“The Delights of Bordeaux Wines” (Keter, 2015) deals with the best of Bordeaux wines, not the simple and cheap products. Perhaps because of this, the edition is still not sold out… I chose to publish the introduction in “Francophiles Anonymous.”
Whenever I approach the wine region of Bordeaux, Intense excitement grips me.
I visited all the important wine regions in France. I toured wine regions in other countries, and tasted wines until I couldn’t get enough – and finally, I arrived in Bordeaux. And I stay in Bordeaux, because that’s where the best is, and I tend to adopt the motto of the late Kiev-born Jewish aesthete and hedonist, Zino Davidoff, who is associated with Havana cigars – “settle for the best.”
When I wrote The Delights of the Southwest France (Keter 2005), I chose not to include the Bordeaux region, and instead to dedicate a book of pleasures of its own to it, and especially to its wines, because its essence is wine, wine, and more wine.
The book therefore complements its predecessor. I did not intend to write a comprehensive essay, both because such a book would necessarily be thick-bodied, serious-minded and intended for a short time, and because writing a “doctorate” on Bordeaux wines is a task that will take many years. My book focuses mainly, that is, on the best, and is by nature narrative. The technical aspects and “managerial” issues – an essential part of the world of wine – are limited to the essentials.
Why a book about the best Bordeaux wines? Because they are the best in the world, and because the vast majority of mortals have almost no chance of tasting them at home or in a restaurant, due to their daunting, even outrageous prices – to taste them, you have to travel to the Bordeaux wine region and visit the wineries.
With the help of the stories of wines, people, and wineries that I have collected during my travels to the Bordeaux region and the experiences I have had there, I would like to share my insights with my readers, and share with them my love for Bordeaux wines and my admiration for the genius of the quality factors – especially the terroir, and yes, the people involved in the field. This is to arouse your curiosity about the best wines in the world, and to send you on a leisurely and enjoyable journey among the palaces of this wonderful wine region, which I love so much.
A never-ending apprenticeship
Like Jean-Luc Godard, who called his film about Paris Two or three things I know about it, I could say, symbolically, of course, about the global wine scene in general and Bordeaux wines in particular: they are somewhat familiar to me. This is not feigned modesty, nor is it a precaution. This is the truth.
Expertise is conditional on complete dedication to one field – and wine is a vast world, subject to constant change, if only because every year – and actually twice a year, at the end of our summer and at the end of the summer of the “New World” – there is a new vintage and hundreds of thousands of new wines are “born.”
Wine expertise also requires innate talents, which it is important for those who possess them to constantly develop and perfect: the ability to analyze with the senses and store flavors and aromas in memory. It also requires diverse multidisciplinary knowledge, and is impossible without a treasure trove of conventional words, which is used to express what is perceived with the senses and analyzed with the help of knowledge.
Expertise is above and beyond the ability to roll wine in your mouth, sip it in a straight line, and mutter a few meaningless words, such as “astringent” and “bouquet” – which characterizes most self-proclaimed experts. Anyone who tells you, even in France, that he is an expert, should be treated with suspicion. Among true experts, you will not encounter such pretentiousness. Because modesty is beautiful in winemaking, and I have already heard from leading chefs, in France of course, who are considered to be experts in wine, that when they taste with their eyes closed, they may get confused between red and white… or between Bordeaux and Burgundy!
A wine lover who does not devote all his time to wine can make an effort to acquire certain concepts and develop a certain understanding. Because even being an enlightened wine lover is a demanding occupation. I am a wine lover, perhaps enlightened, but always debating. My preferences change because my taste is constantly evolving thanks to my love of wine, curiosity, repeated experimentation, and the constant absorption of new experiences and information: more countries, more regions, more wineries, varieties, methods, and most of all – more and more wines, flavors, and aromas.
From bad wines to good wines
My relationship with wine is more than forty [in 2005] years old. The first wines I tasted, in my youth in Marseille, were rosés de Provence Pretty bad ones, which we sipped at picnics from strange bottles called “guitars.” No wonder I’ve since detested rosé wines, and it took me several corrective experiences to be able to sip rosé wine again today.
In Algeria I tasted sun-drenched local wines, the kind that used to be shipped by tanker to the ports of southern France to fortify pale local wines and prevent apatalization. When I was with my “adoptive family” in Milan, the everyday wine was a simple, no-name red or white, in bottles equipped with ice recesses.
As students in Paris, we accompanied our meals with the simplest wines, in liter bottles. “Kil de Rouge” they called them, “a kilo of red” – uncorked, unnamed – what the common French, and even the cloistered, drank. In classical French literature, the remark that someone drank “corked wine” indicated his wealth. But in the Paris of the Sixties, cheap corked wines were already within our reach.
We started with Beaujolais Village, continued with very simple Côte-de-Rhône, Burgundy and Bordeaux. And from the whites – cheap Muscadelle and Alsace. We started by being careful about matching wine to food. On trips, usually in Burgundy, and when we went out to celebrate, we started drinking better and better wines. In this way, we gradually corrected what a very long line of bad wines had done to our palate.
When I returned to Israel in the early 70s, the wine inventory was poor. Until one day in the early 80s – the shock: Carmel Mizrahi 1976. A quality revolution had begun, which Carmel Mizrahi continued with the 1979, 1981 and 1983 vintages, and the Golan Wineries joined in with the 1984 and especially 1985 wine, which may not have yet been exported, and so on – for example, the excellent 1990 wine. Since then, everything has changed in Israel’s small wine world, and in recent years a huge and changing selection of wines has been added, thanks to the boutique wineries – many dozens of private and local initiatives that are welcome – some of which are very good.
The best wine I drank in my first 30 years
Returning to France for tours and work trips starting in the mid-70s suddenly raised the standard of wine we tasted. In 1975, in Neuilly-Saint-Georges in Burgundy, we spent more than an hour choosing a wine in a wine cellar, paid a price that seemed clearly unreasonable to us for the wine we chose, and enjoyed it to the fullest.
This Noisy-Saint-Georges, from the 60s, was perhaps the best wine I drank in my first thirty years. It is etched in my memory as a unique experience, which established my preference for Burgundy wines, a preference that lasted for another twenty years. It was the first link in an unbroken chain of sublime wine experiences, which soared to the very top.
Beginning in 1985, the gastronomic and wine tours I conducted around the world revolutionized my entire concept. When you start to peel back the outer layer and penetrate through field visits and conversations with experts, chefs, sommeliers, winery owners, and enlightened wine enthusiasts, and of course, through tastings and reading widely – you discover a whole world, and the more you delve into it, the more you realize how vast it is, and how unlikely it is to even explore its farthest reaches.
But I am gifted with the gift of rapid assimilation: I process any information with ease. From winery to winery within the same region, and from one winegrower to another, my private database is constantly growing, even hourly in some cases. And the new information is put to use without delay: What I have absorbed and processed at the first winery on the tour serves to sharpen my understanding at the next winery, a few kilometers away, and to enable me to ask the right questions later on – and so on until a comprehensive picture emerges in my mind, which produces a certain insight.
Then I can say to myself that “I am beginning to understand” – as opposed to “I know” – the basics and characteristics of a particular region. The accumulated knowledge and understanding were reflected in my journalistic writing and in the wine chapters of my previous books, The Delights of France, The Delights of Provence and, of course, The Delights of Southwest France, to which this book is a continuation and complement.
Never stops learning
Since I began my cultural, gastronomic, and wine tours to this day – even though I now enter a winery and descend into a wine cellar with considerable knowledge and experience – everything is still, for me, a learning experience and an insider's indoctrination. And perhaps this is actually increasingly the case, because my learning tools are constantly being refined: every winery, every wine, every winemaker provides me with new information, new experiences, countless surprises.
The hundreds of wineries I have visited and the thousands of wines I have tasted have not made me indifferent and bored. On the contrary: curiosity only grows, inquisitiveness intensifies, the ability to be surprised is maintained flawlessly. At the entrance to a new winery, I ask myself with anticipation and trepidation what surprise awaits me there, and not “What could possibly be there that I don’t know yet?” If I ever feel this way, I will know that curiosity has died, and that I am old.
The journey of apprenticeship proceeded by chance, almost according to the route of my first experience drinking French wines: first Beaujolais; then thoroughly Burgundy – from the simplest wines, through the Counts and Princes and ending ten years later, with the King, Romanée-Conti; then wines from the Champagne region and the Côte-de-Rhône region, the banks of the Rhône River; then wines from the southwest and more.
My Romance with Bordeaux Wines
My intimate acquaintance with Bordeaux wines was gradual. At first, I was less impressed with them. Burgundy wine flowed through my veins, and the difference between Pinot Noir and a blend of two Cabernets with Merlot and Malbec and Petit Verdot was enormous. My concepts of Bordeaux were not solidified.
In Bordeaux, I tasted many wines, became familiar with the varieties and methods, gradually discovered more and more excellent wineries, and even held a blind tasting competition in Israel between the first-class wines of Air France and British Airways – most of them, at least in the reds, were wonderful Bordeaux wines.
But I knew I was still far from the top. The prices of bottles were so daunting that I considered the great wines of Bordeaux virtual to me. I had seen the bottles of the finest vintages in the wine cellars of top restaurants, cellars I had descended into with awe, but I had hardly tasted the Idit until then.
My travels in South Africa, where I made the strange “discovery,” at least in the eyes of someone whose notions of wine were acquired in France, of a winery that makes both “Bordeaux” and “Burgundy”; the journey to the Tokay Asso 6 Futonia in Hungary; the visits to the best wine regions of Italy; the acquaintance through tastings of mostly “Old World” wines and especially “New World” wines, as well as wines from Lebanon, North Africa, and even those from England, China, and Turkey; and the hundreds of tastings at the Vinexpo exhibition and the Vinitali exhibition, where I also judged – all of these expanded my wine education, but also made two main points clear to me: first – a human life will not be enough to get acquainted with the wines of the world, and second – there is no quality like the best wines of France. Even if here and there a foreign wine “tickles” them – they are the best in the world.
My real introduction to the Bordeaux dialect began in the mid-90s, but this time I was fully and thoroughly educated – like the guaranteed and necessary end of a secret income. People who understand wine have often told me that the preference for Bordeaux over Burgundy, the “overturn” in taste, is a matter of age, of maturity. I was privileged to be introduced to the best Bordeaux wines – the best wines in the world – at a ripe age, and I was captivated by their charm.
Wine Festival in Bordeaux
In December 1997, the annual conference of the Relais-et-Château Hotel and Restaurant Association was held in Bordeaux. It was attended by about four hundred members of the prestigious association, including about a hundred of the best chefs in the world. I was invited there because my first book, The Pleasures of France, had caused an influx of Israelis to Relais-et-Château in France, to such an extent that in the year after its publication, the Israeli audience rose to seventh place in the ranking of foreign audiences visiting Relais-et-Château in France.
The association's leaders wanted to introduce the members to the very surprising Israeli phenomenon – to a certain extent, the book changed the vacation habits of a large public abroad, and sharpened their attachment to hedonism. While the members sat in long meetings and discussed their affairs, I wandered among the great wineries. In the evenings and nights, unforgettable banquets were held.
We ate, drank, laughed, and rejoiced, and I saw how the chefs, some of the greatest in France and the world and some of my good friends, ate a lot and drank a lot instead of cooking, asking for extras and extras, and making merry. And during all these feasts, we sipped magnificent wines provided by the local wineries.
I will never forget an evening at the indoor cycling stadium in Bordeaux: on the ring around us, exhibition competitions were held, while we dined in the middle, and wandered between tasting stations set up by more than a hundred wineries, all from the Idit, who were happy to present their best products to such an audience.
That week I tasted hundreds of products from good wineries, sipped dozens of exceptionally fine wines, and traveled as a pilgrim among the best chateaux in the world. I know what a heavenly taste in wine is. The tour definitively and firmly established in me a preference for the great Bordeaux wines. But while I can afford an excellent Chateauneuf-de-Pape, a good Burgundy, and a reasonable Bordeaux, I could never afford a Bordeaux from a Psagot winery from a great vintage in a restaurant, or even in a wine shop – and neither can 99% of human beings.
And when I visit a celebrated cellar, like that of the Prince of Monaco in Monte Carlo, and behold the incredible treasures that no one will ever sip from, a rebel's soul awakens in me, and I dream of a popular revolution that will place the treasure at the disposal of its ardent and frustrated enthusiasts.
After Bordeaux experiences, which gave me a clear sense of what the top marker on the scale was, I was introduced to simpler wonders: some of the best in Loire wines, the quality revolution in Provence wines, the best wines Alsace. I realized again that there is no dull moment in the world of wine, and there is no “fear” of tasting the same thing twice, because everything changes, everything develops, everything, or almost everything, improves. Most of all, I realized that being familiar with the best does not in the least detract from the ability to appreciate the qualities of the middle, because every region and most wines have their own uniqueness and charm.
I returned to Bordeaux several times, for more trips, for more apprenticeships – among other things to complete the book – and the excitement, on the bend in the road from Saint-Julien to Pauillac, only grew.
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My main lesson from so many years of apprenticeship is the “theory of relativity.” I can define what I don’t like: wines that “don’t go all the way”: for example, semi-dry, which is also semi-sweet; rosé, which, to my taste, “ruins” red grapes. It’s true that I usually prefer red wines, unless there’s an opportunity to taste an exceptional white wine, but if I were asked which wine I “like” most, I wouldn’t know how to answer. I’ve tasted wines from so many countries, regions, and types that I can’t even say unequivocally whether I like white or red wine more, dry or sweet, French or “foreign” – it all depends on the wine, the moment, the circumstances, the accompanying gastronomy, the company. The selection of wonderful wines in our world is vast, the diversity is marvelous, and each wine is suited to an occasion, a dish, a mood, and an atmosphere, and the choice is a matter of the moment. But red burgundy was, and will remain, the highlight.
Special thanks to Anat Tuag, my regular editor at the time, thanks to whom I added an important dimension of practical guidance to a book of personal experiences. Thanks to everyone who introduced me to the secrets of Bordeaux wines – winery owners, winemakers, chefs, and wine lovers. Thanks to my cousin Shai Cowley, a lover of the city of Bordeaux, who taught me about it and its charms.
Want to buy the book “The Pleasures of Bordeaux Wines”?
You can buy it on the “Bookmark” website atLink this.