Burgundy to Champagne: The Wine Trade in Early Modern France.

Burgundy to Champagne: The Wine Trade in Early Modern France. By Thomas Brennan (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. xxi plus 350pp. $39.95).

Historians have neglected the wine trade in France for a long time because the research is extremely difficult to do. Governments over the centuries conducted few broad surveys and, since wine production was in the hands of thousands of small proprietors, there are few private archives. Thomas Brennan has gone a long way toward overcoming these obstacles in what is a deeply researched and engaging book.

In the overall scheme of things, wine production was nowhere near as important as cereal cultivation or animal husbandry, but since it was a commercial crop, almost all of it was marketed rather than consumed on the spot. This created special opportunities for anyone in the trade, from small producer to big wholesaler, and Professor Brennan has shown an exceptional sensitivity to the various actors in the trade. For what amounts to an economic history, his most important theme is a cultural one, that is, how the various players were advantaged, or not, by their access to market information. Professor Brennan shows a fine sense of how there were limits to the kind of information the market transmitted. Indeed, this information was at times hopeless, and allowed all kinds of shady dealers and con artists who claimed to have the inside track, to transmit all kinds of bogus information back and forth between buyer and seller. One of his most arresting examples is a wholesaler who blatantly lied about the wine ha rvest in the Beaujolais and who almost got away with it. Such a near success was only possible when information was so scarce.

Wine may have been the most commercialized of all agricultural products but there were many impediments to complete market transparency. Some of these impediments are familiar enough: poor transportation, inadequate credit mechanisms, vexatious taxes (including one egregious state-sponsored extortion during the War of Spanish Succession) and so on. Others are rather unusual. One of these was the extraordinary hostility to wine brokers on the part of both small producers and government. This arose, in effect, from important structural changes that were occurring within the wine trade. At one time, government had successfully regulated the marketing of wine but in the last century or so of the Old Regime, the trade had become so complex and large, both nationally and internationally, that traditional market controls broke down. The result was the rise of a near oligopoly of brokers whose access to information about the market allowed them to dominate local production and bamboozle an often negligent government . Several carefully documented trials for fraud show an industry full of sharp practices, producer gullibility, and broker dishonesty. Yet character deficiencies were only a part of the story. Professor Brennan is entirely convincing when he argues that the problems were structural, a function of the difficulty of obtaining accurate information about distant markets given the technology of the Old Regime.

Thus for all its precociousness in marketing skill and its favorable comparison to the less advanced grain trade, the marketing of wine was a product of the business techniques and structures of its time. One of the many merits of this fine book is the ability to illustrate this context and explain just how the wine trade fit in to the Old Regime economy.