Well-traveled

What Does 2003 Taste Like?

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Bordeaux restaurateur Jean-Pierre Xiradakis making the rounds

Bordeaux in the springtime is not Paris in the springtime. In fact, there is a wintriness that hangs over Bordeaux no matter the season. The city is not without grandeur, perhaps the most dramatic flourish being the ornate Place de la Bourse, but it’s a forlorn grandeur—a “depressing opulence,” as Henry James, also no fan of the city, put it. If Bordeaux has any charm at all, it is of a raffish variety, entirely in keeping with the city’s waterfront location. (Bordeaux sits on the muddy, expansive Garonne River, which turns into the Gironde River and empties into the Atlantic just north of the city.) Home to around 650,000 people, Bordeaux has two main virtues: It is an hour’s drive from the Dordogne, France’s best playground, and it is the wine capital of the world.

Each year, scores of wine professionals from Europe, North America, South America, and Asia—distributors, importers, merchants, and journalists—descend on Bordeaux in late March and early April to sample the new vintage, harvested six months earlier. The en primeurs tastings have become a rite of spring in Bordeaux, yet a certain illogic permeates the proceedings. For one thing, the wines are way too young to be judged in anything more than cursory fashion. Everyone knows this, but no one seems willing or able to move the tastings to a more sensible date on the calendar (a year after the harvest would be infinitely better).

Everyone also knows that of all the people who take part in this annual ritual, only one man’s opinion really matters. That, of course, would be Robert Parker, the almighty American critic. Parker generally does his tasting a week or two before the hoi polloi arrive, and while there is a mad dash among critics to be the first to post scores for individual wines, the market takes its cue from Parker’s ratings, published in his bimonthly journal the Wine Advocate several weeks after the en primeur tastings. Though the wines will spend two years aging in barrels, they are sold as futures beginning in late spring, and the release prices are almost entirely dictated by Parker’s marks. Needless to say, Parker is the elephant in every Bordeaux tasting room.

Still, second and third opinions have some value, so other wine experts dutifully make the trek to Bordeaux each year. This season’s tastings apparently drew the greatest number of participants ever, including the correspondent from Slate. In all, more than 3,000 people came to swirl, swill, and spit. The big turnout can be attributed to all the hype surrounding the 2003 vintage, which was cultivated during last summer’s record-breaking European heat wave. It was the hottest, most freakish vintage in modern Bordeaux history, filled with potential greatness but also potential disaster. That some 15,000 French citizens perished as a result of the extreme temperatures has cast the vintage in a slightly macabre light, though as Paul Pontallier, the winemaker at Chateau Margaux, helpfully pointed out, “Eventually, they would have died anyway.” True enough.

This is a particularly lively and interesting time for the Bordeaux wine trade. In recent years, there has been a culture clash raging in the vineyards, pitting Bordeaux’s old guard, ensconced mainly on the left bank of the river, against a group of upstart arrivistes who have purchased wineries in and around the picturesque town of St. Emilion on the right bank. It is a battle not only about wine—many of the newcomers are making wines in a fleshy, flashy style that is a departure from Bordeaux’s norm—but also about Parker’s influence and about pedigree—of the land and of the people who own it. Fortuitously timed to coincide with the arrival of the 2003 vintage, American journalist William Echikson has just published an engaging book about Bordeaux’s wine wars titled Noble Rot. Along with the usual scuttlebutt about Parker, Echikson’s book was the talk of the tastings.

Not that there was a lot of time to talk. True, there were scores of lunches and dinners, but the en primeurs tastings don’t leave much opportunity for socializing—there are hundreds of wines to sample, and there is a lot of ground to cover. The main appellations of the Medoc, as the left bank is more commonly known, are located 45 minutes north of the city; St. Emilion and Pomerol, the principal wine districts of the right bank, are 45 minutes to the east. During the tasting season, Bordeaux’s highways and byways teem with carloads of slightly inebriated oenophiles, their teeth and tongues stained purple by young tannic wines, dashing furiously from chateau to chateau.

It is entirely possible to take part in the tastings and never actually set foot in the city, and lots of people don’t. But despite my dislike for Bordeaux, in the interest of fairness I decided I ought to see it through the eyes of someone who loves the place, so I put aside my wine glass one morning and spent a few hours touring the city with Jean-Pierre Xiradakis. A lifelong resident of Bordeaux, Xiradakis is the proprietor and chef of La Tupina, the city’s most popular restaurant, and deservedly so. The food is regional—lots of foie gras, duck, and lamb—and generally very good, and Xiradakis does much of the cooking on an open hearth at the entrance to the restaurant. It sounds gimmicky, but it is not, and Xiradakis is hardly a showman. In fact, there is a gruffness about him that can make conversation a challenge.

Our tour was notable mostly for the mode of transportation: his Vespa. Whether he forgot that he had a 6-foot, 200-pound American on the back of his bike or because he had one there, Xiradakis kept a heavy foot on the gas pedal. Zipping down cobble-stoned streets at 35 miles an hour, I found myself deeply grateful that my procreation function has been served. We visited a few interesting neighborhoods—Quartier St.-Pierre, the old section of the city, with its narrow, dingy streets, had a sleepy charm—visited his cheese monger (the famed Jean d’Alos), meat supplier, and baker; and we drank a lot of coffee.

It was a pleasant enough morning, but Bordeaux’s appeal was still lost on me. Finally, sitting in traffic along the rather seedy quay, I confessed my distaste for the city and asked Xiradakis what exactly he sees that I couldn’t. “I think it’s the most beautiful city in France,” he replied with a defensive Gallic shrug. Chacun à son goût, as they say.