Béziers has shipped wine and stirred up trouble for over 2,500 years
A Roman wine jar dug up near Rome carries a boast: it holds five-year-old wine from Béziers. The southern French town was founded by Greeks, rebuilt by Romans, and centuries later called itself the world capital of wine, before soldiers sent to quell its winegrowers sat down and drank with them.
Béziers sits on a low bluff above the river Orb, roughly ten kilometres inland from the Mediterranean. Research published in 2013 dated its Greek colony to 575 BCE, making it older than nearby Agde and only slightly younger than Marseille. The Romans refounded it around 36 BCE as a settlement for army veterans, and it lay on the road linking Provence with Spain. Its wine travelled to Rome, and one jar found there declares itself a white from the town. For a few decades in the eighth century it belonged to Islamic Iberia.
In the Middle Ages the town was run by viscounts, and later by the Trencavel family for 142 years, until it became caught up in the war against Catharism. The Catholic Church branded the Cathars heretics and launched the Albigensian Crusade, and when crusaders arrived in July 1209, the town was sacked with enormous loss of life. It was repopulated and rebuilt, joining the French royal domain in 1247. Within a few decades it had its own circle of troubadours, middle-class poets who wrote in Occitan yet sided with the French crown.
Wine made Béziers rich again in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Canal du Midi crosses the Orb here on an aqueduct said to be the first of its kind. By the early twentieth century the region supplied a large share of French wine, and landowners from industry and finance built enormous estates. Then prices collapsed, and growers blamed cheap, watered and smuggled wine.
On 12 May 1907 about 150,000 people from over 200 communes rallied in the town under banners demanding bread or death. When Prime Minister Clemenceau moved a local infantry regiment away, around 500 of its soldiers mutinied, marched back overnight and were welcomed with food and wine. Today Béziers is best known for its August feria, a five-day festival centred on bullfighting that draws around a million visitors.
Source: Béziers
