The surprising urban vineyards of Paris

Think of Paris and you’ll probably think of grand architecture, imposing boulevards, world-class galleries and buzzy cafés. You almost certainly won’t think of vineyards … but maybe you should. A new book, written by wine connoisseur and adopted Parisian Geoffery Finch sheds light on the French capital’s forgotten history as a world capital of wine production.

“The real story of Paris is wine,” said Geoffery, dressed in jaunty red slacks and a charmingly off-kilter trilby for our wine tour of the Latin Quarter earlier this month. It’s a bold statement and he had plenty more.

On the tour, which is aimed at uncovering Paris’s hidden-in-plain-sight vines, I learned how the vine was first brought to the region during the Roman conquest some 2,000 years ago and continued to be cultivated seriously for 18 centuries, up until the 1800s. The drained soils of the Seine basin were ideal for grape cultivation and perhaps still would be if only they weren’t covered in concrete.

“When people discover that the largest vineyard in the world until two centuries ago was the region around Paris, it generally comes as a surprise,” Finch told me. His research is collected in The Hidden Vineyards of Paris and elaborated in his wine tours of the capital.

According to his research, at its height, the Île-de-France had vineyards across 300 sites covering up to 52,000 hectares (the Bordeaux wine region today “only” covers 45,000 hectares). For centuries, the Latin Quarter was also home to the Halle aux Vins, the world’s largest wine warehouse, which had direct access to the trade routes of the Seine.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the cultivation of the vine continued and by the Middle Ages business was booming. The industry was intrinsically linked with the activity of the church in a mutually beneficial relationship. Monasteries had their own vineyards as a matter of course and there were thriving vines in Saint-Germain-des-Prés on today’s Left Bank, close to where our tour took place, as well as the northern suburb of Saint-Denis, where the Olympic Village will be this summer. In turn, said Finch, the profits from the wine sales funded the first Gothic cathedrals, including Notre-Dame.

In the centuries that followed, the Paris region continued to dominate the European wine trade and was home to the world’s largest wine-storage warehouses, first in the Latin Quarter and then the Bercy neighbourhood by the Seine. But as Paris urbanised and industrialised, the vines began to disappear. Today, a precious few remain in the capital itself.

The most known is the Clos Montmartre, located on the northern slope of the famous hill topped by the Sacré-Cœur Basilica. Each year, this pretty plot produces 500 bottles. The harvest is celebrated at the annual Vendanges de Montmartre festival in October – a lively affair reminiscent of a country fête from times gone by. Patrons can glug a glass of the Montmartre red, which is vinified in the cellar of the local town hall.

In his book, Finch not only makes his passionate case for the importance of wine to Paris’s identity, but also unearths lesser-known urban vines, the largest of which are owned and managed by the City of Paris. Clos Bergeyre, tucked between buildings in the 19th arrondissement, has 230 vines of Chardonnay, Muscat and Pinot Noir that are harvested each year. Clos des Envierges inside the Parc de Belleville has 27 Chardonnay vines and 160 Pinot Meuniers, on a site where wine has been grown since the time of the Carolingians.

The wines are vinified in a cellar in Bercy in the 12th arrondissement, the former home of a vast 19th-century storage facility, which also has its own modestly producing mini-vineyard of Sauvignon and Chardonnay. The resulting wines can also be sampled during the city’s fête des vignes in October and Finch also leads private tours to the sites.

Amid a generalised push for more biodiversity, the city is planting more young vines. In 2022, urban agriculture entrepreneur Virginie Dulucq planted more than three hectares of vine in the Bois de Vincennes, creating the largest urban vineyard in the city so far. They are expected to produce wine by 2025 and host regular visits and workshops.

On our tour, we visited a young vineyard on the slopes of the Arènes de Lutèce, a Gallo-Roman amphitheatre that was discovered during the Haussman renovation of Paris in the 1860s. Here, 200 Artaban, Floréal and Vidoc vines are growing fast.

There are even broader changes afoot in the larger Paris region. After being left off the map throughout the 20th century, the Île-de-France region was awarded the IGP (Indication Géographique Protégé) status in 2020 and, since then, a number of new vineyards have popped up in the region. ​Finch’s favourites include La Bouche du Roi in Davron, a 30-minute drive south west of the city, and Les Coteaux du Montguichet in the village of Chelles in the eastern Paris region. Both properties produce well-regarded natural red and white wines and are open for tours and tastings.

Our tour ended with a tasting at Bonvivant, an organic wine bar in the Latin Quarter, where we toasted to the Parisian vine. “Paris is the wine capital of the world and always has been”, says our host, and we all drank to the sentiment.

Hannah Meltzer was a guest on the Latin Quarter Unbottled! tour, which runs almost daily and costs €95 per person.

Discover the best wine bars in Paris.

The natural wine movement in Paris

The wine bars and stockists of Paris were early adopters and key players in the natural wine movement. Thanks to the Paris scene, “natural wine” has gone from obscure hippy-ish interest, started by a gang of rogue Beaujolais wine-makers in the 1960s,  to an ubiquitous global trend, in vogue from Milan to Mexico City.  In contrast to the AOC (Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée), which is awarded by the French government, the definition of a “natural” wine is somewhat amorphous. Wine guru Jancis Robinson defines it as “a relative rather than absolute term for wine produced by small-scale, independent growers from hand-picked grapes using sustainable, organic or biodynamic viticulture”.