cultivated the ancient Cabernet Sauvignon. Dionysus served as their wine con-
sultant and was outwitted by Bacchus who introduced barrel aging, and if they
had not died laughing they would still be blithely fertilising wine history with
absurd rubbish. If terroir were reduced to such ridiculous tales, then two thirds
of Bordeaux would onlybe only be good for growing radishes.
The truth is much more prosaic. As the Gauls – or more precisely, the Gallo-
Romans – liked to put a few drinks away (their only other pleasures were bread
and games) and wine was too expensive to import, they began planting their
own vines in around the second half of the first century. To do so, they first
11
needed a grape variety that could withstand the capricious Atlantic climate:
Biturica, mentioned by Pliny the Elder and the agronomist Columella, and pos-
sibly a cross of varieties introduced from Spain and the Balkans. They planted
this wherever space could be found, gobbling up the terroir. And when they har-
vested more wine than they could drink, they sent the surplus to the newly con-
quered northern provinces of Brittany and Britain which had no lack of thirsty
throats but had had no success in growing vines despite numerous attempts to
select more resistant varieties. This required ships and a port, and Burdigala was
thus founded (thank you Jupiter), at least if historians are to be believed, as their
friends the archaeologists have not yet managed to find the Roman docks which
they presume to have existed in the most enterprising locations of the city.
One thing is certain: Bordeaux became the largest, most important wine city
in the world, as the half-moon-shaped meander of the Garonne – into which
numerous streams flow and where the original inhabitants of Bordeaux estab-
lished a settlement – was not only easy to defend, it also proved to be a perfect
natural port thanks to all the inflows from rivers such as the Lot, Tarn, Aveyron,
Baïse and Gers which chose the Garonne as their outlet. Then, and now, it acts as
an interchange and is the inevitable final stage of a journey from the hinterland
(nearly a quarter of modern France) along the almost 100 kilometre Gironde
estuary to the Atlantic, and offers links to the world's interconnected oceans.
In Bordeaux, the tides are still so strong that the river goes into reverse every
eight hours – acting as the perfect outboard motor for Roman galleys. By the first
century AD, Burdigala was already an emporium and a trade port, as recorded
by the historian Strabo.
Without its port, Bordeaux would now be part of a region called Libourne
rather than the other way around, for the right bank of the Dordogne in Saint-
Emilion – where Atlantic influences are more tempered and olive trees and cork
oaks are able to survive in clay and gravel soils – contained what was an ideal
Lafite Rothschild
12
History Fact and fiction
winemaking terroir for the Romans, rather than the sandy and gravelly river
sediment on the left bank of the Garonne to the north and west of the city where
the Romans probably grew their vines, or the scree to the south which Bordeaux
locals planted from the 16th century. And least of all on the gravel hilltops of
the Médoc, which only became accessible all year round once Dutch engineers
had drained the surrounding marshes using a sophisticated system of channels
and sluices. But even so, Saint-Emilion and Pomerol, whose winemaking his-
tory apparently has Roman roots (the name is a reference to fruit cultivation,
with ‘poma' meaning apple but also fruit in general, so why not grapes?), stood
at the gates of the city of Libourne, which failed to rival Bordeaux despite its
small port. Rural Libourne thus produced wine primarily for personal use until
the mid-18th century.
In fact, the ditches and furrows which the Romans supposedly carved out of
the limestone rock to facilitate the rooting of their vines (as mentioned in nu-
merous scholarly books) have been shown by recent research to date from the
18th century. Furthermore, scholars have long been arguing about the location
of the remains of the grandiose Villa Lucaniacus belonging to Roman statesman
and poet Ausonius. But they are hardly likely to be slumbering in Saint-Emilion
and are thus of no use as proof of the wonderful wines which the town is sup-
posed to have already been producing at the time.
Arnaud II. de Pontac
13
Fact and fiction
Ausonius went down in Bordeaux history because he scratched ‘Oh father-
land, famous for its
