Wine warehouses of Bercy

The wine warehouses of Bercy were a complex reserved for wine merchants located in the Bercy district in the east of the 12th arrondissement of Paris. Located along the Seine, this area received, stored and redistributed wines and spirits. During the late 1900s and the early 20th century, the Bercy wine district was the largest wine market in the world.

Origin

The wine warehouses of Bercy in 1908

The river port of Bercy in the middle of the 19th century

Warehouses were set up around 1800 on the Rapée estate (at the location of the current Bercy sports center), outside the Rapée barrier of the General Farmers' wall, which allowed the wines to be not be subject to the octroi (a municipal tax on trade entering the municipality). These warehouses developed further over the following years. They replaced an area that had formerly been occupied by private mansions built by wealthy Parisian on the edge of the Seine in an area that was, at the time, removed from the hustle and bustle of central Paris. These estates were sold by their owners at the end of the 18th century as the growing population of Paris pushed outside the city walls. Thus, the sumptuous mansions on the rue de Bercy and the buildings in the magnificent parks that surrounded them were gradually demolished during the first half of the 19th century and their materials used for the construction of the cellars.

Mr. de Chabons, mayor of the town of Bercy, acquired the Petit Château estate in 1809, where he established cellars and a cooperage workshop. This complex was bought in 1815 by Louis Gallois (successor to Mr. de Chabons as mayor of Bercy), who enlarged the cellars and subdivided the land, giving the main road the name of rue Gallois and the other service roads the first names of members of his family.

In 1819, Baron Louis, Minister of Finance created warehouses on the land he owned between the Petit Château estate and rue de la Grange aux Merciers (the location of the current Saint-Émilion courtyard)2. These warehouses were destroyed by fire in 1820, but were rebuilt.

The barrels of wine destined for Parisian consumption arrived by boat on the Seine and then were unloaded at the port of Bercy and stored in the Bercy cellars.

Rail transport

A wagon-foudre carrying wine from Anjou in the early 1900s

A train car in the Bercy district decked out with the American flag in celebration of the end of Prohibition in 1933

Transport of wine by rail to Bercy opened up with creation of the railway line from Paris to Lyon in 1849 as well as with the establishment of the nearby Gare de Paris Bercy (train station). The wine district was served by a network of 9.48 kilometers of track and 42 hubs. During the first period, wine was transported in barrels placed on flat wagons (wagons-foudres) from the wine growing regions that were crossed by the Paris-Lyon and, later, the Paris-Menton line; these regions are: Provence, the Rhône valley and Burgundy.

Wine consumption in Paris was increasing. It went from 1,000,000 hectoliters in 1800 to 3,550,000 in 1865. Despite the construction of a new wine market between 1811 and 1845, its storage capacity proved insufficient to cope with this consumption and the development of transport by rail.

Units of measurement

The units of measurement used in the Bercy wine trade were those of the Ancien Régime, which were very disparate. The wine merchants of Paris, through their newly created weekly, the Journal de Bercy et de l'Entrepôt. Le Moniteur vinicole, launched a petition addressed to Napoleon III, which was published on October 6, 1856. They asked the emperor for “the unity of wine gauging measurements” and the application of the metric system to containers. whose volumes varied “from one wine-growing region to another and often in the same department”. The petitioners explained that they considered themselves defrauded, each year, of approximately 1,000,000 hectoliters and urgently requested the application of the laws of 1793, 1812 and 1837.

Paris annexes most of the town of Bercy and its warehouses

In 1860, the commune of Bercy, until then independent, was dissolved, with some becoming part of the 12th arrondissement of Paris and the rest being incorporate into the city of Charenton. Normally, under the laws governing taxation of commerce, the Bercy warehouses located inside Paris should have been immediately subject to duties on wines coming from the provinces, but the public authorities decided to apply a transitional regime for a period of 10 years. The Franco-Prussian War postponed this period a further 10 years.

The flood of 1876, which resulted in the City of Paris buying the entire warehouse district. A commission was created under the direction of Viollet-le-Duc. Its mandate was twofold: 1) to draw up plans for a new road system around and in the Bercy complex (which also involved an element of flood control); and 2) to build the ‘real’ warehouses (that would be publicly owned and rented by the wine merchants (this system would replace the previous system, where the wine cellars were owned by the merchants). The ‘real’ warehouse district that was built under this plan also had embedded in it the tax collection apparatus needed to implement the change in tax status, which became law by the decree of August 6, 1877. The warehouses thereby became public stores for which the City of Paris owner issued concessions to traders.

The construction of the new wine district caused the demolition of buildings that were very much regretted by Parisians. The houses on the Quai de Bercy, including taverns and restaurants were destroyed as well as buildings of architectural and historical interest, including the Pâté-Pâris and the small castle of Bercy. Two pavilions were built on either side of rue de Dijon (rue Joseph-Kessel), at the entrance to the Tolbiac bridge. The whole, surrounded by 3 meter high gates, was divided into two parts—the 'Petit Bercy' was the upstream section and the 'Grand Bercy' was downstream section (to the west). To avoid flooding, the Bercy quay was raised to 8.70 meters above the 1658 low water level.

In the end, though, the ambitious plan of Viollet-le-Duc the project was never completed, due to lack of funding and their lack of suitability of some planned building for the wine trade of the time (notably, the plan for 2-story warehouses). The City ended up renting the old buildings or vacant plots to the merchants, who were free to build their own facilities. This gave the Bercy district the idiosyncratic appearance that characterised it until the renovation of the late 20th century. Some of the more regular and uniform buildings built by the City of Paris at this time in Grand Bercy have been preserved to this day in the new Bercy Village, including those in the Cour Saint-Émilion and those between the rue Lheureux, rue des Pirogues de Bercy, rue Baron -Le-Roy and Avenue des Terroirs de Bercy, where the Museum of Circus Arts and the bakery and pastry school are located.

Apogee and prosperity

1908 postcard showing the Cours Baudoin in the Petit Bercy (the eastern and smaller section of the district)

Bercy's specialised wine journal; June 25, 1856

At its apogee, the wine complex at Bercy was the largest wine market in the world. Advances in transport capabilities helped to promote the success of the Bercy wine warehouses. After the arrival of train service in 1847, the railway provided almost all wine transport between 1875 and 1914. The barrels were replaced by wagons-foudres (specialised train cars transporting huge casks of wine, spirits or champagne); 20,000 of these specialised train cars were in service in 1910 and 8,850 in 1945. The rails in the modern Bercy complex have been preserved on the grounds of modern Bercy in memory of this transportation network.

Water transport also developed and permitted international trade in wines. The boats transporting wines from Algeria, Spain and Portugal were unloaded into barges in Rouen. The barges then proceeded up the Seine river to the port of Bercy.

The district had its own culture, a mix of the working- and merchant-classes, all involved in the commerce of wines and spirits. was governed by its own internal regulations. This community lived semi-self-sufficiently, with services nearby, school, the church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Nativité de Bercy, a post office and a specialised newspaper (the Journal de Bercy et du Entrepôt).

On August 9, 1905, parliament passed a law which required large wine merchants in Paris to have a storefront at the Bercy warehouse and the wine market8. Until the beginning of the 20th century, the two Parisian warehouses retained approximately equal importance. But the specialization of the Saint-Bernard market in fine wines and alcohol and the expansion of Bercy in 1910 gave the advantage to the latter. In 1930, it represented 70% of storage and exits compared to 30% for the wine market.

Decline

One of the last Bercy warehouses in operation, pictured in 1985

Until the 1960s, these blended wine products of dubious quality helped to enrich the Bercy wine merchants. However, consumers were becoming more demanding and began to prefer wines bottled on the wine properties, seeing it as a guarantee of quality. It was no longer commercially viable to 'improve' a Burgundy by mixing it with a Côtes-du-Rhône or of filling it out with an Algerian wine9. Warehouse trading, after a century of existence, began to decline.

Furthermore, the City of Paris began to look with an appraising eye at this site, which was poorly and haphazardly built (the buildings representing only 44% of the surface area) and which was conveniently located near the center of the city. In 1964, the leases were not renewed and improvement or modernization work was prohibited. The largest and most dynamic companies moved to the outskirts of Paris. 8 hectares were removed in 1979 by the construction of the Bercy sports center and the last traders still operating there were forced to leave. The last cellars were destroyed in 1993.

Reconversion

The area of ​​these warehouses was profoundly restructured from the beginning of the 1980s with the construction of Bercy Arena (1984), then of the Ministry of the Economy and Finance (1990). At the end of the 20th century, the restructuring and renovation of the district sounded the death knell for the warehouses, but their memory lives on in the Bercy park which replaced them and has preserved some old pavilions, vestiges of Bercy's wine-making past as well as in the name of the metro station serving it Cour Saint-Émilion.

In 1985, a few cellars were included in the Supplementary Inventory of Historic Monuments, including the Lheureux cellars in which Les Pavillons de Bercy-Musée des Arts Forains, which opened in 1996. The architecture of the old cellars, which formed the identity of the district, also inspired the creation of a shopping center, Bercy Village, with its shops and terraces in 2000. To the east of this area a district was created business organized around the Place des Vins-de-France. Rue Baron-Le-Roy begins at Place Lachambeaudie and ends in a dead end on Avenue des Terroirs-de-France. It owes its name to Pierre Le Roy de Boiseaumarié (1890-1967), creator of the appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC; a way of recognising regional agronomic characteristics and specialised production know-how for agri-food products, including wine). A Baron Le Roy station on line 3a of the Île-de-France tramway has been open since the end of 2012.