The Dutch & the New Médoc

The New French Clarets: How Haut-Brion in London Invented Luxury Wine, 1660–1760

From Charles II's cellar to wartime auctions of Lafite, Margaux and Latour, how London tariffs and the Pontacs turned claret into the first luxury wine.

On 22 May 1707, an advertisement in the London Gazette offered "an entire Parcel of New French Prize Clarets … being of the Growth of Lafitt, Margouze, and La Tour". Three centuries later the names need no translation. The wine had been seized from French ships — England and France were at war — and was being auctioned, cask by cask, to London buyers who evidently knew exactly what those three growths were and why they were worth bidding for. Somewhere between a king's cellar book of 1660 and that wartime notice of 1707, a thing that had never existed before had come into being: wine sold by estate name, at a price set by reputation. This is the story of the New French Clarets — and of how a market designed to keep French wine out of England ended up inventing luxury wine instead.

A name in the king's cellar

For most of its history, the wine England drank from Bordeaux was simply claret — a generic word for a generic product, bought by the fleet-load and graded by broker and vintage, never by vineyard. The first crack in that anonymity appears in the royal household accounts: the cellar book of Charles II records 169 bottles of "Hobriono" served at court in 1660–61. A Bordeaux estate — Haut-Brion, phonetically mangled — had a name in English before almost any other.

The name surfaces again three years later in the most famous wine note in the English language. On 10 April 1663, Samuel Pepys came off the Exchange with Sir John Cutler and Mr Grant "to the Royall Oak Tavern, in Lumbard Street", and there, he told his diary, "drank a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with". Pepys was a man who drank claret constantly and wrote about it rarely; this wine he singled out because it was identifiable — a particular taste attached to a particular name. That is the working definition of a brand, recorded a quarter-millennium before the word entered the wine trade.

The Pontacs' calculated conquest

None of this was accidental. Haut-Brion belonged to Arnaud III de Pontac, first president of the Parlement de Bordeaux and one of the richest men in the province — a man with the capital to make wine differently and the social intelligence to sell it differently. Rather than feed his production into the anonymous river of claret, he aimed it, under its own name, at the most conspicuous spenders in Europe: the court and moneyed classes of Restoration London.

Then he went further. In 1666 Pontac sent his son François-Auguste to London, where — as the Bordeaux writer Jane Anson recounts — he opened a fashionable tavern under the family sign, remembered as Pontack's Head, with the family's wine as the house attraction. There Haut-Brion sold for around seven shillings a bottle when ordinary wines fetched about two, and the mark-up itself became part of the appeal. The clientele Anson lists reads like an index of Augustan England — John Evelyn, Christopher Wren, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, John Locke — and Swift grumbled memorably that he "found the wine dear at seven shillings a flagon". A proprietor selling his own estate's wine, under his own name, at triple the going rate, through his own retail outlet in the customer's capital: as a piece of commercial architecture, nothing like it existed anywhere else in the wine world.

Locke goes to see for himself

The price did not go unexamined. In May 1677 the philosopher John Locke, touring France and recording everything from vines to taxes, travelled out to the gravel rise beyond Bordeaux to see what could possibly justify it. His journal is a marvel of empirical bafflement: the soil of the famous vineyard was "noe thing but pure white sand, mixed with a little gravel", ground that "one would imagin … scarce fit to bear any thing". As for the cost, Locke's explanation had nothing to do with the soil at all: the price had risen, he wrote, "thanks to the rich English who sent orders that it was to be got for them at any price". Demand, not dirt — a one-line anticipation of a debate about what terroir actually is that historians are still conducting.

Locke's notebook has lately acquired a second career. A 2025 study reread his figures on the estate's production and concluded that a large share of what sold as Haut-Brion may not have come from that vineyard at all — a claim, and a controversy, examined in detail in our article on Haut-Brion and the 2025 authenticity debate. For the present story, what matters is simpler: by 1677 the wine was famous enough, and expensive enough, that England's greatest living philosopher went out of his way to inspect the sand it grew in.

War, tariffs, and the paradox of scarcity

Then politics intervened — and here the story turns paradoxical. In 1678, as relations with Louis XIV collapsed, the English Parliament passed an act prohibiting French commodities, wine included; Charles II complained to Parliament in 1679 of "the loss I sustain by the prohibition of French Wines and Brandy". A further embargo followed during the Nine Years' War (1689–1697), amid repeated tariff hikes on French wine across the later seventeenth century. The capstone came with the Methuen Treaty of December 1703: England admitted Portuguese wines at duty at least one-third lower than French, in exchange for Portugal taking English woollens duty-free.

The historian of the British wine trade Charles Ludington has traced what followed. Claret, which had been the Englishman's everyday drink, was priced and legislated out of the mass market; by about 1700, Portuguese and Spanish wines had replaced it as the common draught. But the policy built to exclude French wine had an unintended effect at the top of the market. What little claret still arrived — legally or otherwise — was now, by definition, expensive; and expensive French wine needed to justify its price. The producers best placed to do so were precisely those, like the Pontacs, selling identifiable, concentrated, estate-made wine to buyers for whom dearness was a feature. Tariffs meant to kill the trade instead gentrified it: they compressed claret into a small, high-priced niche and handed that niche to the New French Clarets. Luxury wine, on this account, was less invented in Bordeaux than legislated into existence in Westminster.

Prize ships and the birth of the first growths

The War of the Spanish Succession completed the process in the most ironic way imaginable. With direct trade throttled, much of the finest claret reached London as prize cargo — seized from captured French ships and sold at auction, the sales advertised in the press. Ludington's research finds Haut-Brion advertised in the London Gazette from May 1705; and the advertisement of 22 May 1707 offered those "New French Prize Clarets … of the Growth of Lafitt, Margouze, and La Tour".

The document repays a slow reading. Margaux, Lafite and Latour here step out of anonymity and into the English language — not as generic claret but as named growths, each assumed to mean something distinct to a London bidder. Together with Haut-Brion, the wartime auction lists assemble, a century and a half early, the exact quartet the 1855 classification would crown as first growths. And the auction mechanism itself mattered: competitive bidding on named parcels generated public, differentiated prices — a ranking of estates by money, printed in the gazette, war after war. London's enemy blockade had accidentally built fine wine's first price list.

A new commercial category

Step back, and the innovation comes into focus. Before the New French Clarets, wine was sold by origin-port and colour; its quality was the broker's word. After them, the top of the market worked on a different logic: a named estate, a proprietor answerable for the wine, a style made deliberately dense and durable, a price openly decoupled from the cost of ordinary wine — and a clientele that valued the name precisely because it was exclusive. Every apparatus of modern fine wine — classification, château-bottling, brand, the price hierarchy itself — descends from this template.

None of it, it is worth insisting, was conjured from nothing. The wine in the bottle was the product of the seventeenth century's Dutch-driven technical revolution in Bordeaux — sulfured casks, new plantings, wines built to travel and to keep — without which no estate could have promised a consistent house style. The Pontacs supplied the marketing; the century supplied the means.

When did luxury wine begin? A dating debate

One genuine controversy remains, and honesty requires flagging it. The dominant periodization, associated with Ludington's work, dates the triumph of luxury claret to 1704 and after: it was the tariff wall and the Methuen settlement that finally squeezed claret into its luxury niche, and the prize auctions that named its elite. But a 2025 study in Notes and Records of the Royal Society, analysing Robert Boyle's claret experiments of 1669–74 alongside the 1660 royal cellar book and Pepys's tavern note, argues that the new dark, concentrated style pre-existed the tariff regime — that the luxury product came first and the legislation merely enthroned it. The question — did Westminster create luxury claret, or only crown it? — is currently open, and the argument, with its cast of seventeenth-century notebooks, is laid out in the Haut-Brion authenticity dossier.

Either way, the outcome by the mid-eighteenth century was not in doubt. Four named growths stood at the head of the market England had made for them, at prices no other wine on earth commanded. The 1855 brokers, ranking estates by a century of prices, would merely notarize what the London of Pepys, Pontac and the prize auctions had already decided.