I don’t drink. Well, I do now, but I never used to. I suffered badly from teetotalism in my youth, and a trip to the Ecole du Vin de Bordeaux was part of a long process of rehabilitation for me. L’Ecole du Vin is a great place to get your nose into wine because they wear their learning lightly with thorough, unpretentious courses. You’re also allowed to spit a lot.
My little class came from all over the world, from Cyprus to Japan, and it only took a few tastings before we were living out the motto carved in the reception of the school: wine civilisation is for people who want to know each other, not fight each other. I imagine a similar school for lager would concentrate on the fighting part.
The first thing we did was to get to know our tongues and noses better. We learned how to recognise the layers within a wine and what their aromas told us. At first I had a conceptual difficulty with this because all I could smell and taste for the first few hours was red wine. But I soon got over this and it wasn’t long before I was saying things like: ‘It tastes like the dust on an old projector.†That’s the great thing about wine, you can say anything you like as it’s all a matter of taste.
Our tutor was Gabrielle, a master of wine who is English by birth but whose body language had long gone native. Gabrielle has a great way of making sense of wines. One wine, she said, was ‘refusing to talk to us because it had been struck dumb by the shock of being put in a bottleâ€. She advised letting it lie quietly somewhere dark to recover. I volunteered to go with it.
We learned that wines from Bordeaux are complex. You have to get to know their parentage, their origin and their upbringing. In fact, drinking one is almost like an arranged marriage. We also learned that wines have to be drunk at the right time. Wines, like teenagers, need to be given time to resolve their internal dilemmas. Above all we learned about the terroir — this is the soil and climate of Bordeaux, not to be confused with the Terror, which was an early attempt to remove the Premier Cru of French society. Every chateau has its own terroir and its own mix of grapes or assemblage, giving rise to its own unique wine. Drinking French wine is, therefore, like tasting a part of France.
Bordeaux is the soul of France but, sadly, the soul of France is troubled. The high unemployment that plagues the rest of the country is spreading to its wines as more and more are quietly turned into industrial alcohol. The very best Bordeaux chateaux still sell every bottle but, just off the coast, super-tankers of Australian crude steam relentlessly up the English Channel, bound for Tesco.
My newly trained nose was detecting a slight whiff of crisis in the chateaux. But there was also an interesting fresher note, and that was the new-found confidence of the city itself. The many classical buildings have been returned to their original honeyed colour and the world’s sexiest trams snake in a liberated and sensual fashion through the car-free streets.
The wines of Bordeaux may no longer be conquering the world, but the world is now beginning to come to Bordeaux, which, happily, might be the very thing that saves this unique terroir. We can all drink to that. —