Many would buy
barrels of young wine to sell to passing Monks and Roman soldiers travelling
the roads of southern Europe; some areas very quickly developed a reputation,
in 570, Gregory of Tours proclaimed of a Burgundy wine, ‘there is no liquor
preferable to the wine of this vineyard’.
By the Middle
Ages the wine trade was thoroughly established and it proved a highly sought
after commodity; in the early 1200’s a law was passed in Portugal that anyone
guilty of killing a vine should be tried ‘as though it were the death of a man’.
No doubt, for hundreds of years,
producers in France, Spain, Italy and Germany in particular were besieged by
brokers, importers, agents and merchants.
But when did a
wine producer attract wine drinkers – the ordinary consumer - to their
door? In fact, the idea of the wine
producer welcoming visitors is relatively modern. By the seventeenth century
many private producers (the Church was still a major vineyard owner) had become
rich or the vineyards had been acquired by wealthy patrons who did not
contemplate dealing with the lower classes – or even the merchants themselves.
Bordeaux established the barrier between consumer and producer and in many
cases this is still true today.
So where did the contact between producer and consumer occur first? Surprisingly, it might have been in Bordeaux, or at least via a Bordeaux producer, and a ‘First Growth’ at that.
Chateau Haut Brion,
in Graves just outside Bordeaux city has a history that takes your breath away.
Established around the 14th Century it has a story suitable for the
big screen, involving Barons, Counts, Kings, slander and beheadings at the
Guillotine, the World’s most famous diary, a US President, Robinson Crusoe,
Napoleon, war casualties, American billionaires and a Princess or two. And,
possibly, the first POS wine marketing.
The story is too
long for here, but one person stands out, that of François de Pontac. By
the 1600’s ‘Pontac’ wines were gaining a reputation and the ‘Obrien’ or ‘Ho
Bryen’ was often singled out. When in 1663 Samuel Pepys stopped at the
Royall-Oake Taverne in London and enjoyed, ‘a sort of French wine called Ho
Bryen that has a good and most peculiar taste…’ demand increased even more.
Up steps François, who
decides to create a sales outlet in the heart of London for his wines. He buys
a pub called the Sign of Pontac’s Head and serves his own wines. François in
1680 spots the UK as a huge potential market and takes the wine to the
consumer, thus erasing the gulf between producer and consumer. The Tavern and
his wines were a great success, soon the most fashionable eating house in
London. François knew his marketing and how to create an image, Spanish wine sold
there for 2 shillings a bottle, Haut Brion for 7 shillings. Visitors included
Daniel Defoe, Jonathon Swift and Dryden. What a contrast this must have been to
the rest of the Bordeaux Chateaux, whose owners remained invisible behind their
columned mansions in the Medoc.
The success in
London had another effect. That of sending visitors to seek out the source of
this wonderful wine. Philosopher John Locke was the first recorded ‘tourist’ visitor
to Haut Brion in 1687 and despite changing ownership (and losing one to the
French Revolution), the visitor’s book reveals the whole spectrum of
aristocracy and celebrity. Innovative marketing runs through Haut Brion’s
history; later owner Joseph de Fumel was sending wine to Sweden in the 1760’s. By
the nineteenth century its popularity, price and demand made it impossible to
overlook for inclusion as a ‘First Growth’ in the 1855 Classification, despite
being way outside the Medoc. Improvements in transport and periods of peace
swelled the numbers arriving to taste the wine and walk the walled vineyard.
Yet François may
not have been the first exceptional wine sales rep; in 1700 Claude de Brosse
took several barrels of wine by ox and cart some 400 kilometres to Paris to put
before the King and Champagne heir Charles-Henri Heidsieck rode a white
stallion all the way to Moscow to sell his wine to the Tsar – both made
successful sales.
François de
Pontac may have been inept as a politician (his family had been in the Bordeaux
Parliament for generations) but he knew marketing. Creating a trendy gastro pub full of the
who’s who of London society and featuring the aspirational ‘house wine’ created
a loyal following, eager to visit this fabled winery in France. The wealthy and
the determined could do so and wine tourism began. All this only 20 years after
Van Riebeeck made wine for the first time in SA. Today, the ordinary consumer
is still welcomed at the Chateau, not unusual for New World wineries, but still
impossible at many in Bordeaux.
No doubt Haut
Brion wasn’t the first wine tourism destination, over some 3000 years there
must have been many ‘must see’ destinations on Europe’s wine map and countless
vineyards held in awe by wine lovers, but few can be so lovely as Haut Brion,
or have provided such excellent wine since the fifteenth
century.
Haut Brion has
328 years of wine tourism and those companies who much later opened offices in
London to easier distribute their wines, like Penfolds, and Gallo, or in China
like Torres, or those who had negociant and merchant links to Burgundy or
Bordeaux trading from wharehouses on the Thames or in Amsterdam, were way behind
the marketing savvy of de Pontac who effectively cut out the middle-men and who
had been putting glasses of his wine into consumer’s hands in 1680.