There was something surreal about my visit to La Cit\u00e9 du Vin, Bordeaux\u2019s wine museum, last Saturday. From the top floor, with its panoramic view of the city, you could see the smoke from the Gironde wildfire turning the sky yellow, yet none of the staff seemed remotely concerned. This was in spite of the fact that the conflagration had already triggered France\u2019s largest evacuation since the second world war and was getting closer to Bordeaux every hour. OK, maybe they thought it unlikely they\u2019d be asked to leave their homes, but weren\u2019t they worried about the region\u2019s vineyards? These people worked at a museum dedicated to celebrating wine, for Christ\u2019s sake.<\/p>\n
Some of the finest reds in the world are located on the Gironde\u2019s left bank, the same side as\u00a0the fire<\/p>\n
The day before, I\u2019d made a pilgrimage to Ch\u00e2teau Rauzan-S\u00e9gla as part of a trip to Bordeaux which Caroline had organised to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. It was 35\u00b0C when we were taken into the vineyard \u2013 the first stop on the tour \u2013 and at that point our guide seemed more concerned about the ongoing drought than the nearby fire. The lack of rainfall means the berries are still quite immature, but that could turn out to be a blessing as unripened grapes are less likely to suffer from \u2018smoke taint\u2019, whereby an entire vintage can be contaminated. Even if the fires don\u2019t reach the vineyards, the smoke probably will. By the time I left Bordeaux on Saturday afternoon, the entire city smelt like a bonfire.<\/p>\n
I know I risk sounding like an unfeeling plutocrat, given that several firefighters have already lost their lives, but I cannot help thinking about the 61 crus class\u00e9s of 1855. These are among the finest reds in the world and all are located on the Gironde\u2019s left bank, the same side as the fire. If they go up in smoke, it would be a civilisational blow equivalent to the Louvre burning down. I\u2019m amazed there\u2019s been so little attention devoted to this in the coverage the fire\u2019s received. Yes, the threat to the local wildlife probably makes for a better story, but even so. We\u2019re talking about Lafite Rothschild, Latour and Margaux.<\/p>\n
I was keen to go to Rauzan-S\u00e9glabecause its second wine is one of my favourites, particularly the 2015. The winemaker did better than many of its competitors that year because the recently appointed director, Nicolas Audebert, took the bold decision to bring the harvest forward by three weeks. I fantasised about meeting Audebert in the underground vault where the magic happens and comparing tasting notes.<\/p>\n
Getting in wasn\u2019t easy. Rauzan-S\u00e9gla is owned by the same family who own Chanel, and when Caroline called the ch\u00e2teau to book a tour she was quizzed about my taste in wine. She had to send photos from my collection, but because the whole trip was supposed to be a surprise she couldn\u2019t ask my advice about which bottles to photograph and chose some pretty ropey ones. \u2018C\u2019est pas possible,\u2019 came the haughty reply. She ended up having to book the trip through a tour operator called Smooth Red, which was better at sweet-talking the gatekeepers than her.<\/p>\n
Naturally, the difficulty of getting past the velvet rope made the experience that bit more special, although seeing up close how a famous wine is produced was always going to be fascinating. Some of it I knew, but much of it I didn\u2019t, such as the fact that the juice is initially left to mature in wooden barrels produced by master craftsmen, with each cooper\u2019s brand introducing different notes. I had naively thought that the different elements that need to be combined to create a great vintage were just varieties of grapes, with the wines of the left bank dominated by Cabernet Sauvignon. But in fact there are dozens of different variables, including the barrels, and there\u2019s no formula to fall back on, because of how the ingredients taste changes from year to year. It\u2019s an art that owes as much to the institutional memory of a great ch\u00e2teau as it does to chemical analysis.<\/p>\n
The climax of the tour was a trip to the tasting room, from which you could see the vines that had produced the wine in your glass. We sampled the 2019, 2017 and 2015 \u2013 all good vintages, although the first two are a little young. The 2015, by contrast, was exquisite, and our guide kindly gave us the bottle to take home. As we sat in our hotel later, drinking the wine, ashes began to appear outside the window and a smell of burning trees filled the room. Caroline found an Instagram video of horses galloping down a main road in Cap Ferret to escape the fire, and started worrying about them and all the pets people have been forced to leave behind. But my mind was still fixed on the 61 crus class\u00e9s. Please God, let them be spared.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There was something surreal about my visit to La Cit\u00e9 du Vin, Bordeaux\u2019s wine museum, last Saturday. From…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":833965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,48353,2592,44,4357,42387],"class_list":["post-833964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bordeaux","tag-france","tag-news","tag-wildfires","tag-wine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=833964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/833965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=833964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=833964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=833964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}