Bordeaux, les Chartrons

For centuries, the massive Chateau Trompette in the place des Quinconces kept the Chartons apart of the rest of Bordeaux, and in the 17th century Flemish wine merchants, feeling discriminated by the English, set up their own business and quay there.Soo, they were followed by German, Irish and Dutch traders and then by the English themselves. The most successful of these merchants bought their own vineyards, founding fabulously wealthy dynasties “The aristocratie du Bouchon”. Bordeaux reputation for snobbery and smug, closed social circle comes from there. The decline of the Chartons began with the Revolution, when many Chartrons merchants were guillotined and many others moved abroad. Under Napoleon, although commerce revived, it was never the same; if the 1950s the brokers still had their offices in the prestigious but shabby waterfront buildings, along the quay, by the 1960s the relocation of port activities to the north, and the switch to land transport of wine made even this vestige of the past irrelevant.Bordeaux has sought a new role for this quarter while maintaining as much as its original wine business as possible, first by constructing the shabby new (and utterly sterile) CITE MONDIALE DU VIN on the quai des Chartrons, concentrating on hotels and an ultra-modern conference centre with exhibitions shops open to the general public.
One of the success stories of the Chartrons is the restoration of the austere neoclassical ENTREPOT LAINE, around the corner from hotel Fenwick at 7 rue Ferrère, built in 1820, where spices and other imported goods were stored. Now, it’s vast spaces are used for the giant-scale exhibitions and installations of the MUSEE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN (tel 0556008150, open 11-6. The same building contains the ARC EN REVE CENTRE d’ARCHITECTURE dedicated to architectural exhibits. Not far from these displays of cotemporary art are shops dealing in fond old things, in the VILLAGE DES ANTIQUAIRES: antique dealers line rue Notre Dame on all sides of the austere Protestant temple.
The old wine trade is remembered in the hotel particulier of an Irish broker Francis Burke, now the MUSEE DES CHARTRONS with a collection of lithographed wine labels and bottles going back to 1600.

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