appellations
Pessac-Léognan, Sauternes, Graves 56
Map of listed estates
200 legendary châteaux and their wines from A to Z 67
Travel and discover
269
City of Bordeaux 270
Right bank 272
South, Médoc and Atlantic 273
Selected addresses for visitors to Bordeaux 274
Bordeaux service
Cuisine 280
Glass and decanter 282
Storage and aging 285
Vintage overview 288
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Introduction
200 years of
wine adventure
Bordeaux is one of the oldest winemaking regions in the world.
However, what we know as ‘grand vin' (‘great wine') first emer-
ged during the 17th and 18th centuries. This development invol-
ved immigrants from a variety of countries – Bordeaux wine is a
universal product to the core.
The Bordeaux story
Success did not come about by accident, and great wines are born of great
terroirs: ‘mother vine' (as the cliché has it) is happiest growing in sand, gravel
and clay, sinking her roots deep into the womb of grandmother earth and bus-
ily siphoning mineral crystals, vitamins and aromas into her grapes that grow
and thrive before becoming Lafite Rothschild. Ten little Romans are said to
have discovered the excellent terroirs of the Gironde, laid down their spears and
cultivated the ancient Cabernet Sauvignon. Dionysus served as their wine con-
sultant and was outwitted by Bacchus who introduced barrel aging, and if they
had not died laughing they would still be blithely fertilising wine history with
absurd rubbish. If terroir were reduced to such ridiculous tales, then two thirds
of Bordeaux would onlybe only be good for growing radishes.
The truth is much more prosaic. As the Gauls – or more precisely, the Gallo-
Romans – liked to put a few drinks away (their only other pleasures were bread
and games) and wine was too expensive to import, they began planting their
own vines in around the second half of the first century. To do so, they first
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needed a grape variety that could withstand the capricious Atlantic climate:
Biturica, mentioned by Pliny the Elder and the agronomist Columella, and pos-
sibly a cross of varieties introduced from Spain and the Balkans. They planted
this wherever space could be found, gobbling up the terroir. And when they har-
vested more wine than they could drink, they sent the surplus to the newly con-
quered northern provinces of Brittany and Britain which had no lack of thirsty
throats but had had no success in growing vines despite numerous attempts to
select more resistant varieties. This required ships and a port, and Burdigala was
thus founded (thank you Jupiter), at least if historians are to be believed, as their
friends the archaeologists have not yet managed to find the Roman docks which
they presume to have existed in the most enterprising locations of the city.
One thing is certain: Bordeaux became the largest, most important wine city
in the world, as the half-moon-shaped meander of the Garonne – into which
numerous streams flow and where the original inhabitants of Bordeaux estab-
lished a settlement – was not only easy to defend, it also proved to be a perfect
natural port thanks to all the inflows from rivers such as the Lot, Tarn, Aveyron,
Baïse and Gers which chose the Garonne as their outlet. Then, and now, it acts as
an interchange and is the inevitable final stage of a journey from the hinterland
(nearly a quarter of modern France) along the almost 100 kilometre Gironde
estuary to the Atlantic, and offers links to the world's interconnected oceans.
In Bordeaux, the tides are still so strong that the river goes into reverse every
eight hours – acting as the perfect outboard motor for Roman galleys. By the first
century AD, Burdigala was already an emporium and a trade port, as recorded
by the historian Strabo.
Without its port, Bordeaux would now be part of a region called Libourne
rather than the other way around, for the right bank