Like many of its wines, Bordeaux would have been better with a bit more time

Bordeaux has been a savvy commercial centre since Roman times.  It's a river town with an
enormous port on a wide, slow bend in the Garonne.  This Mississippi-like river snakes through Southern France, providing a watery highway linking Toulouse, Bordeaux and the Atlantic.  The Bordelais have exploited their geography by becoming pragmatic brokers and traders.  Their most famous export, of course, being wine.

This commercial heritage is reflected in an efficient tourism office, one of the best I've ever experienced for offering agendas and sorting details.  We gave them a simple mission: "We're here for a day and a half, we'd like to get an introduction to the region, but we're most interested in tasting and buying wine."  I suspect that penultimate word triggered an increased level of attention.

Of course, our first visit to Bordeaux undoubtably deserved more than 12 hours of sightseeing, and the logic of the map said we should have stopped here ... the 2/3rds point between the Normandy Coast and Gascony ... en route.  Instead, logistics forced us to squeeze it in to the two nights between the end of cooking school and the beginning of our week-long cottage rental.

The tourism office has a dedicated wine desk, unsurprisingly in what's arguably the world's largest production area for fine wines.  We quickly ended up here, where the desk manager sorted a tasting for us that afternoon, and an all-day tour the next day that would cover the city highlights before heading out to the august wine region of St. Emilion.

There are a bewildering number of places to taste wine in Bordeaux, of course, but most are introductions to the region that give a similar overview.  Compare and contrast the left and right banks, end with a Sauternes.  We'd done an excellent starter course with Berry Brothers in November (covered here), so wanted something more specific.  We were looking for interesting wines from smaller producers that didn't export much; reasonably-priced jewels we could lay down and reveal with a story at a dinner party in a few years' time.  The tourist board sent us to The Wine Corner, a small shop in a street running north from the cathedral which, we were assured, did highly personalised tastings and specialised in smaller vineyards.

Appearances deceive
Our first few minutes weren't promising.  The shop wasn't much bigger than a galley kitchen, we had to wait for other customers to clear out even though we'd made an appointment and the girl serving us was no local, but a Russian.  But all was not what it seemed.  Experts from all over the world come to this oenological Mecca to hone their skills.  She knew her stuff.  The shop front was the tip of an iceberg; when you wind down some circular stone stairs you find yourself in a warren of 18th century cellars with a cozy tasting alcove furnished with two plushly upholstered bar stools.  Our Russian spent time upstairs diagnosing our tastes and talking through possibilities.  After identifying the four we wanted to try, it was downstairs to the cellar, where she put the wines in a sensible order and walked us through the tasting notes and cellaring potential of each.

We'd opted for an organised tour the next day based on two warnings you always hear about Bordeaux.  First:  It's a huge area, and if you don't know where you're going you can spend hours driving aimlessly amongst the vines.  Second:  Few vineyards are open to walk up trade; you have to arrange tastings in advance.  There was a third tip we heard repeatedly:  Go to St. Emilion.  And so we were off, on a 25-seater mini-coach, for a short city tour followed by lunch at a St. Emilion vineyard, a drive around the AOC and a wander in the eponymous town.

The city tour was an excellent idea.  Bordeaux is not your typical provincial wine town like Beaune, Greve-in-Chianti or Napa.  It's France's 6th-largest city, with history, additional industry and government (it's the regional capital) to add to the wine.  The city centre is walkable, in theory, but the bus covered everything faster, with commentary.  The mostly 18th-century riverfront is gorgeous; the Place de la Borse and its fellows as palatial as Versailles, but built to celebrate commerce rather than monarchy.  The Alee de Tourny is a gracious rectangular space of the same period that called Piazza Navona to mind.  In fact, there's block after block of magnificent 18th century architecture that makes it clear this place was dripping with money while Paris' poor were storming the Bastille.  It's no wonder that the Girondin movement, a counter to the lead revolutionary party, was based here.  They lost, but they're commemorated in a stunning memorial column.

Other eras pop in to mix things up.  There are two city gates Eleanor of Aquitane would recognise, and though the cathedral where she contracted her marriage to Louis of France has seen several makeovers since her time, it's still resolutely gothic.  As are a whole string of impressive churches across town.  The Romans exert their presence with the ghostly remains of an amphitheater.  There's even a modern district similar to Paris' La Defense, and a Richard Rodgers-designed courthouse with funky inverted towers that mimic the Medieval tower next door.  Getting a feel for the place in a morning, or even a day, was a bit laughable.  Turns out Bordeaux has 362 official monuments historiques ... only Paris has more.  But the bus made a valiant attempt and left us with the understanding that there's plenty to see here before you even start to think about wine.

Then it was off to St. Emilion, the 30 minutes of highway driving before we saw a vineyard validating the warning about how big this place is.  The next surprise:  it's quite flat.  Every wine district I've toured relies on steep slopes, and I've accepted the general rule of thumb that the good stuff comes from high up, while the vines in the valleys yield the cheap table wine.  That's definitely not the case here, where some of the world's most expensive wines are grown in flat fields or gently rolling hills.

Our winery tour took place at Chateau Grand Corbin-Despagne, a grand cru in the northern part of the district close to the border with the equally-famous Pomerol.  The tour was standard:  start in the vineyard to discuss growth and harvest, into the room with the fermenting tanks to go over the making, finish with the barrels to talk about ageing.  The regional difference seems to be an obsessive degree of quality control.  From regular pruning of each vine to control exactly how much sun each bunch of grapes gets, to sorting the fruit grape by grape, to minutely varying the temperature of the fermenting vats as needed to moving the wines through different barrels, this is a high-intensity wine making process.  You can certainly understand why something so labour-intensive demands such a high price.  Although a sceptical voice inside of me was thinking, surely you can produce equally nice wines in other regions without all the faffing about?

The class of '85

Perhaps, but doubtless not with this sophistication and ability to age.  Over a buffet lunch we tasted four different wines, going all the way back to their 1985.  That one was a tour-de-force of complexity, giving entirely different experiences from first taste to finish and showing off why good, old wines are so treasured.  And so expensive!  These days they produce both a showcase wine and a secondary and we actually preferred the junior partner, bringing a case home to age.  It's classic Bordeaux, with light tannins, red fruits, earth and even a hint of liquorice that should mellow and deepen with laying down.

Our postprandial drive wound us through St. Emilion's extensive vineyards, dotted with historic chateaux, humble farmhouses and the mid-sized producers between them.  There's plenty of gorgeous architecture to marvel at, the landscape has enough variety to be constantly interesting, and the tour guide was a treasure trove of historical titbits about what happened, where.  One thing was certain: the whole region is doing very, very well.  Our Russian wine tasting hostess and the Chinese ads we saw for wine tours made it clear that the international super-rich are pouring in here, buying expensive labels to prove sophistication.

The top-end wineries are responding to the trend, building lavish additions, investing in their operations and producing ever more complex wines to justify the escalating prices.  Our guide, however, told us a salutary tale.  The super-rich she's been exposed to aren't interested in the nuances of taste, or the complexities of food matching.  They're ticking an acquisition box that validates their wealth.  She's had people say to her, "I've already bought and drank a €300 bottle.  Why should I buy another?  They all taste the same."  I fear that by escalating prices to take advantage of a current trend, the wine makers of Bordeaux may have a problem when the high rollers drift to the next "must have".

Our final stop was the town of St. Emilion itself, which ended the day on a sour note.  I suspect this is one of these places like Taormina or San Gimignano that transforms back into a picturesque stage set at night, after the group tours leave.  But in the middle of the day, with every street body-to-body with tourists, it's horrible.  The Medieval ruins, stately towers and giddily-angled streets fade beneath the braying hordes.  Few seem to have any interest in what's around them.  They're eating ice cream, browsing through tacky, wine-themed gift shops or stopping to block traffic as they debate where to go next.  In a square at the heart of town, a busker "entertains" in a voice so irritating we thought he must be asking for money to stop. We found the whole place charmless and irritating, and were happy to have so little time there.

Fortunately, there was one redeeming feature.  The monolithic church is worth pushing past the crowds to see.  A local nobleman returned from the first crusade so impressed by the church of the Holy Sepulchre that he decided to create his own version in St. Emilion, hewing a Romanesque church out of the living rock to house the bones of the monk who gave name to the place.  It's an other-worldly, subterranean wonder, unlike anything I've ever seen.  It's more like a Game of Thrones set than a recognisable piece of European history, even with the modern incursion of the metal struts necessary on some of the columns to keep the whole thing from collapsing.  And, best of all, access is limited and only by ticketed, guided tour.  Meaning it's the only place in St. Emilion where you can find space to breathe, while being with people who appreciate their surroundings.

We packed an enormous amount into a day and a half, found plenty to enjoy and bought several cases of treasure for the wine fridges.  But, bottom line, we like Burgundy more.  From the sightseeing to the vineyards to the style of wine, the other famous wine region touches our heart a bit more.  Bordeaux, doubtlessly, deserves more time to prove us wrong.  But we had to go.  A cottage back in the sleepy Gascon countryside was calling.