Wine warehouses of Bercy

Low stone warehouses with rounded roofs and heavy iron rings embedded in their walls stretch across the Bercy district. These buildings once housed the largest wine market in the world. During the nineteenth century, wine barrels arrived here by boat along the Seine, were rolled into these cellars for storage, and waited for the city's tax collectors to approve them. One night in eighteen seventy, a barrel-maker accidentally started a fire that consumed millions of liters of wine, leaving the streets flowing with red.