing textiles agricultural products you name it but wine is there as well and it's a it's a consumer show rather than the you know the the earlier classifications were largely for the trade not for not for consumers so much now probably what undoubtedly some consumers were aware of the classifications these would be the wealthy people who were buying them yes valente a year when we talked with him it was very proud of the fact that you know the courtier was the one called upon to establish that classification and because of their place in neutrality in the system but one of my you know going back to my original question and that biggest question of why did this particular class particularly classification become the permanent one and the one that hasn't you know changed for the last 150 years he won't believe has simply answered this question is but for the first time this you know the classification got out into the world there was in public it was published you know in the catalog of the of the exposition so my my sense is that it's simply the publicity that this got and perhaps that you know the cachet of the 1855 exposition I mean it was a very important thing it's like the you know the you know the great 181858 exhibition in London the Crystal Palmas exhibition I mean it's very important landmark in you know in in in national history because here you are here you are putting your nation on display and it's you know it's it's it's it's wealth and it's products and everything on display and and so you know it's really no other classification got this amount of publicity so you mean we have the 1855 classification as the permanent one just because it was printed in the catalog history turns on the weirdest things but I okay but if I remember correctly champagne and burgundy were also at the 1855 of his exhibition so why didn't they end up with their own system of classifying wine too yeah that's a really interesting question so I did ask for all that and he said it was because there was no tradition of classifying in those regions whereas Bordeaux's merchants were doing it for at least 200 years and while we're talking about how sort of history intervened he also said that the French revolution had a completely different impact in Bordeaux than it did in burgundy because Bordeaux was dominated by the nobility and burgundy by the church so when the new government seized all the church lands they got burgundy's vineyards whereas the aristocrats of burgundy could hold on to their own land now this really surprised me because I had this idea that the aristocrats had all been guillotined well that's that's one of the myths of the French revolution because of course we talk a lot about what happened in Paris but Bordeaux is quite far away from Paris geographically and so also quite a few lost their head The biggest group of them survived and by the 19th century were just as prospers as they had been before. They still had their limbs and they still had their way of doing. Yeah well not only that but one of the interesting things that Rod told me was that the old regime still have a big influence today. The La Plasse system is really to my mind like an old regime system. It's very very antiquated. It's a very antiquated system and it's you know it's a very close it's a close shop it's almost like a monopoly and this is very characteristic of the old regime. What the revolution strives is it was break down these monopolies like they ended the guild system for example. But what you have in the in La Plasse is kind of like a guild system. It's difficult to get into and they and they they they operate within their own rules and they make it very difficult to operate for people to operate outside their rules and that's that to me is what what is sort of odd about it odd about it is that you know most other regions are pr人ed operated on a much more open commercial system but here you have it it's almost a close shop. So that that brings us back to the fact that Bordeaux was really built by accountants. And the Ristocrats but I don't believe you can just create a wine region from nothing if the land or the climate isn't any good right even with the best well in the world. So Bordeaux couldn't have been a supplier of fine wine for centuries if it couldn't produce fine wine. Yes absolutely I had a discussion with Charlie about this and he said there are records of people investing in particular sites so that they could get the type of wine they wanted. By the way in the following conversation he refers to Montesquieu the Baron and French judge who came up with the idea of separation of powers so it was a really important and constitutional history but he also had a Bordeaux château. So how much understanding did they have of Téhua at the time? I think in Bordeaux as continues to be the case there were market leaders and then there were followers but I think particularly perspricatious vineyard-like Montesquieu and before him the de Pontac family knew that if they produced wine there was great consciousness of Téuas though it wasn't exactly called Téuas we understand it today. The Montesquieu actually did use the term Téuas. But they knew that if they produced on particular vineyard site if they pruned the wines in a certain way if they only gave a certain kind of manure to the vines they even the de Pontac family even used different kinds of wine training systems depending on where the vines were in the old Brinnell and vineyard to produce a desired effect and then historians have also shown that they were very careful in in the cellar and using new oak, topping up the barrel so oxidation was reduced and things like that. So it was a combination of both viticultural and the inological prowess if you were but I can't say that that was a sort of elite consciousness. They knew the markets they knew how to produce wine in a particular way and then by the 1720s you find that production of a darker red colored claret being amplified throughout Bordeaux but it took a few decades. And that was for the Dutch market. Well it turns out that eventually the British also wanted this style and it wasn't because of the trendy Dutch it was because of politics. Britain and France as you know have been enemies at different times for hundreds and hundreds of years and Charlize is at one point this reoriented the British wine market towards the Iberian peninsula which of course supplied stronger reds and it also to reinforce this they brought down tariffs on French wine and that brought about novel ways to avoid the taxes. There were two methods obviously smuggling just outright smuggling was one. So evading the British patrol ships landing at a small port somewhere in England or Scotland unloading the barrels and the wine was there with no customs duties imposed. The other technique was to declare the wine that's actually from France to be of another origin. So they would say came from Portugal, came from Spain. The customs officers usually there's a quote I have winked at the practice of this occurring and the wine entered it was still taxed but it had much much lower rate than French wine would be and that continued for a long time there were periods like in the 1750s the British tried to to put an end to the practice but it mostly continued to go on. Another fascinating thing I've discovered is that I think this had its ups and downs but some of the traders actually discovered that importing bottled wine was going to be easier tariff wise and tax wise than importing huge barrels where they would have to make a huge cash outlay in customs duties. So there was one particular trader I know of who shipped bottled wine up the terms to London in large quantities in probably starting in the 1750s and 1760s. So this would be a good moment to mention that one of the reasons there was so many scots trading in Bordeaux is because the French gave them special deals as you mentioned France was at war with England for a big part of it it's free but so were the scots and they had that common enemy they had England as a common enemy. So that's how scots and also the Irish ended up in Bordeaux as a state owners and negotiers and for the history for the story that's also why my family refuses to this day to cheer for England at the rugby ballcups. They will support the scots but never the English team. But let's go back to the smuggling because that's really fascinating. Okay. We love the good exhibition. No we do. So that's right it's the text reduction. It turns out that people will do anything for a good text reduction. Now in the 1750s there was a huge attempt by the British government to crack down on the smuggling so Charlie says people came up with another idea. They purposely smuggled hoping that they would get caught. Famously and one theory is that in the early 18th century this was actually intentional means to get fine wine into England but they would auction the wine that was impounded or they would find a buyer for it but most often it was auctioned. So there's a theory that look real and some of the other from a crew like Margot started intentionally making sure that their ships got caught by the British patrol ships so that it would then be brought legally into England auctioned off and whoever the purchaser was had a deal with the producer in Bordeaux so they would get a cut of the sales. As far as I know that's pure speculation but it could make sense. So this is all fun history I mean I guess it's funny for us today but we should also balance it out by you know talking about some of the darker periods in Bordeaux that also happened at that time like like the impact of Veloxera. Yeah and Charlie talked about that. Oh it was severe in Bordeaux and in other regions whose products went through Bordeaux. Veloxera hit Bordeaux itself extremely drastically in the latter half of the 19th century and it's fairly widely known that Bordeaux started importing wine from places like Rioja to then re-export it as their own wine but there were devastating effects and a lot of people don't realize this but out of huge economic impact there was one study that was done on the Dordonia which is immediately adjacent to Bordeaux that found that the generation of children affected by Veloxera were actually significantly shorter when they grew up than previous generations so it had a severe economic impact and people weren't able to feed their children as well due to that but Bordeaux also I've also found as Veloxera rage through Bordeaux people started coming up with new ways to sell their wine as quickly as possible before their vineyards were destroyed so a lot of people started selling wine while it was still there with the grapes hanging on the vine so they referred to this as Sush sales which sort of transmogrified into two modern owned premar where certainly was precursor of it so it was a way for people to get money quickly get cash flow, survive economically, before the wine was even made. - Yeah, that's a horrible story. And if you are interested in that period, I mean, there's so much records about it and the impact that it had on France. But one of the interesting topic that I wanted to mention and to bring on today is how, you know, that part of history was linked to the creation of the AOC system in France, because we've talked a lot about the border classification, but that's not part of the AOC system. So, going back to Charlie's story, we are at the beginning of the 20th century and France's vineyards are ruined. There's this massive economic and social crisis. And what has been described as copycat vineyards are growing around the world, because France is lacking grapes. And so France is buying grapes all wine from the neighboring countries and selling them under a French label. And so, that annoyed a couple of people in France. And they came up with a first set of regulations that were the premise, the first step, if you will, towards the AOC system that we've got today. So, in 1919, the first thing that they've done is they wanted to guarantee origin and provenance, because the problem was all of those smuggled wines again that came to France from different countries, but were sold under label of French wine. So, what they put in place was a system of premium. You would get more money from four wine that would come from a delimited region that they had decided on. But actually, funnily enough, it didn't really have the impact that they wanted, because what it created was a huge value. I mean, people were getting more money just because the wines was coming from a region. So, they were doing more wines. So, they replanted France's vineyards with those very high producing grape varieties, like the hybrids that are not used today, and some of them are not even legal today to be used. So, that really, really annoyed Joseph Caput, who at the time was the French minister for agriculture, and he came up with that idea of, okay, if we control provenance, it's not just for provenance, it's also for the sake of quality. So, the laws, sorry, of 1935, which are still the ones that we are using today, wasn't really to protect wine from fraud, or fraudulent wine like bad wine per se. It was to protect fine wine from ordinary wine. It was to exclude people that were not driven by quality, and that also created, so again, we're still using this almost a hundred years later, but it had created a problem or an issue at that time, is that suddenly, from that moment, they're not only put an intellectual property link with the region, any wine coming from the region has the right to call themselves from that region, but also notions of quality and safeguarding quality, because now you also have to prove that you have the right level of quality in order to carry that label. And we could talk about this in more details, and I can point our listeners to some sources of research for this, because it's, I mean, I find it fascinating, but this duality, the AOC system being ruled both by intellectual property laws, and being at the same time a quality certification, that's really unique in the French legal landscape, and that explains a lot of the current problems with the AOC system. But before we get into it, I just want to take a second to ask a favor to everyone listening to the podcast right now. If you like what you've heard so far, please do subscribe to the Rini podcast channel on any of the platforms that you are listening to this episode on, and give us a cool rating. It really helps. - And when we say give us a cool rating, what we mean is please give us five stars. But going back to the Flock Zero sales, one of the questions that popped into my mind when I was listening to Charlie is, is that the start of the AOC system was at the reason for it, the Flock Zero? - It is, and it isn't. So Charlie's done incredible research into the origins of this system, which he summarized in a wonderful article for the canter. Now, they probably will put it behind the paywall, but I recommend everybody goes and finds it and pays money to download it because it's a great article. So at this point, I'm gonna let him take over and tell the story of the rise of on-premise. - So obviously, World War II had a pretty devastating impact on line production and wine sales. Then, both France and England were very slow in recovery and economically in the late '40s and early '50s. The U.S., however, was booming. And what I've discovered is that a lot of the important sales started shifting to the U.S. market. And in particular, a man named Robert Hasse, who actually went on to found a vineyard in California, was a wine dealer in '17, excuse me, '17, '54 in 1954. And there was a lot of wine he noticed in Bordeaux, still in barrel, unsolved, among the top producers in Bordeaux. And he had an epiphany, which was to sell the wine, still in barrel, to his customers. And he was connected with a wine shop called M. Layman in Manhattan, which later joined with Sherry Wines to become Sherry Layman. So he created an offering in '17, I'm gonna keep saying '17, he created an offer in 1955 for his special customers to buy cases, case minimum, top-rated estates before it was even bottled. And that turned into his competitor, Layman Wines, excuse me, Sherry Wines, doing the same thing within a few years. And this was basically a way to move more of a wine that wasn't selling into the American market. It was not wine as an investment, it was not on-premur in the spring following vintage, like it is now, but it was an important shift in how wine was gonna be sold, especially the top estates, the finest wines from Bordeaux. Then there were a series of pretty bad advantages in the 1960s, and suddenly in 1970, there was a very good and very high yielding vintage in Bordeaux. And this sort of shifted from a buyer's market to a seller's market. And the Bordeaux chateau began selling on-premur to foreign dealers in a much larger capacity for the '70 and the '71 good advantages. They got a little ahead of themselves because the '72 vintage was not very good at all. They were a bit arrogant and would even deny barrel tastings to some of the merchants and wanted to sell this stuff. And by the time everyone was tasting in '73, everyone knew it was a horrible vintage and the whole idea sort of collapsed. But the basic structure of selling on-premur between what Robert Haas was doing in the 1950s, then that shifting to the major merchants in New York, and then this marvelous vintage in '71 sort of structurally changed, at least the perception of how wine could be sold. It could be sold to consumers long before it ever reached the market. In some cases, two to three years before. So wait, was this merchants going on and buying on behalf of customers who know what they wanted? Or is it merchants just by barrels knowing that they can probably sell it once they've got it? A bit of both. It apparently was merchants buying wine because they knew the market really well and they knew they could sell it. And sometimes it was because they had specific customers in mind. The offerings in the '50s and '60s from Laman and from Sherry went to specific customers. They had a specific sort of high end mailing list that they made these offerings to. There was also even an on-premure tasting in Manhattan, the spring after vintage in '71, I believe. So that's an interesting occurrence. So barrel tastings of wines to allow sales of wine that wouldn't be available for a couple of years after that. And then '75, is when merchants, at least in England, to some degree in northern Europe started offering, explicitly offering on-premure sales to their customers. Then there were some more bad ventages and everything really took off in '82 with that vintage, which is still considered a very important and round vintage. The interest thing is that the wine from the 82 vintage was softer or softer tan ins, richer, darker and color, and more easily accessible to novices or particularly Americans who didn't know a lot about border wines and how they should be. So I've talked to merchants who say that in 82 and in the years following it really changed the way in which people were evaluating border wines. So the old style of wine may be fresher, a little bit thinner, more classic, but highly tannic than needed to be laid down for 10, 15, 20 years, no longer became the son after style and of course not him alone by critics like Robert Parker who gave rave reviews to the 82 vintage were an integral part of that process. So communicating about wine became very important to on-premur and the role of critics and scores. So let's go back to the story of on-premur. I've told the story from the 1950s going forward in some slight degree, but on-premur existed long before that. But it was usually in November of the vintage year and not in the spring following. So it's clear that buyers were going to wine estates sampling the barrels and making commissions for wine in the fall following vintage in the 1740s and probably much earlier. And why did it move to spring? It was better for everyone involved to have it in the spring. The wines were more mature. I mean a lot of these November purchase wines could have been fermenting or they had gone dormant because of the cold weather but then as soon as spring occurred wherever the barrel ended up it would start fermenting again. So the spring just made more technical sense and also the chateau were wealthier. So I know that a lot of the chateau had to sell their wine in the fall just because they had that huge buildup of expenses in the fall for paying all of the vineyard workers, the pickers, paying for new barrels, paying for all the wine production process and they needed the cash. If they could get a bank loan they were paying interest. If they couldn't get a bank loan they were not going to survive. So the fall sales were very important given the economic climate in the late 19th, early 20th century and even earlier. So again we see that money is really important to this story. The post-war financial environment is particularly integral because France and England were in a slump. Well the US was enjoying the jet set era so they had money to burn. So let's go back to that 1970 vintage which was so good that it put power back into the hands of the chateau. This was a time when finally they could name their price and prices began to rise. The problem was that the chateau got overconfident and started getting a little bit arrogant. They had the 72 vintage which was terrible but they promoted it as being the vintage of the century and convinced a lot of merchants to buy it. By the time they were tasting the vintage in '73 they realized it was a horrible vintage and the whole thing sort of collapsed. There was a brief blip in 1975 which was a pretty good but smaller vintage and British wine merchants and others actually started to sell on-premure to their customers and this included the wine society. The first on-premure vintage was 1975. Bordeaux did as much as it could to promote this idea of on-premure but it really didn't take off until the 1982 vintage which was another great vintage and that really I would pinpoint it. '72 was really '82 as being the defining moments for on-premure and it just took off inform after that. Really by the turn of the century I think it became more what it is today in terms of a huge festive event with thousands of people descending on Bordeaux in the spring. Now we have this other annual ritual as well, all the articles that come out each year seeing that on-premure is a disaster and that this system is about to collapse. Yeah and I guess that's also linked to the rise of the wine critic. Anyway so there's so much more to talk about but that's the end of my historical research. Pauline I know you've been doing some research of your own. What did you find? Well I wanted to understand you know what the rule of Asia was in all of the history of Leplas of course it would be a bit more recent but that's where it's fascinating because that's the 1982 vintage turns out was just important to American consumers as you mentioned but to consumers in southeast Asia as well so it really changed a lot that vintage. So we previously talked about the way the year 2008 was incredibly important in fine wine because it's the year the Hong Kong government dropped its duties on wine and Hong Kong instantly almost overnight became a fine wine hub and auction houses and merchants rushed to service the market which at the time was always the gateway to China and so I talked to Simon Tam who's a wine pioneer in the region and also the former head of wine Asia for Christie's he remembers that period really well let's listen to him. Then of course you know there was a re-tasting of Robert Parker's, Robert Parker did a re-tasting of the 82's and then Moulton came up tops and so on and so on and then people were saying "oh no 82 must be great" and you know it doesn't taste canic and you know it's not purple and it actually is more agreeable and so the next wave was chasing 82's and by this stage a lot of people have become a little bit more secure in their own appreciation. You think well you know what I'm going to try not just 82, 82 Moulton I'm going to try maybe 82 second third or fifth growth then what happened was that so it was 2008 I guess sort of you know three or four short years later people were like well people were bragging about their own primer allocation only to be loved by somebody else who mixed them who are more wine secured. When are you going to drink it? Oh yeah the the the the the the writers said this is good for you know 45 years. Now nobody absolutely nobody in Hong Kong wants to wait even 20 years or 20 months to drink anything let alone wine you know and so this get rise to the wine auction business. And so the world of fine wine changed forever. Now for anyone interested in knowing more about Boydonuts history I strongly recommend that they get hold of Rod Phillips book French wine and Charlie Leary recommended the work of historian Charles Luddington. And Valente Ancailler how a courtyard of reference that you will remember for the first episodes he really recommended Philippe Rudier as well. No to believe you can speak French and all the job that he's been doing at University Montagne in Bordeaux. But I feel like we've packed a lot into this episode from no smuggling to philosopher to wars between the French and the English to how American prosperity drove the young primar system. Well the thing that I take away from all of these conversations is that as much as we romanticize wine it's a business and the highest profits accrues to those who understand the business the best including logistics. Ludgistics again and people in Bordeaux understand you know both business and logistics. So researching this podcast has brought me into contact with some of the smartest people you know I've met in the wine world. But one of the other things I was reflecting on you know listening to all the interviews that you've done is how vivid like lively the history is and even you know sometimes two hundred years later you can feel that there is some rest of that that the way Bordeaux trades is still really impacted by that history and that culture and how embedded in history Laplaces. Yeah and the other thing I think is that you know you can look at the modern day things which seem like you know quirky traditions but what you discover is that people in the past were really smart and they made those decisions for very good reasons at the time. Anyway so that's history and I recommend that everybody goes and reads more about this because it is a fantastic history. Pull in our last episode is next episode what are we going to talk about? Well you talked about the smart people of the past and and the decisions they take for good reasons for the last episode we're going to talk about the smart people of the present and the decisions they are taking today that are likely to impact the next 25 years of La Plas de Bordeaux and not just La Plas as you know a border lay locally local system, but it's it's global impact on the future fine wine. Okay, I've got a prediction about something that will be going on in 25 years. All right. Good for it. Whether the wine media still exists in print, digital, voices through satellites, whatever, there will be people saying this year is the final year for on-premise the system is about to collapse. Well, and yes, probably, but as you've mentioned and as you've clearly demonstrated, never underestimate a system that has been around for more than a hundred years. Yeah, always surprises you. Until next time. Cheers. This podcast episode was presented by me, Felicity Carter, editorial director of a rainy global, along with Pauline Vickard, the CEO and co-founder, and it was edited by Polly Hammond and the five forests team. We want to thank all the fascinating personalities who took the time to answer all of the hard questions we threw at them, only a few of whom were featured in today's episode, but you'll be hearing from many, many more of them in the episodes to come. Insider Plaster Border was made possible thanks to the support of the Civivision, one of Border's leading negotiations house. We are very grateful to Mathew Shadowly and all of his team for sharing insights, data, contacts while allowing us to do the editorial freedom. Until next time. See you. Bye.