Wine growers A long story ... HISTORY OF BORDEAUX WINE.
The Biturges Vivisques, a Celtic race who inhabited Burdigala, the future Bordeaux, were the first to produce wine in this area in the first century of our era. Wine properties were established gradually but it was not until the 12th century that wine producing really took off. The marriage in 1152 of Aliénor of Aquitaine with Henry Plantagenet, the future king of England, is the point of depart for a tremendous expansion in the trading of Bordeaux wines to England. During more than three centuries claret wine - a wine made from the juice of white and light red grapes and much appreciated by the Anglo-Saxons - was exported by the Bordeaux wine merchants and this played a role in the development of the whole region.
It was during this auspicious period that the charming, medieval, fortified town of Sauveterre de Guyenne was founded in 1281 by Edward 1st, King of England and Duke of Aquitaine. It has a highly important strategic and economic place in the commerce of wine in this area. It was not until the 17th century and the arrival of the Dutch that the white and red wines appeared which were similar to those we know today. The quality of the ground gradually acquired importance. In the 18th century the colonies provided new avenues for trade. The wines were exported in barrels from the docks in Bordeaux and the town took on a new dimension. Corked bottles appeared. The region seemed to be blessed with a flourishing future when several disasters caused the destruction of the vines and the wine trade. In the first place illnesses, Oidium, mildew, imported from the USA, Phylloxera, which destroyed the plantations from 1875 to 1892 and then the first and second world wars.
It was in the period of profound crisis that the Wine Cooperative of Sauveterre de Guyenne was born.
It was not until the end of the 1950s that the Bordeaux wines entered a new golden age. The end of the century was marked by considerable progress in the subject of vine-growing, of agronomy as of oenology. The wine properties were reorganised, the vine growers marked a turning in their history in a radical orientation towards quality and the production of wines of an ‘Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée (guaranteed vintage). They will never diverge from this new path.