BORDEAUX, France — Bordeaux is wine--grand, tannic red capable of long life and alive with vivid flavor; crisp, smoky white, simultaneously rich and dry; opulent dessert wine the color of amber, as sweet as honey and as fine as silk . . . .
But Bordeaux is also a city, and a wonderful one at that--a sophisticated, wealthy metropolis, in which contemporary fashion, art and design play animatedly against a backdrop of exquisite 18th-Century buildings, bright boulevards and charming medieval back streets. Bordeaux is also today, as the French would say, une ville qui bouge --a city on the move.
Wine, or more specifically the wine trade, animates much of the city's activity, of course, keeping Bordeaux wealthy and insuring its continued prominence on the world stage. But other factors--its proximity to Spain (the "happening" European nation of the early 1990s), its long tradition of gastronomy, its avid civic sponsorship of daring architecture--imbue it with remarkable energy and make it not just an interesting but an exciting place to visit.
Bordeaux is the second-largest city in France in area and the fourth-largest in population. Located on the Garonne River, near its confluence with the Dordogne, not far from the Atlantic coast (and about 120 miles north of the Spanish border), it was built on or near the site of a settlement established in the 3rd Century BC by Celtic tribes. One of Julius Caesar's lieutenants captured it for the Romans in 56 BC and built it into a fortified town, which became known as Burdigala, from which the city's modern name derives. Two of modern Bordeaux's main streets, the Rue Sainte-Catherine (now a sort of elongated shopping mall) and the Cours de l'Intendance, were first laid out in this era.
Bordeaux's later history is surprisingly English. It was here in 1137 that the future King Louis VII married Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose considerable dowry included the entire Aquitaine region--which is to say most of southwestern France. After a stormy 15-year marriage, their union was annulled and Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet--who almost immediately inherited the English crown to become Henry II of England. For the next 300 years, until 1453, England and France disputed the ownership of Bordeaux and the surrounding region--and the Aquitaine remained, in effect, English.
During this period, the English developed a taste for the wines of the region, and established a thriving wine trade that built Bordeaux into a major port. The English involvement in Bordeaux winemaking explains why so many famous wine estates today bear English or Irish names in whole or in part--Palmer, Talbot, Leoville-Barton and Langoa-Barton, Cantenac-Brown, Phelan-Segur, even the famed Haut-Brion, which is French for O'Brien.
As a matter of fact, though, only a handful of wine-producing chateaux are located within the Bordeaux city limits. The rest surround Bordeaux, on both sides of the Garonne and the Dordogne--most notably in the Medoc to the north of the city (home of such blue-chip estates as Lafite, Mouton and Latour), Graves and Sauternes to the south and Pomerol and St-Emilion to the east. All these regions are within easy driving distance of the city, and hotel concierges can arrange vineyard tours--though Bordeaux chateaux seldom have fancy visitors' centers of the California wine-country sort, and they won't necessarily offer free samples.
Two new facilities, both in the Medoc, that are more accommodating than most, though, are the chai (above-ground wine cellar) with visitors' center and museum attached at Chateau Pichon-Baron, and the gift shop and restaurant behind the 16th-Century Chateau Prieure-Lichine. Also in the Medoc is the Chateau Cordeillan-Bages, a luxurious small hotel with restaurant and wine-tasting facilities next door to (and partially owned by) Chateau Lynch-Bages.
Bordeaux itself is notable for both its beautiful, almost stately business quarter--with its monuments, parks and long vistas, it almost suggests a Gallic Washington, D.C.--and its well-preserved old town. In spirit, it seems to blend the orderly design and classic architecture of northern France with the informality and verve of the south, rather as if a portion of Paris had been transplanted into the midst of Toulouse or Montpellier.
