Pairing Bordeaux

This blog entry is one that I started a long time ago, and never really got around to finishing. There was just so much to cover, that I didn’t want to rush it. It is one of the most important times for me in this trip though, so after much delay, I have finally taken the time to finish it.
So, without further delay, Kiss My France, Ltd. proudly presents: “Pairing Bordeaux.”

This weekend, I took myself on one of the highlights of this trip. Before I left for France, I decided that one of the places that I most wanted to visit was Bordeaux, because I have such an interest in wines, and Bordeaux is one of the world’s best wine regions (it is a world heritage site, in fact). Also, it is nice to get away and relax from time to time.
So, I booked an evening train for after work. I planned this trip so well, I tell you. My train left at 6pm. I finished work at 2:30pm, so I had three and a half hours to get to my room, shower, and make my way over to Bienvenue Montparnasse (the departing station) at a leisurely pace.
Such was not the case.
The RER B is the train that connects where I live to the train line that goes to Bienvenue Montparnasse. Well, as you may have heard, Paris’s train system is just coming off of a “greve” or a strike. So the trains are still getting their acts together.
The train I took stopped at a station called Chatelet Les Halles for about half of an hour, for no discernable reason. We just sat there, the car packed to the gunnels. It also was dreadfully late arriving at the station where I live, so instead of having all the time in the world, I arrived at Bienvenue Montparnasse with about 20 minutes to spare. I thought, as I climbed the stairs to the ticket machines (you just put in your credit card, and it spits out your tickets), “Well, twenty minutes is ok. I’ll get my tickets and be on my way.” Again, not so. The ticket machines don’t take American credit cards. I have a European card, but I didn’t make my reservation on that card, so it was off to the teller for me. Except that the lines were super, super long, it now being a Friday after working hours, and people are trying to get home.
I was in luck though. There is a special “English Speakers Only” line that was very short, only about 5 people ahead of me. Great! I got into that line. It turns out that the sign should actually read, “Dullards Only” as these people argued with the tellers about all kinds of ridiculous things: what do you mean there isn’t another train today? Do I have to pay you now? I really would like a window seat; can you change someone so I can have a window seat?
By the time I got to the teller, I had resolved myself that I would have to take the next train to Bordeaux, which was in half of an hour, but stopped frequently between Paris and its destination, so a three hour trip becomes a five hour trip and puts me into Bordeaux at almost midnight.
I told the teller that, and he said, as he handed me my tickets, “Oh, I think you can make this train if you run. You do have SIX MINUTES.”
So, I ran. I mean, I totally ran, like you see in the movies. I was about to wave my hands in the air and start shouting, “Hold the train! Hold the train!” when I finally found my train, and my car, and got on. I collapsed into my seat, sweating, breathing hard, and with, literally, no time to spare. By the time I had gotten my jacket off, we were already on our way. It was divine intervention that I made that train.
The trip to Bordeaux was fine. I slept for the first hour and a half and listened to my iPod.
The train was full, and I was getting sick with a cold from lack of sleep, I think, so after I woke up to give the conductor my tickets, I just stared out the window at the countryside as it zipped past. The sun set behind the hills, and the sky took on a deep indigo, streaked with translucent grey/white clouds that looked like pulled cotton. The moon was full and bright and dipped in and out of view like a pearl bobbing in ink.
In culinary circles, it is said with conviction that no meal is complete without wine, so the continual challenge is to pair the right wines with the right foods. A bad match wont ruin a meal, but a good one can make a good meal into a fantastic one. I like to think of life that way, so I tried to find the perfect music to pair with these hours on the train, to make the roughly 300 miles southward a great experience.
Sometimes you want to be alone, you know? Sometimes you just need to be alone with you thoughts, and do as you want to do. That was really how I was feeling in Champagne, but for Bordeaux, I felt like having someone with me. As it happens, that someone turned out to be none other than Elton John.
If you have the means and the wherewithal, I truly suggest that you take an evening train from Paris to Bordeaux. Sit at a window seat and watch the moon and the hills race by as Elton croons “Your Song.” It was a beautiful trip to the south.

Arriving in Bordeaux is a bit different than arriving in Epernay or Reims. Those are both very small towns, and the gare (train station) is not too far from any thing. Bordeaux is one of France’s largest cities, with a population of over 500,000. So, when I called my hotel to ask if I could walk to them from the gare, the response, “Oh la la! Mais non!” was not unexpected. They recommended that I take the tram. This is a new, electrical kind of train that runs all over the city. Fare is 1,30 euros, so about two bucks. Small change considering that the thing cost just over a billion euros to build. A BILLION EUROS. The longer I live here, the less I think in terms of dollars, but still, a billion of anything is a ton (pun intended). To put that in perspective, right now that is almost two billion dollars spent on a tram for a city the size of, what? Peoria? Sorry, but who cares about Peoria? At least, who cares enough to spend two billion dollars on Peoria? I don’t, even if I had that much.
The great thing that the tram has done for Bordeaux is that it has reduced fossil fuel emissions by a great deal. The tram is so clean, and cheap and efficient, that people actually have stopped driving. Main boulevards have closed road traffic and are now only open to foot traffic. Amazing. Also, almost every street is lined with trees, big old ones, so you know they have been there for a while. I love that.
The one thing that I can say I don’t like about Paris is that it smells a bit. Bordeaux smells like fresh air. Incredible for a city this size, considering that Peoria smells like my dog.
So, I took the amazing tram and got to my hotel, a great place on le rue Hugerie. For the money I spent, I was hoping for a closet that was only infested by a small family of rats, but what I got was not even close.
My room was fricking huge. It had three large French windows, two beds, a full bathroom, a small coffee table, and a fire place. I paid 50 euros ($70) for this, for the weekend. In Paris, I cant get by on 50 euros in a day, but Bordeaux is not Paris.
I dropped my bag, and Elton and I went for a walk.
The first thing that I noticed was a huge carnival. Bordeaux often finds itself in the midst of fetes, I am told, so this was not a surprise. It was beautiful and huge. Its center piece was a giant Ferris wheel that juxtaposed nicely with the column of Liberty at the town square. I walked around a bit more, bought a cheese sandwich and took it back to my room. I had dinner in bed, and finally got some sleep before drifting off to the BBC.
The next day I woke up, feeling better, and got myself to the tourist office, which my friend Darrin recommended. Thanks Darrin! I booked a tour to the Medoc, which is one of the most famous of the wine regions around Bordeaux. It left at 1:30, and seeing as it was only about 10am, I took myself on a walk.
Saint Catherine in Bordeaux is roughly the equivalent as Las Ramblas in Barcelona, if you have ever been, or to Michigan Ave. in Chicago, if you have ever been there. I walked down this boulevard, closed to car traffic, and decided on Le Maison du Café as a nice stop to check my email and get a coffee. It was great people watching, and a really great morning. Not to mention that the coffee was the best I have had so far in France. Elton agreed, and we watched the young fashionistas shake their money makers up and down Saint Catherine while Benny and the Jets played on.
After that, I got back to the tourist office and headed out to the country to see the Medoc.
The bus that took us out there was comfortable. I cant complain anyway; the whole thing cost only 29 euros, so I was excited AND not broke, a winning combination.
The ride was about an hour, and the scenery was just as my Rough Guide described it, not notable. We first arrived at Chateau Reverdri, and small estate in the Lessiac region of the Medoc. This place is family owned and has been so for fifty years and three generations, so it is has a history. The guy that we met with was the current owner and couldn’t have been more than forty. A nice guy, and a total wealth of knowledge.
He showed us the fields and the aging vats. He answered our questions about what kinds of grapes he grows (merlot, cabernet sauvignon and some cabernet franc, just like everybody else in the Medoc). Then he took us to his aging cellar. There were rows on rows of oak barrels(a mix of French and American oaks, to be exact). He said that the law requires that all wine is aged at least six months, but he ages for about a year. I asked about global warming, and he gave me a look of total anxiety. He said that this year was really dry (unlike Champagne which was really wet), and the bloom didn’t come until late. He said he worried all summer.
Later, he opened one of the barrels for us to smell, and it was like you could taste the wine in the air. In fact, he said that about 3 to 10% of the wine evaporates in the barrels, and this is called the “Angel’s Share.” Isn’t that nice?
We moved on to the tasting, which our guide walked us through. Most of the group had no idea what they were doing, and so they were really attentive to what she had to say. I appreciated that. Anyway, the wines he had us taste were really fruity and had a real flavor of the oak. They were nice, so I bought a bottle of his 2005 for a friend in Paris, and we headed out to the bus.
Our next stop was in the Haut Medoc region of Bordeaux which is just south of the Medoc region. We would be stopping at what our tour guide told us was a real chateau, but I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant until we came to the area the chateau was in. We made a pit stop at what looked like the White House, and nobody really paid much attention to it outside of passing interest, until the tour guide mentioned that this was Chateau Margeaux, the most famous vineyard in Bordeaux. It is currently owned by a Greek family, who the guide assured us had French roots. The chateau is huge and gleaming white. It is a temple to all things wine, and these people can afford it. A bottle of Chateau Margeaux in a bad year can run in the hundreds, so a good year will be way more expensive, and an aged bottle of this stuff from a good year can be more than your mortgage… for a bottle of wine. It is no larger or more intoxicating than a bottle of Yellow Tail, but man, this stuff is the best there is.
Anyway, about twenty minutes later we arrived at Chateau Argasac, and this guide was not lying. This was a castle, in every way that people think about castles- from the towers at the corners of the building, to the moat and draw bridge. This was the total package. The chateau itself dates from the 11th century, so it has been around for a while. It was first owned by the English, when they ruled this area of France. It is obviously no longer English, but it is owned now by a large corporation who produces the wine and holds its meetings in the castle.
I got to taste some of their 04 and 05 reds, and they were really good. The Chateau Riverdri wines were what some people describe as “green” or too young. These were not. Oaky and juicy, but not as dry, they were ready to drink and very nice. I hadn’t eaten for a while though, and so with four glasses of wine in my empty stomach, I was really starting to enjoy myself. That’s when I decided that it was best to break from the group and wander the castle by alone. I ducked under the imposing velvet rope at the bottom of a staircase, and wound my way up the stone slab stairs. Who knew what treasures awaited… the throne room? The torture chamber? The Great Hall? What I did come upon was more startling than any of these, something I truly was not prepared to see. A large, heavy wooden door was bolted shut. It was obviously thick and very imposing. On the door was a small sign that had been written on:
“Salle du bain hors de service. SVP, descendez vous.”
I read it over and over, like I was about to divine the great mystery of the ancient Chateau Argasac, that I would know what great secret was held behind this door, and so I spoke the words on this sign aloud, as if to confirm them:
“Bathroom out of order. Please use the one on the lower level.”
Really? That’s what sneaking away from the group and up a flight of cordoned off stairs gets you in our modern, corporate age? Good bye yellow brick road, indeed.
So disappointing. That sign might as well have read, “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine”
I slouched back down to the group, only to come across two young American couples on their respective honeymoons. I was about to go up and say hello, when I noticed them all holding their wine glasses by the bowl instead of the stem, and the guys were trying to see who could chug their wine faster. So, maybe it was the snob in me or all the painstaking training I have gone through, but before I said word one, I turned on my heal and got back on the bus.
The ride home was nice and easy, a good thing for someone who has a belly full of wine and little else. On the way, a woman asked in French if she could sit next to me. I told her, “Sure” and we were on our way.
She was one of those people who sits next to you and starts up a conversation, not that you want one or anything. I was happy to just sit and enjoy the sun set, but she was a chatty one, so we talked.
The funny this was that after about thirty minutes of talk about our families, where we are from, what we were doing in Bordeaux, she had difficulty finding her words in French. I helped her, and suddenly, it dawned on me. “Holy cow! I have been speaking French to this woman for half of an hour! Holy cow! I speak French!”
Ever since that conversation, things have been much easier with my French. I have been speaking it almost exclusively and my confidence is through the roof.
Anyway, the woman, who’s name I never got, was from Mexico. She was in France with her mother and daughter, and was just tooling around the country seeing the sights for a month. She is a computer programmer, and she said that she saves up her money for a while, then quits her job and goes on a long trip. That is exactly what Ruta does, and I admired both of them for their passion for travel.
She told me later that she was going to cook a big Mexican meal that night for some friends. I told her that I was a cook, and I don’t think I realized until that conversation how much I missed Mexican food. It is just not something they do much of here. Oh well.
The bus ride ended, and we parted ways. It was really cool to meet another traveler who spoke no English, and seeing as I speak no Spanish, our common language had to be French. It was a great way to learn about someone else and to boost my confidence.
Elton and I got back to my hotel, rocking out to “Saturday Night‘s Alright for Fighting“, but not before stopping at a Paul. They’re all over the place; they’re like Corner Bakeries that have been around for 137 years. I got a cheese and tomato sandwich on olive bread and then took a nap.
Later, I went out for a walk around town. I had intended for it to be a chance to get some shots of Bordeaux and to just sight see, but not to make it a long trip, as France is really cooling off, and the dark is coming earlier and earlier. Despite all that, though, the walk seemed to go on forever. I walked for about two and a half hours, just going and going. I got pretty hungry along the way, but I couldn’t bring myself to go into any place. Bordeaux is, among other things, a college town, so there are tons of students hanging out just about everywhere. I just wasn’t in the mood to be talked to or to answer the same old questions about the States. “Where are you from?” “Do Americans like the French?” “Why did you start this war?” like it was me who personally dropped the first bomb (though technically speaking, the whole thing did start on my birthday, years ago). As proud as I am of my home country, it just gets really old answering the same questions over and over.
I wondered how Elton felt about all that, and turned on my iPod. As many questions as have been asked of me, I have even more about the world around me. I am just flustered at how old a place can be and how it still works. This city was built by the Romans, and yet, it is still here, spending billions of Euros to keep itself going. Chicago isn’t even two hundred years old yet, and I cant even think what life must have been like that far back. Or the fact that these people still plant roses at the end of their rows of vines to protect from vine pests. Somehow, the rose plants get attacked first, so they serve as a warning sign to the farmer that he needs to do something, as the pest is known to get from rose bush to grape vine in three days. That is pretty specific; how does someone who does not have today’s technology figure that out? How do they know it is a microscopic pest? How do they know how to stop it? And why after hundreds of years of planting roses, hasn’t someone come up with a newer, better way of doing things? In truth, science has, but the vine farmers in Bordeaux still plant roses, after hundreds of years. I just don’t get it.
But more than all of that though, I was forced to ask myself one question that had been bothering me. One thing that, try as I might, I could not figure out, and it was bugging the heck out of me: who the hell wrote “Rocket Man”? I mean, the lyric, “I miss the Earth so much; I miss my wife” is just ridiculous. Am I supposed to believe for one second that Elton John was ever in the closet enough to be married… to a woman…. And that given the chance to blast off into space with other men, all locked up in a confined, metal phallus, that Elton John was actually thinking about his wife? Unlikely.
In any event, I finally came across the old west gate of Bordeaux; built by the Romans, it now serves as a reminder of all that has transpired within this city’s walls. It was the outer most defensive gate for the Romans; it was the spot where three hundred Frenchmen lost their lives during the Revolution, and now, it is the site of a really cute little coffee bar. Hmmm, how things change….
Anyway, that night, just outside the gate was a reggae show, so I stayed and bopped along with the crowd. Really positive stuff, and the students and the people of Bordeaux all danced along together. It was really cool. How random, this whole reggae festival in the middle of a French city built on Roman ground that used to be run by the English. It is a small world, after all.
Later, I grabbed some falafel and a GINORMOUS baked potato, some Heineken, and went back to the room. As a treat to myself for how hard I work in Paris, I took my dinner in my big, fluffy bed, while watching the new Doctor Who on the BBC. After eating, I was sound asleep in moments, probably because of Doctor Who.
The next day my train was leaving Bordeaux for Paris, so I only really had time for lunch before the train took off.
I stopped at a place called Ragazzi da Peppone, a great little Italian place near the hotel. They serve the freshest pizza in the whole of the western world. I got the margarita pizza with salad. Curiously, the salad was served fresh on top of the pizza, and it was delicious. The cheese was not melted, so it became almost bread and salad with cheese and tomato. Super, super fresh, and totally delicious. I came to find out from the waitress that this is how pizza is served in Bordeaux, and it was a total change of pace for me, but a welcome one. Chicago is known for its pizza, but I am just not sure if I can take that much melted cheese on something anymore. That’s a lot of cheese! So this style was great. The cool thing about Ragazzi de Peppone is that, if you would like some wine, you don’t get a menu or anything. You just go down to their cellar, below the restaurant. It is actually a cave that the restaurant was built above, and it is filled with bottles from all over Italy. You pick what you want, and you bring it up to the restaurant with you. The server just scans it and adds it to your bill. It was really cool, and there are tons of bottles.
I sat outside and watched Sunday traffic whiz by. It was very relaxing.
Later, before I got on the train, I stopped into a wine store, just to see if there were any treasures that I could find to bring back to Paris with me. There was one, but it was way, way out of my price range. It was a syrah mix, but I had never heard of the other grape in the mix. The bottle was around 100 euros, so too much for me, but I really wanted to taste, as the grapes were grown and the wine made in Nazareth. I mean, these are the wine roots and land where Christ himself drank. I do understand that this is not a 2000 year old bottle of wine (that might used to have been water?) going for only 100 euros, but just to taste the wine of that land is like being at the last supper or something. I had never felt such a connection to history. I held the bottle for a while and then moved on. It still blows my mind. I didn’t even know you could get wine from there anymore.
So, with that thought in mind, I headed out to the tram and then to the train. The ride back was quick and uneventful.
I got back into Paris and into bed, so I could be up and ready for work the next day.
This trip was crazy: such a connection to history, all in grapes. I just cant fathom that way of life still being lived all these hundreds of years later, and yet the trip was over so fast, gone… like a candle in the wind.

God, that was cheesy.