Bordeaux Nouveau

It Produces Some of the Greatest Vintages of All Time, but It’s Never Taken Very Kindly to Visitors—until Now. From the City to the Grand Old Châteaux Beyond, Elaine Sciolino Discovers That France’s Premier Wine-making Region Is Showing a Fresh Face to the World.

I confess I came late to Bordeaux. My experience with wine began as a kid growing up in Buffalo in the 1950s. My paternal grandfather, Gaetano, who emigrated from Sicily, concocted a rough-edged wine in the backyard every fall. One year red; one year white. He ‘aged’ it for a few months in old whiskey barrels to give it a bigger bite and watered it down for me and my siblings to sample.

During my first decade living in France, I mostly avoided visiting the Bordeaux wine region. To many, the very name means old-fashioned, snobbish, and unaffordable. For centuries, its winemakers have created some of the world’s most prized and expensive wines—Thomas Jefferson was famously devoted— and they devised a system of classifying them that hasn’t changed since the days of Emperor Napoleon III.

I realised that I could spend my whole life sampling Bordeaux wines and never master the vast universe of their history and traditions. I have French friends who so revere them that they can rattle offvintages the way American baseball fans know who scored how many home runs in which World Series. Fantasising about Bordeaux wines helped journalist Jean-Paul Kauffmann endure his ordeal as a hostage in Lebanon in the 1980s. He kept his memory in shape by reciting daily the famous 1855 classification system. He imagined the aromas and tastes of the wines from the dark and cramped dungeon where he was held chained and sometimes blindfolded. “Sometimes in the deep dark well of reality, a miracle happened,” he wrote after the ordeal was over. “The taste of cedar and black currant from the Cabernet Sauvignon, the plummy aroma of the Merlot, returned to me.”