The year is 1772. The English nobleman rests comfortably before a cracking fire in the manor house. He thoughtfully quaffs a glass of new French claret as he contemplates the affairs of the Empire. The French and Spanish have finally been subdued; the Dutch trade is brisk, and King George is in firm control of those pesky colonists across the pond. All is right with the world and Britannia rules the waves.

By the 18th century, the British had been drinking claret imported from western France for over half a millennium. It all started in the mid 1100’s through a series of bizarre marital relationships between French and English royalty. From 1152 to 1453, what was known as the Plantagenet kingdom encompassed England and most of France. At the heart of this territory was the Bordeaux region where wine had been made since Roman times. The wine trade route from Bordeaux to London was much shorter than routes from Spain or Germany so wine from the west coast of France had the greatest impact on developing the English taste for wine.

The French word clairet (meaning “pale”) was used to describe those early wines from Bordeaux. According to wine historian Hugh Johnson, the anglicized term claret was the best light red wine Bordeaux had to offer and was well suited the English taste. Johnson goes on to describe that claret was made as vine rosé is made today. The grapes were trodden and the wine first fermented in the vat on the skins for no more that 24 hours. The pale wine was then run off into barrels to complete the fermentation as juice. Most certainly, claret was made from the ancestors of Cabernet and Merlot.

Claret was the every day drink of the British throughout the middle ages. Things began to change in 1635 when the Dutch became the allies of the French and the price of wine went on the rise. So did quality as the Dutch favored darker, tastier wines and began to compete with England as the primary market for the wines of Bordeaux. The result was development of the grand wine growing

estates starting with Haut-Brion. By the mid 1700s, the clarets of Bordeaux had evolved into the “grand vin” dark rosé wines prized by English aristocracy. Claret is now a protected name within the European Union used to describe a red Bordeaux wine.

Claret came to America with the British colonists. The red table wine from Bordeaux was very popular on the east coast by the 1850s and heavily imported into California by the earliest Argonaut settlers. It became a challenge for the early California vintners to compete with the imported wine so the term claret was widely adopted for the domestic product as a way to cloud the issue. The first California claret was made from Mission grapes but by the late 1860s, Zinfandel was the primary claret grape. California claret – made from almost any variety although Zin made the best wine – was extensively sold on the east coast by the 1880s. With the approach of Prohibition, the term claret was deeply ingrained in California wine culture and most of the state’s producers offered a claret wine. Everything changed after Repeal and by 1960, claret was rarely seen on a California wine label.

Today claret has all but disappeared from the lexicon of California wines. In its place is a new term coined by the domestic wine industry to describe a blended wine made from the classic grapes of Bordeaux - Meritage. This name was adopted and trademarked by the Meritage Association in 1988 following a contest won by southern California wine buyer, Neil Edgar. The only thing common to the English claret of the 18th century and the Meritage of today is the legacy of the great classic grapes of Medoc, Graves and Galillac.

As he slowly rises from the plush divan in front of the final flickering embers of the evening’s fire setting aside his drained claret glass the Lord of the Manor ponders, “I wonder what will ever become of those ruffians in colonies?”