Ausonius, the Roman Poet Behind Saint-Émilion's Most Famous Wine
Almost nothing in this view of Saint-Émilion is Roman. The bell tower stands over a church that medieval monks hollowed out of the limestone, the houses are honey-coloured stone pulled from quarries under the town, and the rock face on the left still has doorways cut straight into it. The oldest thing in the frame is the habit of planting grapes on this hill. Bordeaux likes to credit that habit to one man. He was a fourth-century schoolteacher who ended up a consul.
On the western edge of town, on a slope facing south, sits Château Ausone. It’s seven hectares, one of the smallest top estates in Bordeaux and one of the most expensive, and it carries the name of Decimus Magnus Ausonius. The name turns up in local archives as early as 1529. Whether Ausonius ever owned this particular hillside is a different question. Nobody can prove it.
A Schoolteacher From Burdigala
Ausonius was born in Burdigala, Roman Bordeaux, around 310. His father was a doctor. He studied in the city and then taught there for about thirty years, first grammar and later rhetoric. Around 334 he married Attusia Lucana Sabina, daughter of a rich local landowner. She died at 27, after three children. He never remarried and outlived her by some forty years.
For most provincial teachers that would have been the whole story. Then, in the mid-360s, the emperor Valentinian I called him to the court at Trier to tutor his young son Gratian. Ausonius went along on the campaign against the Alamanni in 368 and got a captured Suebian girl, Bissula, out of it (he wrote poems about her, which say a fair amount about how a Roman court poet saw a war prize).
When Gratian became emperor in 375, the tutor was paid back in full. Ausonius was made prefect of Gaul, his son Hesperius got a prefecture as well, and in 379 Ausonius held the consulship, the highest honour Rome still had to hand out. A teacher from Bordeaux was now one of the most powerful men in the western empire.
It lasted until 383. The general Magnus Maximus rebelled in Britain and crossed into Gaul, and Gratian was killed at Lyon. Ausonius went back to his estates near Bordeaux and stayed there. He called them nidus senectutis, the nest of his old age.
A Poet Who Kept Looking at Vines
Ausonius wrote a lot, and much of it is clever occasional verse for friends. His best-known poem is the Mosella, written around 371 after a trip along the Moselle. Partway through, he stops cataloguing fish and turns to the slopes above the river, where the vines climb up “in a natural theatre”. Then he thinks of home:
sic mea flaventem pingunt vineta Garumnam
“Just so do my vineyards paint the yellow Garonne.” Anyone who has stood on the quay in Bordeaux and looked at that river, thick and golden with silt, knows he picked the adjective on purpose.
He was just as open about the city. In a poem ranking the great cities of the empire, Bordeaux comes last, twentieth, behind Rome, Constantinople, Carthage and the rest. It also gets the warmest entry:
Diligo Burdigalam, Romam colo; civis in hac sum, consul in ambabus; cunae hic, ibi sella curulis.
“I love Bordeaux, I revere Rome. I’m a citizen of one and consul in both. My cradle is here, my curule chair is there.”
He even gave the acreage of the modest estate his father left him. Two hundred iugera of ploughland, a hundred of vines, fifty of meadow, and a lot of woodland. A hundred iugera is roughly 25 hectares of vines. That’s more than three times the size of Château Ausone today, and he called the place his “little inheritance”.
Lucaniacus and the Case for This Hillside
Ausonius had more than one country property. The one Saint-Émilion cares about is Lucaniacus. The name reads like “the Lucanus place”, and his father-in-law was Attusius Lucanus Talisius, so a lot of people think the estate came to him through his wife’s family. From the late sixteenth century on, scholars went looking for it, and several villages around Bordeaux with names that sound close enough have put in their own claims.
Saint-Émilion’s case rests on what’s in the ground. Remains of a Roman villa, mosaic floors included, have been found at the foot of the Ausone slopes. In 2018 more Roman walls turned up when a plot was pulled out for replanting. So somebody with money lived here under Rome, looking out over the Dordogne valley. What hasn’t turned up is anything with Ausonius’s name on it.
A villa proves a villa.
The estate itself says there’s little doubt left. Historians put it more carefully: it fits, it’s possible, and it can’t be confirmed.
Why the Name Stuck
The vines were here long before him. In the first century, Pliny the Elder was already writing about a grape called biturica, named for the Bituriges, the Gaulish people around Bordeaux. Ausonius arrived about three hundred years later. What he added was the writing: a consul who put his own vineyards into Latin verse and told the whole empire he loved his hometown.
That’s the kind of pedigree a wine estate can’t buy. The name has been attached to this hillside for five hundred years now, and the modern estate, which took shape in the eighteenth century, has passed through very few families since.
In 2021 Ausone walked out of the Saint-Émilion classification, where it had held the top rank since the first list in 1955. When your estate is named after a Roman consul, a ranking from 1955 doesn’t add much.
He’d have recognised the view.