Académie du Vin de Bordeaux

Founded in 1948 on the initiative of leading figures in the Bordeaux wine trade and viticulture, the Bordeaux Wine Academy has been working since its creation to guarantee and transmit the history and culture of Bordeaux wine.

If the Bordeaux vineyards are at the origin of some of the most prestigious wines in the world, they have also shaped, over the centuries, an art of living around their great wines. This vineyard has created a spirit, an ethic, but above all a celebration of wine in everyday life that cannot be found anywhere else.

By giving Bordeaux wine "the honors it deserves", the Academy illustrates and testifies to one of the highest forms of our civilization.

The Bordeaux Wine Academy, like the French Academy, is endowed with 40 seats of Academicians. These seats are occupied by the owners of the most prestigious Bordeaux wines, for two thirds, and by eminent members of the French Academy, writers, artists, scholars, academics, for one third. The Academy operates thanks to its associate members, which include more than a hundred châteaux that produce the greatest wines, as well as brokers and merchants from the Bordeaux area. Finally, to develop its action, it relies on corresponding members, honorary members and partner members who actively contribute to the promotion of the civilization of wine through its noblest representative: the wine of Bordeaux.
 
Today, the Bordeaux Wine Academy, under the impulse of its Grand Chancellor Jean-Pierre Rousseau and its Vice-Chancellors Florence Cathiard and Olivier Bernard, is part of a dynamic approach and contributes, in its modern environment, to perpetuate the Bordeaux wine civilization:

• It assumes its vocation by promoting, at all times and in any place, the nobility of Bordeaux wine and the respect it inspires.

• It pursues a policy of close relations with the economic fabric, the cultural and academic world and the local authorities, thus contributing to linking everything that participates in the life of Bordeaux and its region with wine and its culture as common denominators.
• It initiates events: conferences, symposiums, exhibitions..., combining research and conviviality and, in particular, illustrates the art of living Bordeaux wine by organizing prestigious dinners, gathering the international, cultural and academic elite.
• On the complicated question of vintages, it publishes every two years a code of vintages, in several languages, which has acquired such an audience and reputation that it has become the reference document for the knowledge and tasting of Bordeaux wine.

• It awards a literary prize to a work of quality that takes up the themes cherished by Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.
• It keeps a living trace of the experience of the main actors of the Bordeaux region, most of whom are members of the Academy, in order to transmit the fruits of experience to future generations. Eighty hours of archival film have been made, including interviews with 26 eminent Bordeaux personalities, revealing the great history of Bordeaux wine, made up, like all history, of events, discussions and anecdotes.

• It conducts studies and active research to keep alive the memory of wine, a sign and symbol of time.

To illustrate its motto "HIC UVA UBIQUE NOMEN", ("Here the vine whose name is everywhere") the Bordeaux Wine Academy gathers around a council of twelve members and forty academicians, the most famous vintages and the most famous professionals of Gironde.