clairet

Old French clairet meant 'light' or 'pale' — from Latin clarus, 'clear' or 'bright.' When English merchants began importing wine from Bordeaux in the 1100s (Bordeaux was English territory from 1152 to 1453), they called the local wine claret because it was light in color. These medieval wines were pressed quickly, producing a pale rosé rather than a deep red. They were thin, low in tannin, and drunk young. Nothing like modern Bordeaux.

The English love affair with Bordeaux wine was political as well as gustatory. Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry II of England in 1152, bringing the entire Bordeaux region under the English crown. For three centuries, Bordeaux wine flowed to England duty-free. The English drank more Bordeaux than the French did. When Bordeaux was lost to France in 1453, the English kept drinking claret. They just had to pay for it.

Winemaking techniques changed. By the 1600s and 1700s, Bordeaux producers began making darker, more tannic wines — the predecessors of modern Bordeaux. The color deepened, the body thickened, the aging potential increased. But the English name stayed the same. Claret, which meant 'the light one,' was now applied to some of the darkest, most powerful red wines in the world.

Claret became a class marker in Britain. It was the wine of the aristocracy, the gentlemen's clubs, the Oxbridge high table. 'Good claret' implied good breeding. The word appears constantly in Victorian and Edwardian literature as shorthand for social standing. Americans and Australians eventually adopted 'claret' as a generic term for dry red wine, further diluting the Bordeaux specificity.