BORDEAUX

Photo from Angell Guillén on unsplash

Bordeaux is to France what Napa Valley is to California. It’s a case of the little area making the big area famous.

You surely may find fine wine outside Bordeaux or Napa, but no other winemaking district in their respective countries has their prestige, certainly their aura.

The world’s largest fine wine vineyard
Bordeaux is the largest fine wine vineyard in the world. It is larger than Germany’s entire vineyard areas put together (and eight times larger than Napa Valley’s!). Each year, it produces a staggering 700 million bottles of red and white wine—and one-quarter of all French wine under appellation d’origine contrôlée.

Water everywhere
The name Bordeaux comes from “au bord de l’eau” or “along the water.” The area is indeed dominated by its rivers—the Garonne and Dordogne that meet to become the broad Gironde—and by the Atlantic Ocean, an hour’s drive away.

Combined with the vast pine forests to the south and west, these bodies of water temper and modulate a climate that otherwise would be more perilous for grape vines. (Hundreds of years ago, the rivers also were keys to the region’s early commercial success, functioning as conduits for commerce to the outside world.)

Greatness in numbers
In large part, Bordeaux’s wines stand tall because they are blends of different grapes, a trait that they share with only a few other wines in the world (Champagne and Rioja, for example).

The red wines produced at Bordeaux’s famous châteaux might mix Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon—Bordeaux’s two most widely planted red grapes—with ancillary varieties such as Cabernet Franc, Malbec,Malbec and Petit Verdot, but not in any precise recipe and rarely all five at once. Bordeaux estates also make white wines—some dry, a few sweet—from blends of Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc or Muscadelle.

These blends work because, when one grape variety supports the other, they introduce complexity into a wine. For instance, supple Merlot hangs flesh on the bones of the highly structured, almost austere Cabernet Sauvignon; or crisp, fresh Sauvignon Blanc enlivens plump, soft Sémillon.

The idea of blending separates Bordeaux from Burgundy, its rival in fame to the east. There, Pinot Noir alone makes Burgundy’s great reds; Chardonnay alone, its great whites.

Grapes of note
Though we think of Cabernet Sauvignon as the grape of red Bordeaux, Merlot is planted nearly two-to-one, especially on what is called the “Right Bank,” the vineyards of St. Emilion and Pomerol on the right side (as you look downriver to the sea) of the river Gironde. The “Left Bank,” or Médoc, is where Cabernet Sauvignon is strong, although often tempered by Merlot.

And though we think of Bordeaux as a preeminent red wine-producing area, it makes vast quantities of white wine as well, especially in Entre-Deux-Mers (“Between the Two Seas”). Likewise, some of the world’s most sublime sweet white wine comes from the districts of Sauternes and Barsac—where Sémillon is the workaday grape. In fact, until the 1970s, Bordeaux made more white wine than red.

Classification of 1855
Perhaps you’ve overheard someone referring to a Bordeaux red as a “second growth.” In 1855, the brokers who dealt in Bordeaux wine listed what they considered the best 61 Médoc wines and ranked them into five categories, called “crus” or “growths.”

The results always were controversial – some suggest that they were arbitrary to begin with – but these chateaux still enjoy royal status among all 8,000+ Bordeaux chateaux.

The five chateaux that are ranked as “first growths” are three Pauillacs—Lafite-Rothschild, Latour, and Mouton-Rothschild (elevated from “second growth” status in 1973)—and Haut-Brion (from Pessac-Léognan) and Margaux (from Margaux).

Garage wines
In the early 1990s, Bordeaux saw the emergence of a movement called vins de garage or “garage wines,” by and large St. Emilion estates that made red wine from a mere 4-5 acres of vines, in such small quantities that the entire production could fit (or, indeed, be made in) a garage. The movement since has expanded well beyond St. Emilion.

Consumers, collectors and the media consider the garagistes either saints, for their super-avant-garde methods (pruning their vines severely and culling the harvest, thus concentrating flavors, and extracting optimum fruit, texture and mature tannin during winemaking) or sinners, for their capitulation to an “internationalized” style of red wine (for example, so augmenting fruit and wood in a wine as to obliterate terroir and individuality).

Wherever your vote, in the end the garagistes changed winemaking throughout Bordeaux because they caused even the most far-flung châteaux to attend to things such as vineyard yields or fruit expression, especially in better vintages.

La région
Bordeaux is comprised of 57 appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) designations. The six most important to remember are: Médoc (only red wines); Pomerol (only red wines); Graves/Pessac-Léognan (both red and dry white wines); St. Émilion (only red wines); and Barsac and Sauternes (only dry and sweet white wines).

Within the Médoc, five important AOC sub-regions are worth remembering: Haut-Médoc, St. Estèphe, Pauillac, St. Julien and Margaux.

Bordeaux and dinner
In truth, Bordeaux's cooking, even though it is French, is very plain. And the better food and wine matches with Bordeaux wine are also simple and straightforward. A classic marriage is roast leg of lamb (or roast beef) and a red from just about anywhere in Bordeaux.

Other great matches are foie gras terrine and Sauternes, or Roquefort cheese and Sauternes—the former duo for the beginning of a meal, and the latter for the end.

If you can manage some fresh, briny oysters, pair them with a young white Graves. And many of the straightforward, crisp Entre-Deux-Mers whites make excellent apéritifs with any type of finger food or nibble.