This Sammelband gathers four strands of Bordeaux's own reading culture around 1870 under a single binding: a vineyard owner's practical guide to the region's wines, a dead local poet's collected verse in Gascon dialect, a wine-trade almanac for the coming year, and a satirical civic pamphlet in defense of the city's women. Together they read less as four unrelated pamphlets than as a portrait of what an educated Bordelais of the period might have kept on a single shelf. The compilation [...]

First edition of a remarkably concise manifesto for practical wine improvement, joining cellar hygiene and disciplined vinification to the increasingly ampelographic idea that the quality of wine begins with the choice of grape. Writing from Bordeaux in 1875, Eugène Glady attacks growers who remain "slaves to custom and routine," declaring routine "the negation of all progress." Drawing on his experience buying wines in the Agenais and Quercy, he moves from fermentation, racking [...]

Rare first edition of this slim survey, pitched at a general readership rather than the wine trade itself and belonging to the promotional à vol d'oiseau genre common in French regional publishing of the period. The formula had already entered wine literature with Auguste Luchet's La Côte-d'Or à vol d'oiseau (1858), and was brought to Bordeaux by Dr. Aussel's much larger La Gironde à vol d'oiseau. Ses grands vins et ses châteaux in 1865. Vène's vol d'oiseau, appearing only two years later [...]

First edition of Jean Barennes's study of medieval viticulture and winemaking in the Bordelais as newly attached archiviste-paléographe to the Gironde's own departmental archives. For the occasion, he gathered the result from a seven-part serialization in the Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde into this standalone edition, crowned by the Société d'Agriculture de la Gironde and prefaced by long-serving Gironde archivist J.-A. Brutails. This copy is signed as one of [...]