If myth is just a half-remembered truth, then history presents just one side of a complex series of events. Neither myth nor history tells the whole tale. "Facts" are subject to personal interpretation and translation changes context and meaning. In the end, what appears on the written page may differ greatly from reality, especially if that reality was long ago and far, far away.

The region of Bordeaux was, during the Middle Ages, known as Aquitaine. In 1152, Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. This man became King Henry II of England and Duke of Normandy. His marriage to Eleanor gave him reign over what are now Bordeaux, Gascony and a good portion of western France.

In these days, England was Catholic and needed wine for Mass. Due to climatic challenges, the cool, damp island nation was unsuccessful at viticulture, so Aquitaine, by default, became England's vineyard.

During the Middle Ages, it was customary to ferment white and red grapes together. This light red became England's beloved claret, a word taken from the French clairet, meaning clear or brilliant. The wines evolved. White grapes and red grapes were fermented separately in the ensuing years, but England's proprietary nickname for red Bordeaux has remained ever constant to this day.

Bordeaux was hard-pressed to keep up with demand for its wines during the 300 years of English rule. It used the wines from the High Country (Haut-Pays), a growing area that encompassed Gaillac, Bergerac, Quercy (modern-day Cahors) and Nerac (modern-day Buzet), to make up for any shortfall. The Bordelais also made sure that these producers and others situated upriver did not turn into direct competition.

The wine growers within Cahors, for example, were required to use smaller barrels than those in Bordeaux, but they were taxed at the same rate, and as the Bordelais controlled the Garonne River and its tributaries, they made sure that their own wines were sold before any wine from regions upstream.

In what became known as the "Bordeaux privilege," the Bordelais prohibited the arrival of wines from upriver from the Sept. 8 until after the feast of St. Martin Nov. 11, or until after Christmas. This effectively ensured the Bordelais healthy sales when England's fleet arrived to collect wine for the Christmas holidays.

When the second, or Easter, fleet arrived, any remaining Bordeaux was loaded first; the wines from upriver were loaded after that. The producers from the Haut-Pays (effectively those regions south of St. Macaire) circumnavigated the "Bordeaux privilege" by either sailing down the Dordogne (which entered the Gironde below the jurisdiction of Bordeaux proper), or by sailing down the Garonne to St. Macaire, off-loading their goods there, hauling those wine casks to Bergerac, then allowing them to complete their voyage down-river on the Dordogne.

At the time, ships were the only viable means of long-distance transport for bulky, weighty items such as wine casks. Maritime trade flourished.

The Bordeaux wine barrel or barrique is a unit of measurement. The generic term for a wooden holding vessel is "cask."

As far as casks are concerned, one barrique holds 25 cases of wine. One pipe holds two barriques. Two pipes fill one tonneau.

Ships' cargo holds were measured in terms of the number of tonneau they could carry. The term was first used by the English navy during the Middle Ages and referred to the quantity of Bordeaux wine any given ship could hold. This unit of measurement soon became standard for all fleets.

The tonneau remains a physical entity in Alsace; but in all other places, the word has transitioned into the modern-day commercial measure we call tonnage.

All through the Middle Ages (and well into the 1700s) when demand far exceeded supply, Bordeaux wines were routinely blended with wines from the Haut-Pays, Languedoc, Hermitage and Spain. After the vine plagues of the 20th century (phylloxera, downy mildew and powdery mildew), the Bordelais found themselves in the same desperate predicament: high demand, short supply.

By the end of the 1800s, the Bordelais imported dried grapes from Greece and Turkey and imported wine from Spain to vinify and/or blend into their claret. Fraud on the part of producers and wine merchants ran rampant, not just in Bordeaux but in many other areas of France and throughout Europe. In 1908, the Bordelais decided to establish and delineate a zone of production.

Interestingly, they opted to exclude the Haut-Pays wine regions even though their wines had been blended into Bordeaux and sold as Bordeaux for centuries. The shunned wine regions had to apply for their own zones just as Bordeaux scrambled to plant more vines to make up for the impending grape shortage.

The Dutch had become actively involved in the Bordeaux wine trade after the Middle Ages and shifted this great red wine producer on its axis. The Dutch wanted white wine to distill into eau-de-vie and they wanted sweet whites at table. This changed Bordeaux's vineyard landscape significantly and longlastingly. For the next 300 years (until the 1970s), Bordeaux produced more white wine than red.

The Dutch, experts at water management, drained Bordeaux's "palus" or marshlands/mudflats in the 1600s and elevated the celebrated gravel beds of the Medoc Peninsula by digging drainage ditches.

The Dutch sailed into the inland port of Bordeaux with huge wheels of gouda cheese as ballast. These were off-loaded and sold. Wine was purchased by the tonneau and taken back to the Netherlands, leaving the Bordelais with a century-old tradition of eating Dutch (vs. local cheese) with French Bordeaux.

And that's not only the rest of the story, it's the whole fromage!

Lisa Airey is a certified wine educator. E-mail her at thewinekey@ aol.com.

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