March 11

March 11, 1744: The fine art auction company Sotheby’s was established on this day. The company’s wine subsidiary, Sotheby’s Wine, specializes in wine auctions in different locations, including Hong Kong, New York, and London. Sotheby’s Wine holds more than twenty wine auctions each year in these locations, specializing in rare and fine wines from Bordeaux, Burgundy, Napa Valley, Champagne, and Sonoma County. These include France’s First Growths such as Château Lafite and Burgundy’s elegant Pinot Noirs. As a result, it has built an excellent reputation, becoming a trusted source in wine auctions.

March 11, 1907: The Revolt of Languedoc Winegrowers started. Marcellin Albert, a small-scale winegrower, called the revolt. Albert called the meeting of the village’s viticultural defense committee that set forth the protest against Georges Clemenceau’s government. The protests aimed to push the government to enact wine control measures and ensure no fraudulent wine practices were destroying the reputation of the wine market. On March 11, protestors marched to the parliamentary commission in Narbonne that had been sent to investigate the crisis. The revolt continued until September 22, 1907, when Georges Clemenceau’s government revised laws about wine production. For more information, see Laura Levine Frader’s work Peasants and Protest: Agricultural Workers, Politics, and Unions in the Aude; 1850-1914.

March 11, 2014: Plonk, an Australian comedy series, premiered. “Plonk” is slang for cheap wine, a fitting title for a show that follows a fictional television crew and their misadventures while trying to film a wine program.

For more dates in wine history, click here.

Header image: Christian Ferrer — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).