Bordeaux

Bordeaux is a port city, and that’s the key to the whole region. It made its fortune shipping wine to England and the Netherlands, and its wines were shaped by what travelled well and what the British aristocracy would pay for. The word "claret" is English, not French.

The Gironde estuary and the two rivers feeding it - the Garonne and the Dordogne - split the region in two, and the soil on either side is different enough to demand different grapes.

The reason is drainage and heat. Gravel holds warmth and drains hard, which suits late ripening Cabernet Sauvignon. Cold, wet clay doesn’t, so the Right Bank plants Merlot, which ripens weeks earlier. This isn’t a matter of taste. It’s what will actually ripen where, and it explains the whole map.

The wedge between the two rivers has the strangest name in Bordeaux and the strangest rule. "Between two seas" only looks like a mistake: they’re rivers, the Garonne and the Dordogne. They got called seas because the Atlantic tide runs a long way up both, so the water on either side of the region rises and falls twice a day - and on a big tide the Dordogne carries a tidal bore, the mascaret, upstream as a wave that people paddle out and surf.

The rule is stranger. Entre-Deux-Mers is the largest stretch of vineyard land in Bordeaux, and its appellation is white only: dry Sauvignon Blanc, Sémillon and Muscadelle. Most of what actually grows between the rivers is red, and none of it may use the name - it is sold as Bordeaux or Bordeaux Supérieur instead. So the biggest subdivision of the region is, on the label, a white appellation, and almost everything planted in it is disqualified from saying where it came from.

It’s the part of Bordeaux to look in first for a white worth more than it costs, precisely because the name on it isn’t one anybody is bidding for.

Almost no Bordeaux is a single variety. Six red grapes are permitted - Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, Malbec and Carménère - though the last two are now rare there. The blend is settled months after harvest, by tasting through the separate batches and deciding how much of each goes in. It’s the biggest decision a château makes all year.

Each grape has a job. Cabernet Sauvignon supplies structure, tannin and blackcurrant. Merlot supplies softness and weight through the middle of the mouthful. Cabernet Franc supplies aromatic lift and a leafy edge. Petit Verdot, at a few percent, supplies colour and a floral, violet like scent.

Napoleon III wanted a ranking of Bordeaux for the Paris Exposition Universelle. The brokers produced one in a matter of weeks, and rather than tasting anything they simply sorted the châteaux by the prices their wines had been fetching. 61 estates were sorted into five growths, from Premier Cru Classé down to Cinquième.

It has been amended exactly once in nearly two centuries: Mouton Rothschild was promoted from second to first growth in 1973, after decades of lobbying and an order signed by the agriculture minister of the day, Jacques Chirac. Its motto had been, wonderfully, "First I cannot be, second I do not deign to be, Mouton I am." Afterwards it became "First I am, second I was, Mouton does not change."

Note also what it excludes. The 1855 list covers only the Médoc, with a single exception. Haut-Brion, which is in Graves rather than the Médoc, went in anyway because its name and its prices were already long established - Samuel Pepys was drinking it, and writing the name in his diary, in 1663. The entire Right Bank is absent, which is why Pomerol - home to Pétrus, one of the most expensive wines on earth - has no classification at all. Saint-Émilion runs its own classification, revised roughly every decade, and the revisions keep going badly. Estates demoted in the 2012 ranking took it to court. In 2021 the owner of Château Angélus was convicted of unlawful interference in that same ranking: he had chaired both the regional appellation body overseeing it and the growers’ organisation, while consulting for châteaux that were promoted - his own among them, to the top tier. By 2022 two of the four estates at that tier, Cheval Blanc and Ausone, had withdrawn from the classification altogether.

Dry white Bordeaux is Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon, at its best in Pessac-Léognan, where barrel fermentation gives it a waxy, smoky depth that ages for decades. It’s consistently one of the least fashionable great white wines in the world, which makes it good value.

South of the city, where the cold Ciron river meets the warmer Garonne, autumn mornings produce a mist that burns off by afternoon. That cycle is exactly what noble rot needs. The result is Sauternes: grapes picked berry by berry over several passes, sometimes yielding a single glass of wine per vine.

The name I kept running into here is Émile Peynaud. Working at the University of Bordeaux from the 1940s, he reshaped modern winemaking practice - harvesting later, strict selection, control of malolactic conversion - and is, as far as I can tell, the single person most responsible for how a good red wine tastes today.