Does Drinking Claret Signal Old Money?

Spend enough time around serious wine drinkers and eventually someone will say the phrase "More Cow Bell." Just joking, highly unlikely but it would be funny. The word that will probably pop up is Claret. Not Bordeaux. Not Cabernet. But Claret.

The word hangs in the air a little differently. Like More Cow Bell.  Ok, ok, enough homage to Christopher Walken.  

Claret sounds like a habit that predates modern wine marketing. Which raises an amusing question for anyone who sells wine for a living like myself: does drinking Claret signal old money?

The answer has less to do with price and far more to do with culture.

The term itself is an English invention, dating back centuries to the period when Bordeaux wines were flowing steadily into Britain through trade routes that long predate the United States. British aristocrats did not ask for Bordeaux at dinner. They asked for Claret. The word became shorthand for the red wines of the region, particularly those from the Left Bank where Cabernet Sauvignon dominates the blend. Over time it became something more than a geographic reference. It became a cultural cue.

Anyone who has watched the television series 'Downton Abbey' may remember that Lord Grantham references Claret more than once on the show.  The wine appears at the Crawley's dining room table as naturally as the silverware.

That detail is telling.

Claret historically wasn’t a trophy wine. It wasn’t meant to impress strangers across the table. It was simply the house red of people who had been drinking the same wines for generations. Old money, when it reveals itself, tends to do so through habit rather than spectacle.

Modern wine culture in the United States often works differently. Conversations tend to begin with price or critic scores or whether a bottle is considered “cult.” Napa Valley built an entire prestige economy around those signals, and some of the greatest California Cabernets now command prices that would have stunned earlier generations of wine drinkers.  Opus One is close to piercing the $500 mark.  

Claret, by contrast, rarely behaves that way. Even great Bordeaux often arrives quietly. It is structured, restrained, and famously built to evolve over decades. It assumes patience. It assumes someone might buy a case today and open it gradually over the next twenty years.

That sort of thinking—buying wine for a future version of yourself—is about as far from impulse purchasing as you can get. It also explains why Claret has always felt slightly aristocratic. It implies pedigree.  

Yet there is a funny twist to the story that anyone who runs a bottle shop notices almost immediately. Despite its reputation, Claret is often remarkably affordable relative to the prestige wines that dominate the American imagination today. Exceptional Bordeaux can still sell for less than many mid-tier Napa Cabernets designed to drink immediately.

Which makes the cultural symbolism of Claret even more interesting.

One of the most recognizable Claret bottles in America doesn’t come from Bordeaux at all. Francis Ford Coppola’s Claret, famously wrapped in traditional gold netting, has been sitting on grocery store shelves for decades and yet it has always carried a certain quiet esteem.  For many Americans, that bottle was their first encounter with the word Claret, and its presence in ordinary retail settings never really diminished its sense of tradition. The gold netting may have something to do with that.  

That tells you something important about wine culture. Prestige is not always about scarcity. Sometimes it is about continuity and symbolism. A bottle that quietly evokes an older tradition can carry weight even if it is widely available.

Which brings us back to the original question.

Does drinking Claret signal old money?

Not necessarily. But it does signal a certain sensibility. Claret drinkers tend to value restraint over spectacle, longevity over immediacy, and tradition over trend. The wines themselves evolve slowly, and the people who appreciate them tend to approach wine with a similar patience.

In a world increasingly obsessed with what is new, rare, or algorithmically trending, that mindset can feel comforting.