I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.

I'm Levy Dalton.

I'm Erin Scala and here's our show today. Oh, The I'm going to be. We can thank the Dutch for many things. We can thank them for tulips, for Rembrance,

for President Martin Van Buren, and for Great Bordeaux.

Yep, you heard me, that's right.

I said we can thank the Dutch for Great Bordeaux.

Allow me to explain. 55% of the Netherlands is below sea level,

so water control and flood prevention has long been a big issue in the government for centuries.

Since the 1200s, water control boards have been working on the flooding issues by managing water barriers and waterways.

These water control boards could levy taxes, and they played a big role in the formation of the Netherlands as a cohesive nation.

The Netherlands is one instance where a national geographic issue such as water helped them solidify into a nation.

This highly organized system of water control was so efficient

was such a feat of modern engineering that these systems were very

attractive to wetland regions that were looking for solutions to their own water problems,

such as Bordeaux in the 17th century.

Dutch engineers were called in and they started by building water blocking levies around wetlands

and draining the built-up water out to the river in canals.

If you go to Bordeaux today, you'll see many such canals leading out to the river.

Great wineries saw the successes of these systems and in the 1800s many installed their own drainage pipes to carry water from the vineyards to the sea.

In the year Mark Twain was born, right around the time when Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens were working on some of their classics,

the good people over at Chateau Latour were building stone drains to manage water in their vineyards.

Interestingly, water management is only allowable in some forms in Wardo.

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