Best of Bordeaux. Rolf Bichsel

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СКАЧАТЬ However, from a modern pragmatic

       perspective, the Revolution was just a turning point that brought an influx of

       new blood and capital, as many estates were acquired by different aristocratic

       families during the Restoration. In the years after the Congress of Vienna, a large

       number of citizens quickly came into money, began by acquiring a patent of no-

      bility (sold in bulk by the reinstated French crown which was constantly short

       of money), and as the crowning glory of their career and a symbol of power and

       success, they acquired a real chateau, surrounded by vines of course. (Nouveau

       riche) bankers or businessmen then replaced Bordeaux's old moneyed aristoc-

      racy who had ruled the winemaking roost in the 17th and 18th centuries, and as

       merchants, notaries, doctors or tradesmen were constantly forced to buy a seat

       in the city parliament, rather than inheriting it from a father or uncle. This was

       almost as essential for a first-class Bordeaux citizen as a service pistol once was

       to a Swiss who wanted to join the ranks of high society.

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       History Fairy-tale chateaus

       Fairy-tale chateaus

       Today only a few, well known wine estates such as Lafite, Latour or Margaux

       actually date back to medieval manors (or ‘seigneuries' in French, a form of ad-

      ministrative district where the local lord dispensed justice and reigned supreme).

       Most of these also had an old, generally dilapidated castle, or more specifically

       a fortress, as a chateau is by definition not a residential building but rather be-

      gan life as a military defence facility. These dark, damp stone palaces with their

       thick walls and arrow-slit windows had long since been uninhabited, or only oc-

      cupied when necessary. From the Renaissance onwards, the old chateaus gave

       way to more comfortable Italian-style villas known as ‘maisons nobles'. The ac-

      tual ancestral seat declined into a symbol of old ancestry and high nobility. One

       of the first actual wine chateaus was Haut-Brion which the de Pontacs built in

       1550 as a country house, summer residence, and symbol of their estate, wealth

       and perhaps even their vineyards which surrounded it. However, the Bordeaux

       wine chateau primarily found in the Médoc is a 19th-century invention. In 1787,

       Jefferson spoke of Haut-Brion without the Château pre

       fi

       x, and only mentioned

       two examples: Château de la Fite and Château Margau, both old seigneuries.

       Only La Tour, also an old seigneurie, had to renounce its chateau title and was

       relegated to a mere ‘cru'. Many ‘chateaus', including the one at Latour, were only

       built after the o

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       cial 1855 classi

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       cation we will soon be examining in further

       detail: it was not until after this publication (which listed all estates still without

       their ‘chateau') that the term for a wine estate became an essential prefix, and

       a real chateau building played a vital role in establishing its image. The build-

      ers of these more or (generally) less tasteful edifices were the nouveau riche,

       entrepreneurs or bankers such as the Douats, Pereires or Rothschilds. They

       found their ideal creator in the form of architect Louis-Michel Garros, the inven-

      tor of every possible ‘neo' style (neo-Renaissance, neoclassical etc.) who was as

       happy to plunder English Gothic as the French Renaissance. The first chateau

       commission given to Garros, who settled in Bordeaux in 1863 after studying in

       Paris, was Fonréaud in Listrac. This was followed by numerous others including

       Lachesnaye, Malescot-Saint-Exupéry, Lascombes and Ducru-Beaucaillou. Gar-

      ros was the true inventor of the ‘wine chateau', later also creating many other

       variants in Béziers, where other levels of society came into money virtually

       overnight thanks to the liquor and mass wine trade. His interpretation of the

       ‘chateau' clearly refuted the principles of the era's other great eclectic architect

       Viollet-Le-Duc (to whom we owe renovation of Carcassonne, a childhood dream

       of a knight's castle in Languedoc as controversial as it was successful), whose

       1858 handbook of architecture complained that the term ‘chateau' should be

       reserved for just medieval buildings with all newer forms being described as

       a ‘maison des champs', or country house: ‘A country which has abolished the

       aristocracy and thus all privilege cannot seriously build “chateaus”. For given

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       Class society History

       the partitioning of an estate, what is a chateau other than a flash in the pan, an

       extravagant structure which perishes with its owners without leaving the slight-

      est reminder.' How can he be so right and yet so utterly wrong!

       Class society

       On 18 April 1855, the Bordeaux Syndicate of Wine Brokers addressed a letter

       to the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce СКАЧАТЬ