Dallas told me once that as part of their eternal damnation, those souls headed for Hell would have to go through Atlanta International. Well, I now believe that those penitents headed for Purgatory have to go, again and again, through the train station Bordeaux-Saint Jean! Crowded, hot, poorly labeled, and without any help, the penitent soul has to seek his way by elbowing others aside, going up and down to different tracks until, by a last-moment divine grace, he stumbles unto the right platform a minute short of departure. In other words, I did not have any love for Bordeaux, and about zero interest in visiting it.
However, I met a couple of Spaniards along El Camino, who praised Burdeos highly as their favorite French city. Really? Well, maybe I should at least take a look, so after the FlixBus from Pamplona left me at the train station, at 9h00, I decided to spend the day checking things out. Of course I was starting with a big load of prejudice and in the least appealing part of town, so I was particularly critical of the trash on the ground and the dirty facades (the porous, creamy limestone from which the city is built is fertile ground for the growth of mold, so unless washed with a certain frequency, the old buildings look somber and uninviting).
As I walked closer to town, however, the streets became cleaner and more and more of the buildings had a clean, creamy aspect to them. Once I reached the city center, I was favorably impressed by the plazas, the churches, the monuments, and the happy awakening of the city. I was planning on taking the tourist bus, which left from the Tourism Office right in the center of town, and got there in time to catch the first run of the day. It is not a hop on-hop off bus, unfortunately, so it was going to give me a bird’s eye view of the different parts of the city, and if I wanted to visit a specific point afterward I would have to take the tram.
Burdigala was a Roman city established ca. 700 BC, distinguished by its location along the left bank of the Garonne river, and by a region where the soil and the maritime climate was conducive to the planting of vineyards. Not much is left of the Roman city, because the city has gone through many stages of expansion, but Bordeaux has retained his great location as one of the prime ports of Europe (the industrial port has since migrated downstream to the estuary of La Gironde, which has allowed Bordeaux to develop their river front with many promenades, green belts, and other types of recreational spaces). Sometime during the Middle Ages the city was protected by a massive wall, of which only the imposing gates remain. The trace of the walls is now followed by wide avenues in a modest Parisian style. When Aquitaine was taken over by the Protestants, many Dutch merchants moved to Bordeaux and built fancy residences, or combined residences and wine cellars, along the waterfront. These areas have gone through many stages of renewal, particularly after the French took back Aquitaine, and were augmented by monumental civic architecture.
The one thing Bordeaux did not have until relatively recently, was a bridge to cross La Garonne, which is a silty river with treacherous sand banks. After being frustrated in one of his campaigns Napoleon I had his engineers build the first bridge, built on wood pilons pushed into the silty bottom. The bridge was not completed until the early 1800’s, a few years after the death of Napoleon. So, going back in history, that means that the right bank of the river developed in a completely different way, largely as silos for the storage of grain and other types of industrial activities. Most of that old industry has now disappeared, leaving behind ghost complexes that are now being considered for demolition and construction of new residential areas. One repurposed industrial complex that I wish I had time to visit is called Darwin, and is a demonstration project for all things ecologic.
After I completed my tour I took tram B to La Cité du Vin, an ultramodern complex that, among other things, hosts the Wine Museum. The building is “modern” and presumably represents the swirling of wine inside a carafe. “Rare”, if you know what I mean. But the museum is fabulous. At the start you collect a small device and earphones, which you then use to tap into the different displays. To begin with you embark on a flight over some of the most beautiful wine-producing portions of the world, such as France, Italy, Germany, South Africa and southern Australia, and then you get to listen to the experiences of wine growers from Santorini (where the vines need to be nested to protect them from heavy winds), Georgia (where some of the oldest grape varieties were domesticated and wine making techniques have varied but little in 3,000 years), Chile, Napa Valley, Spain, and France. Every region has its own challenges, and has developed its own strategies to deal with these challenges. I have been lucky enough to have visited these regions, so I was more and more drawn into the mistic of wine. The major lessons is that the regional quality of a wine is strongly influenced by terroir (the combination of soil type, soil slope, slope orientation, and elevation/temperature), sunlight, rainfall, suitable varieties and, of course, the ingenuity and knowledge of local growers and vignerons.
A good part of the museum is devoted to the different ways in which wine is manufactured. First step is, of course, the care of the vines. Turns out that in the Americas vines are infected by an aphid, phylloxera, which sometime in the late 1800’s early 1900’s jumped over the Atlantic and started devastating the European vineyards. Some treatments have been developed, but what seems to have worked best is to bring rootstock from America, which has developed resistance to phylloxera, and grafting unto it the ancient European varieties. According to the display, nowadays the majority of European vineyards are grafted in this way. Another interesting “pest” is the fungus Botrytis cinerea, present in the Sauterne region southwest of Bordeaux. This fungus develops over some of the grapes, slowly eating at the skin of the grape, causing the grapes to lose some of their moisture and shrivel up, concentrating the sugars and flavors in the remaining juice. The resulting Sauterne wine is sweet thanks to the "noble rot" caused by the fungus.
Then comes the tending of the vines. In Europe irrigation is considered an insult to Mother Nature and is forbidden by the wine associations, but in other parts of the world it is the only way to keep a crop going. The grower then has to keep an eye on biological pests and decide how to deal with them (pesticides or bioecological measures), thin the fruit buds so the plant is not overloaded, thin the leaves (both to delay maturation and to facilitate sun exposure) and, when the moment is right, harvest the fruit.
There are many different approaches to the mashing, pressing, and fermentation of the grapes, and every variety has its own idiosyncrasies. Then comes storing, ageing, and in many cases blending to achieve the wine that the vigneron has in mind. Finally there is the degustation of the final product, and what I think was my favorite part of the museum. How do you explain the kaleidoscope of texture, aroma, taste, and color of good wine? The museum uses different materials to show textures that could be attributed to a wine, such as soft, silky, rasping, rough. It also has many glass bells with materials such as pencil shavings, orange peels, leather, fruits, or flowers, where the beginner can squeeze a small membrane to circulate air through the glass bell and get a whiff of what that smell might be like in a wine (they even have a series of quizzes to encourage the visitor to concentrate). I am excited about conducting some wine tastings at home and trying some of these techniques!
All in all, I very much enjoyed my visit to Bordeaux, but was also happy to finally make it back to Bergerac. I have about 10 days left before I have to head back home, so from here on every moment will be precious.
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