Bottling it in Bordeaux – An Irishman’s Diary about one of the lesser-known Irish gifts to France

The story of the “wine geese” – refugees from 17th- and 18th-century Ireland who started new lives in the vineyards of France – is well known by now. Less so, still, is that of Peter Mitchell, although he too was an Irish emigrant of the era who also made his fortune in Bordeaux.

What sets Mitchell apart from the Lynches, Dillons, and others, is that he did not make wine. He only made containers to hold it. But as such, he appears to have been responsible for the classic French wine bottle shape, the Bordelaise, a subject to which we'll return.

To some extent, ironically, he may have benefited from what was seen as his British heritage. France had a policy then of encouraging immigrants who brought skills it lacked. The ability to blow glass was one of these. In the early 18th century, France was heavily dependent on bottle imports from northern Europe, including England.

So in 1723, the Dublin-born Mitchell secured a royal patent to establish a glassworks in Bordeaux, with a 10-league exclusion zone for competitors. And although his own speciality had been barrel making, he knew where to look for glass expertise.

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Central to his success was the use of coal furnaces, then typical in England. It was in any case part necessary that he did not use up Bordeaux’s scarce wood supplies. He instead imported the coal, and also brought in workers, English and otherwise, with glass-blowing experience.

The arrangement had its problems. Imports were unreliable and the workers occasionally struggled with local materials. The quality of bottles was therefore not always what it might have been, a fact recognised after Mitchell’s death when his widow could not prevent a Dutch competitor gaining access to the former 10-league limit.

Even so, the Mitchell glassworks was the biggest in France at the time of the revolution and remained in business until the 20th century.

It is perhaps no coincidence that so many better-off Irish émigrés of the 18th century had a talent for making wine, because they famously had a talent for drinking it too. Ireland’s imports of claret (Bordeaux red), in particular, often dwarfed those of England.

Jonathan Swift called it the “Irish wine”. And the Earl of Chesterfield, when lord lieutenant, lamented that “nine out of ten gentlemen in Ireland are impoverished by the great quantities of claret which, from mistaken notions of hospitality and dignity, they think it necessary should be drunk in their houses”.

Their compunction towards hospitality aside, a travel writer of the era also marvelled at the natives’ capacity to hold the stuff. “The Irish drink the most of any of his majesty’s subjects with the least injury,” he wrote.

Last month’s Ireland-Belgium football match in Bordeaux suggests we haven’t lost this dubious talent in the intervening centuries, albeit it was beer most supporters confined themselves to, even there.

The game, on the other hard, proved quite an education. But away from the football, for those who took time to enjoy it, Bordeaux was also a lesson in aesthetic values. This was not just because the old city is beautiful. It was also because of the extent to which locals go to keep it that way.

Their trams, for example, look just like Dublin's Luas, except in one respect. When they were being planned (around the same time as the Luas), it was decreed that they could not have overhead wires – that would ruin the elegant skyline. Instead, a new ground-up power system had to be invented, allowing the sleek glass trams to glide around with minimum visual intrusion. It would never have happened in Dublin, where beauty and urban planning intersect about as often as the Red and Green Luas. Yet, speaking of sleek glass, it seems that Ireland has made at least one vital contribution to Bordeaux aesthetics, via the aforementioned Peter Mitchell. Among his innovations was the now-classic Bordelaise bottle, with its high shoulders and slender neck. This may, admittedly, have had as much to do with function as form. Production of wine was evolving then to meet a growing demand for older vintages. The market needed regularly shaped bottles that could be stored easily on their sides.

Also, the shape, like some of the technology that produced it, may have come from England. Still, it was Mitchell who introduced it. And having survived the demise of his factory, it survives today. So our award-winning football fans may come and go. But irony of ironies, the wine bottle remains Ireland’s permanent gift to Bordeaux.