This project investigates the creation of one of Europe's great cultural treasures: fine wine from Bordeaux. Modern historians have generally sought to explain the creation of Bordeaux grands crus as a result of wealthy English consumers whose demand for fine wine inspired and funded Bordelais wine-makers, or else the result of superior geography (terroir) and centuries of French wine-making skill. But these explanations, even when synthesized, overlook the necessary role of middlemen, the "British" (in fact mostly Irish) merchants who "raised" the wines in their Bordeaux cellars, blended them to their customers' tastes, and then got the wines to market in Britain and Ireland. In many ways, these merchants were as much the "winemaker" as the maitre de chai at the chateau. Indeed, in French, the merchants were known as "negociants-eleveur," or wholesaler-growers, as it was they who purchased the wine within weeks of production and then "grew" or "raised" the wine in their cellars by racking the wine from its gross lees, fining (clarifying) the wine with egg whites, and blending the Bordeaux wine with wine from the Northern Rhone Valley and Eastern Spain. The importance of these merchants has long been acknowledged by French historians, but their role in producing the wines has never been fully explained. This project has uncovered the activities of leading wine merchants in the creation of fine Bordeaux wines, and placed those activities within a broader network of trade that was centred on Bordeaux and Ireland, but included northern Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean. In so doing, my project shows that neither terroir nor wealthy consumers--nor even a synthesis of the two--can explain the birth of fine Bordeaux wine; instead, the chain of causality must include the entrepreneurial and wine-raising skills of Irish merchants and vast trading networks in which they operated.
This project is important because it shows that our most esteemed consumable commodities are not products of human skill or nature or alone, but instead of human innovation acting with natural resources, and within technological and cultural limitations, in order to meet consumer demand. Specifically, this project shows how Bordeaux grand crus wines, among Europe's most famous luxury commodities, were gradually invented by (mostly) Irish merchants over the course of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, as they purchased the most expensive and esteemed young wines from around the Bordeaux region, and then manipulated these wines in order to satisfy the demands of wealthy British and Irish consumers. It was this style of wine that would become known as "grands crus." This project should provide a helpful case study for commodity historians and business students, as well as provide a fascinating story for wine lovers around the world.
The overall objective of this project is to focus on previously unused private archival sources to tell a story about economic migration, business innovation, international conflict and cooperation, national identity, and cultural assimilation, all of which remain important topics for Europe and the world today.
