With its wide boulevards, stone buildings and elegant plazas, Bordeaux is a Parisian-style city without the capital city’s rather substantial population. The muddy and mighty Garrone River dissects its two banks and three bridges allow for easy access to the old and new sides of the city. Bordeaux’s moon shaped port was declared a World Heritage site by the United Nations and for good reason — it is idyllic by city terms, but rapidly changing. The French are so good at building and designing and instilling beauty into everything from castles and chateaus to everyday basic clothing and even the seemingly simplest objects like poles for power lines, which can look like Picasso and Le Corbusier teamed up for the outcome. Their expertise in transportation systems is also quite apparent. With the recent development of the high speed Trans Grandes Vites, or TGV train, Bordeaux is increasingly a residence for commuters who everyday ride two hours each way to and from Paris.
The extent to which city planners have successfully discouraged automobile traffic within Bordeaux’s cobbled streets and ancient walls and gates is amazing. There is an extensive above ground modern tram system. Small buses navigate the tighter city streets. Bicycle and pedestrian paths along with rental bike stations are in every neighborhood, making it cheap and relatively easy to hop on two wheels and very quickly transport yourself. Bike riders fly through crowds, often with large delivery packs on their backs and drivers instinctively break for pedestrians at nearly any crosswalk. Collisions are avoided as if all this chaos is somehow being miraculously choreographed. In fact, the gravest danger is the risk of being hit by the sleek trams which are so silent and fast that you barely hear them approaching.
All this is not necessarily what I wanted to write about today but it is important to note that the ease of movement that the rental bikes allow, and the pleasantness of a city so seemingly accommodating to pedestrians and cyclists, provided a newfound sense of freedom once we learned how to sign up and pay for them.
You see all kinds of creatively adapted food trucks throughout France.
Our apartment was in a touristic part of town, with a four story stone spiral staircase and no elevator, lots of natural light and occasional street noise, a tightly quartered kitchen where we could cook some meals which made it feel a little more like home than a hotel. Language classes lasted till 1 pm and the time flew by. French is spoken very differently than it is written and even with my rudimentary understanding I quickly developed an appreciation of its subtle beauty and the value in gaining at least an intermediate sufficiency. (This will take time and effort.) As our small classes ended each day, the lunch hour arrived, shops closed and the entire city seemed to sit down to three course lunches with wine and coffee at outside tables spilling from restaurants onto streets and plazas. The French, we learned from a podcast on the history of food, were largely responsible for the development of restaurants many centuries ago, as the country’s customs gradually flowed from the nobility to a rising merchant class amidst a strongly emerging regional food culture.
Bordeaux is known as “the cité du vin” and we rode the rental bikes to a wine museum in a nice part of town called the Cartier de Chartrons. The neighborhood has a great feel with its narrow streets and old stone buildings, a few churches, lifestyle shops, small fabricators, a daily market, and lots of people out and about the streets, cafes and restaurants. The museum itself was a few notches down from the typical elevated standards for museums in France but we paid our admission, descended into the ancient barrel cellar to view an exhibition and later had a small tasting. There is a lot to learn about the complexities of making and identifying wines in the Bordeaux region. When locals pronounce Bordeaux, the word kind of gets stuck in the bottom of the throat. The “r” dissolves into a guttural sound followed by the “deaux.” It’s a skillful linguistic move. But I digress.
Down in the arched stone cellar of the wine museum we learned a number of useful things. The age of modern wines most probably started with Northern Europeans who began to import massive amounts of port and clarets in sailing ships from the southern regions that were loaded to the hilt with barrels. What it must have taken to load 500 pound barrels from warehouses to wharfs to schooners to their final destination with 16th century technology. I imagine where there was a thirst, and money to be made, there were many ramps and pulleys and other ingenious ways.
The British invented the bottle in the 16th century and that was followed by a cork industry made from the bark of an oak native to Spain and Portugal which also incidentally grows beautifully in Northern California. The continuum of oversized bottles, which I personally love to fill with my own wine, are named after ancient kings: Mathusalem (8 bottles), Salmanazar (12 bottles), Bathazar (16 bottles), Nabuchodonosor (20 bottles), and Malchior (24 bottles).
Two hundred years later, so the exhibit informed us, the Dutch initiated the process of sulfuring barrels and wines to preserve them. This no doubt changed wines and wine making completely, as they could now be aged and preserved much longer as the sulphur fends of vinegarization. Today, in a backswing against this historical trajectory, however, there are rapidly expanding natural and naked wine movements underway, toward unadulterated organic and biodynamic methods that are in direct opposition to the late 20th Century Bordeaux styles so influenced by now retired American critic Robert Parker, a man whose palette and power could make or break wine houses and vintages, and who is regarded as highly responsible for how many French wine houses approach wine making today. Not always in a positive light, I might add.
Falling under the spell of Bordeaux, I am reminded that I am missing my first olive harvest in thirteen years and that I very much miss the daily and weekly chores in my own home artisan farming operation: the topping of barrels, occasional tasting with the glass thief, staying on top of things but getting out of the way to let the fruit do its magic. The blessings of liquid sunlight are some of the best pleasures that this life has to offer, especially when it comes from your own two hands on land carefully tended. But sometimes you have to appreciate them second hand, if you are lucky enough to be in a place to do so.