(Decanter) - Jane Anson works back from the storming of the Bastille and delves into the world of Bordeaux wine before the French Revolution of 1789. 

The handwritten banknote, made out in beautifully clear script to Messieurs Schroeder and Schyler from a Mr Sartorius in Paris is for a sum of 4,000 livres. It is dated 14 July, 1789.

It’s somehow entirely unsurprising to see that even with the revolutionary forces storming the Bastille just a few streets away, Mr Sartorius was still thinking of getting payment for his wine off to a Bordeaux négociant.

But it’s still hard not to feel a thrill to be sitting with this in my hands, one of hundreds of rare 18th century promissory notes that are held in the archives of Schroeder and Schyler négociant firm.

In fact, archives sound a little grand. Many of these are held in numbered boxes (and when I say numbered, I mean by year – so 1739, the firm’s first year of operation, sits next to 1740 and so on) in Yann Schyler’s office, the eighth generation of the family to run the merchant business.

Inside the boxes, bundles of letters and manuscripts are bound in their 18th century string. Some have never been opened, others carefully unfolded and read, with a few choice items preserved under glass. Clearly they have always been treated with this level of care, right from the start – every letter the date it was written, the date received, and the date it was replied to painstakingly noted on the envelope.

Even this tells a story, as the early letters took up to two months to arrive in Bordeaux via boat from their origin (often Hamburg or Lübeck, from where the founders Jean-Henri Schÿler and Jacques Schröder arrived in 1738) while things had speeded up considerably by the late 19th century to one week or less.

Several thousand more documents, from correspondence to order forms to contracts with châteaux securing 10-year bulk purchases of harvests, are held in Bordeaux’s city archives. These vast repositories have just moved to a new building designed by architects Robbrecht & Daem (the same architects designed the new Le Pin winery back in 2011).