With over 280,000 acres (120,000 hectares) of vines producing a staggering 71 million cases (6.4 million hectolitres) Bordeaux is the largest wine producing region in the world. Situated in the South West of France the wines became the aforemost mentioned in the world thanks to the healthy trade they enjoyed with the claret-loving, one time rulers of Bordeaux, the British. What made the region particularly famous and popular across the world as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at a time when other French wines were largely unheard of outside of their own borders, was the ease at which it could be shipped by ocean across to Britain and by extension, to it’s colonies throughout the world.