Château Haut-Brion: Earliest References
Incredibly, even in these early days, as the estate passed from Pierre de Bellon to the Pontac family, there was already a flourishing and seemingly profitable vineyard here. For many years it was believed that the earliest reference to the wine of Château Haut-Brion dated to the 17th century, but in 2014 the results of a scholarly competition launched by the estate’s 21st-century proprietor, Prince Robert of Luxembourg, proved otherwise. Historians and academics pored over relevant archives, no doubt tempted by the thought of the prize (a collection of wines from the estate) and the earliest reference to the wine of the property (perhaps, being pedantic, wine from the seigneurie of the same name) now dates to January 21st 1521.
The document in question was an acte notarié held in the Archives Départementales de la Gironde, which recorded the sale of a perpetual annuity in wine between seigneur Jean de Monque and the bourgeois merchant Guilhem de Mailhois, a sergeant of Bordeaux. The price was 400 francs, a small fortune for the time, and for this Jean de Monque was to deliver each year “quatre pipes de vin, seront du cru des vignes appartenant audit de Monque du lieu appelé Aubrion, appartenant audit vendeur”. Not only was the wine from the place named Aubrion in existence, it was actively traded, and it seems to have held considerable value also. Perhaps more importantly, although we take it for granted today, the wine was named for its place of origin; it was not merely from Bordeaux, or from Graves, but was from a specific vineyard. Five hundred years ago this was a rarity, wine often being sold merely as clairet (the origin of the word claret) without any more specific information on its origin.
