On Thursday, May 31, 1967, in the Great Rooms at its King Street headquarters in London, Christie’s held its first “Finest and Rarest Wines” sale. The selection, which, besides the cellars of Linlithgow and Rosebery, included lots from “Amiya, Dowager Countess of Sandwich” and “the Right Honourable the Lord Brunt-isfield,” was a dream for collectors. There were quaint, lopsided, mouth-blown bottles of oddities like eighteenth-century Milk Punch, extract of absinthe, 1830 Tokay, and Sandeman’s 1911 Coronation Vintage Port, as well as several nineteenth-century bottles of a strange, flat Champagne called Sillery that was once popular with the British upper class. Most coveted was the collection of pre-Phylloxera Bordeaux, 164 of the best wines in the best vintages, in the most desirable bottle sizes.
In Bordeaux, big bottles could range from magnum (the equivalent of two bottles) to Marie-Jeanne (three bottles) to double magnum (four bottles) to Jéroboam (six bottles) to Impériale (eight bottles). In Burgundy and Champagne, older Jéroboams were called Rehoboams, an Impériale was called a Methuselah, and even bigger bottles existed, including a Salmanazar (twelve bottles), a Balthazar (sixteen bottles), and a Nebuchadnezzar (twenty bottles). Collectors loved these—for their rarity, for their drama, and for the fact that wine aged more slowly in them. In the Rosebery sale, the Lafites alone included nineteen magnums of 1858, a magnum of 1864, two Jéroboams of 1865, and forty-four magnums and seventy bottles of 1874. The sale, in a single stroke, established Christie’s wine department as a seller of rarities, ushered in a new age of wine collecting, and positioned Michael Broadbent as its public face.
TRADITIONALLY, WINE HAD left France for foreign markets in sixty-three-gallon casks known as hogsheads. British gentlemen would store these casks and drink their way through one before ordering another of its kind. Sir Robert Walpole, the eighteenth-century prime minister, had a cellar full of them; he particularly liked Margaux and Lafite.
It was during the quarter-century preceding Thomas Jefferson’s visit to Bordeaux—the same period when the cylindrical, cork-stoppered, easily stacked glass bottle became common and opened the way to long-term storage and maturation of claret—that the English adopted the custom of laying down bottles to drink years later. English gentlemen subdivided their cellars into bins, each big enough for three hundred bottles (the equivalent of a hogshead). They labeled the bins with château name and vintage, and filled them with bottles that were motley in appearance. These were unlabeled bottles filled from casks by a gentleman, or more likely his butler. (After 1850, they would be joined by labeled bottles filled by middlemen such as Bordeaux or London merchants, and, less frequently—until the 1920s—labeled bottles filled at the châteaux themselves.)
Inevitably, cellaring of wine trickled down to the middle classes. The practice was popular enough by the 1760s that the same Pall Mall bookseller who had published Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary came out with a book for recording wine purchases. The Cellar-Book, or Butler’s Assistant, in keeping a Regular Account of his Liquors sold well enough to generate several editions.
Exactly which wines the English laid down stayed remarkably constant. The passion they and the Scottish nobility shared for first-growth claret approached an addiction. Lafite, in particular, enjoyed a special status both in Bordeaux, where in all the early classifications it was ranked first among firsts, and in Britain, where it was the preferred wine of the peerage. Below these four was a broader, increasingly articulated hierarchy of growths. In 1787, Jefferson mentioned three tiers, around 1800 a fourth tier was named, and around 1820 a fifth.
This unofficial five-tier stratification of Bordeaux’s wines would be codified thirty-five years later. With the Paris Universal Exposition approaching, Napoleon III charged the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce with drawing up a list of the best. The chamber turned this over to the region’s brokers, who, to avoid the indelicacy of picking favorites, instead drew up a list merely of the most expensive wines, and arranged them by price. The resulting Classification of 1855 formalized a numerical ranking of sixty-one of the most sought-after reds. Below the four first growths were fifteen second growths, fourteen third growths, ten fourth growths, and eighteen fifth growths. All of the wines came from the so-called left bank, west of the Garonne River. The predominantly merlot-based right-bank wines, which would become revered in the second half of the twentieth century, weren’t even mentioned.
At the same time, a separate classification of Sauternes confirmed Château d’Yquem’s unchallenged position as the king of sweet white wines. A large part of Yquem’s reputation had to do with its extremely low yield: seventy gallons to an acre, compared with more than four hundred for a leading red wine. Put another way, a single vine can produce an entire bottle of dry red wine; it produces just one glass of Yquem. The wines of Sauternes relied on the phenomenon of “noble rot,” or botrytis, a fungal infection that, under precisely the right weather conditions, withered the Semillon grape to create an unctuous wine of unparalleled richness. The glory of Yquem was affirmed four years later when Russian Grand Duke Constantine, the czar’s brother, placed an order for four barrels of the 1847 vintage of Yquem, paying 20,000 gold francs, four times the going rate. The purchase spread Yquem’s fame and sent its market value soaring.
For Bordeaux, 1858 to 1878 was a belle epoque, blessed with favorable weather and a succession of excellent vintages. The advent of railways and steamships opened virgin markets. Gold rushes minted new millionaires. The 1860 trade treaty between Britain and France negotiated by Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone, himself a claret man, reduced the tax on Bordeaux wine by 95 percent and led, over the next fifteen years, to an eightfold growth in British claret imports. Bordeaux’s own wine production, over the same period, grew two and a half times, from 50 to more than 132 million gallons. The boom, which came to an end only with the arrival of phylloxera, funded the building of scores of grand châteaux, adding to the region’s mercantile luster.
And so in the eighteenth century had begun a long migration, an annual diaspora of Bordeaux’s most precious wines to the scattered cellars of claret lovers. Most of the wine sold fast and was drunk just as quickly. In 1788, wine from the 1784 vintage was already a rarity; Haut-Brion had only four hogsheads remaining, and demand for the vintage had pushed the price up to three livres per bottle. As early as 1829, a writer skeptical of advertisements for bottles from the famous 1811 “comet vintage” noted that, given its high quality and a relatively small crop, “it admits of a doubt whether even in the cellars of the richest individuals, any quantity to speak of now remains of the wine.”
Nonetheless, vintages that were scouringly tannic when young could take decades to become drinkable, and wealthy claret drinkers held on to unusually abundant and ageable vintages. Subterranean deposits of fine Bordeaux began to accrete, like some patchy geological formation, into a far-flung stratum of old wine.
Some was kept by the châteaux. Starting in 1798, Lafite began compiling a vinothèque, or wine library, with examples of each of the château’s vintages. A few bottles of 1797, the first contribution to the vinothèque, remain at Lafite, and are the oldest bottles in its cobwebbed cellar. The oldest bottle in Margaux’s vinothèque, by contrast, is an 1848. Some of the wine went to the cellars of the premier restaurants in France. And much of the wine was exported.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the largest markets for claret were in flux. During the 1850s, the United States was the best customer. From 1860 to 1890, Argentina, flush with beef and wheat money, claimed that role. But most of the wine going to the Americas was lesser stuff, not the expensive first growths that merited cellaring for decades. Those remained the province of the British. Over the century following the 1855 Classification, untold tons of the top growths found their way across the Channel into the cellars of private houses, wine merchants, and ancient colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Very often it was Lafite.