Photo by Ian McCausland
GARY’S CORNER
Engineering Bordeaux By Gary Hewitt, DipWSET, CWE, FWS, Sommelier Winemaking is full of creative solutions to specialized problems. I have often envisioned engineers, late in the evening, around a low table strewn with bent and empty beer cans, laughing and scribbling plans on napkins. For one particular invention, I picture a sublime moment of creation as a machine is imagined into existence. It’s taller than wide, straddles grapevines, and uses flexible rods to whack grapes from the vine onto a conveyer belt that carries them upwards and dumps them into an onboard hopper—a fantastical Rube Goldberg invention! But no, these absurd machines exist and harvest the majority of the world’s grapes every year. Solutions often seem mundane compared to the mechanical harvester, but every action, from planting a vineyard to the distribution of finished wine, is impacted by engineering. And, very occasionally, engineers get to play on a grand scale. In the case of the Médoc region of Bordeaux, engineers transformed a salt marsh into some of the most revered vineyards in the world.
Also at the time, the English and the French were repeatedly at loggerheads over trade, and the English were imposing harsh duties on French wine. In looking for alternate markets, the Netherlands was discovered as a profitable destination, and relations with France flourished. Therefore, it was no surprise that France turned to the Dutch master engineers— the dessiccateurs—to drain the country’s marshes. The deal proved extremely attractive to the Dutch engineers. To comply with French law, the land to be drained was signed over to the contractors who assumed full financial risk. In return, once the lands were drained and ownership reverted, the contractors had access to the lion’s share of the reclaimed land (although they paid rent). Many of the Dutch stayed and became French citizens with the consequential results of further consolidation of important wine estates and a flourishing reputation for the Médoc.
The potential of the Médoc was hinted at by a famous estate just to the southeast of the city of Bordeaux in an area called Graves (meaning gravel). A property owned by the Pontac family called Haut-Brion had developed a reputation for wines of a “particular taste.” English philosopher John Locke made a pilgrimage to Haut-Brion in 1677 to find a “little hillock facing west, whose soil is nothing but pure white sand, mixed with a little gravel. One would imagine it scarce fit to grow anything.”
The actual engineering feat was complex and involved the techniques developed to reclaim low-lying coastal land in the Netherlands. The high sand dunes on the ocean side of the Médoc were stabilized by extensive plantings, while tidal flooding was controlled by a system of dikes along the Gironde backed up by mills and pumps to drain the marshland. Any hope for an agricultural future depended upon preventing saltwater from permeating the soils. In total, 3,500 hectares of land was reclaimed from the estuary. Channels dug to facilitate this engineering feat are visible in the Médoc to this day.
At the time, similar gravel soils were noted to the northwest of the city along the bank of the Gironde Estuary. The area was remote, but patches of gravel above the arable land used to grow wheat supported a few promising vineyards. These islands of vines later became the great wine estates of the Médoc, but at the time, their villages, now famous in the wine world—Margaux, Saint-Julien, Paulliac, and Saint-Estephe— were linked only by water transport. The most westerly reaches of the Médoc nearing the Atlantic Ocean were sand dunes and salt marshes affected by the rise and fall of the tides.
The success of the process greatly exceeded expectations. The complex strata of sands, gravels, and clay underlying the gravel beds created perfect environments for growing Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc. This could not have been predicted, nor could the extent of fame and prosperity of the region. Perhaps the engineers did not create the brilliant terroir of the Médoc—eons of geological time and processes did that—but their efforts certainly revealed the terroir and provided the wine world with some of its greatest glories.
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