Bordeaux

Winter is a natural moment for a little recherche du temps perdu. For my band of serious thinkers, the usual aides-mémoire are not petites madeleines dipped in tea but some of the various wines the holidays afforded us. Wordsworth said that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” The jury is still out on the accuracy of that neatly phrased observation. But regardless of its pertinence to the art of poetry, its pertinence to the art of wine appreciation can hardly be gainsaid. With that in mind, I offer, as a minor public service, a brief recollection of some of the wines that a beneficent providence vouchsafed us as the winter solstice came and went and the house was redolent of evergreen and wood fires.

When someone says “Bordeaux wine” most of us think first of wines from the Médoc, home of Pauillac, Saint-Julien, Saint-Estèphe, Margaux and other celebrated names. For some reason — marketing prowess, perhaps — the great region of Pessac-Léognan, directly to the south in Graves, cheek by jowl with the town of Bordeaux, comes up mostly as an afterthought. This is both odd and regrettable. It is odd because, as a matter of history, Pessac-Léognan takes precedence. I suppose the story begins with the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the future Henry II in 1152. Eleanor brought vast lands from that region of France to the marriage, so there is a sense in which the French wines the English have loved since the Middle Ages were originally English.