The bustling streets in this elegant city are full of casual restaurants and wine bars. Bottles are open on most tables and almost everybody is sipping wine with their meals — not surprising in a world-renowned wine capital.
Yet one thing seems odd: Nobody in Bordeaux is drinking Bordeaux.
On a recent visit to Bordeaux this spring, I saw patrons drinking Loire Valley wines. Burgundy, too, which a generation or two ago might have been considered sacrilege given the rivalry between the two great regions. More than any other, natural wines were everywhere. But Bordeaux? Barely a sign.
It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed this phenomenon in Bordeaux. In other French wine regions, except in the most exalted Michelin-starred restaurants, the local wines almost always dominate wine lists. Wines from elsewhere are afterthoughts.
Michelin-starred restaurants offer plenty of Bordeaux here, as do those places outside the city among the vineyards spreading from Médoc and Graves on the western side of the region to Pomerol and St.-Émilion in the east.
But in the city of Bordeaux’s more casual restaurants, where the clientele are not necessarily wine tourists, the absence of the region’s wines from the table, and many of the lists, is glaring.
“This is a big subject of discussion in the city,” said Jane Anson, a wine critic and author of “Inside Bordeaux,” who lives here.
Last year, Pierre Hurmic, then Bordeaux’s mayor, asked the city’s restaurants to start serving more Bordeaux.
“We want to rejuvenate the image of Bordeaux’s wines,” Mr. Hurmic said at the time. “It’s also about making the people of Bordeaux and the four million tourists who come here each year more aware of the variety of our wines, not just reds, but whites, rosés and sparkling crémants.”
The image of Bordeaux has suffered greatly in the last 20 years or so. For generations, those who were curious about wine turned to Bordeaux as their gateway. Not only was Bordeaux considered the greatest red wine in the world, but its hierarchy, based on a classification from 1855, was easy to understand, and the wines were plentiful. Bordeaux was my entry point back in the 1980s, when the universe of wines was far smaller and more limited than it is today.
But in the 21st century, the excitement has moved on. Burgundy and natural wine have captured the imagination of younger wine lovers everywhere. Bordeaux has come to be seen as stodgy and old-fashioned, a luxury object for status seekers and collectors. Regardless of how beautiful the wines can be or the historical importance of the region, this is now the dominant perception, especially among young people.
“It seems that far fewer people worldwide are drinking classified Bordeaux wines today compared to 20 or 30 years ago,” said Nicolas Lefèvre, who, with his partner, Cécile Lambré, runs Soif, an excellent restaurant with a terrific wine list. The only Bordeaux wines on their list are not from the grand chateaus but rather from natural vignerons like Uchida or Closeries des Moussis.
Mr. Lèfevre attributed this decline both to Bordeaux’s marketing approach, which he called elitist and focused on luxury, and to the wines themselves.
“It’s primarily for reasons of taste,” he said. “A segment of our clientele is gravitating toward lighter, less oak-driven wines that project a more modern image and showcase distinct terroir identities.”
Like Soif, Blouge, a wine bar in the heart of Bordeaux, carries few Bordeaux wines other than natural bottles. Its owners, Josselin Goineau and Caroline Johnston, come from a natural wine tradition and for more than 20 years worked in restaurants in London and Paris, cities immersed in natural wine, before opening Blouge two years ago.
“As long as I can remember, there has always been a trend of Bordeaux bashing,” Mr. Goineau said. “I never saw anyone actually drinking Bordeaux during all my years in London and Paris.”
Mr. Goineau, 43, allows that his view may be skewed. He and many younger people in the restaurant and wine industry were raised in an ethos where natural wines, not Bordeaux, were the norm. Ms. Johnston is the daughter of Tim Johnston, whose wine bar in Paris, Juveniles, opened in 1987 and famously stopped selling Bordeaux (and Burgundy, for that matter) in the 1990s, focusing instead on less familiar bottles.
Mr. Goineau points to the high cost of most of the classified Bordeaux wines and the long aging they need to blossom as discouraging.
“Only an extremely wealthy elite can now afford bottles of this kind,” he said. “Conversely, the inexpensive Bordeaux wines found in supermarkets, priced at three or five euros, are so dreadful to drink that they, too, have been shunned.”
Not all the city’s restaurants ignore the local wines. Ressources, which has one Michelin star, offers an excellent selection of Bordeaux, as does L’Univerre, an unpretentious bistro with an enormous wine list. Still, in visits to both places, I saw people drinking Burgundy, Champagne, wines from Alsace and elsewhere, but no Bordeaux.
François Pervillé, the proprietor of Au Bistrot, an inviting restaurant on a quiet square, attributes the absence of Bordeaux on the city’s tables more to demographics than to taste or cost. Bordeaux, a port city like London or New York, he said, was historically receptive to the rest of the world and had greater access to many different sorts of wines than did landlocked regions. This, he believes, has helped to shape the tastes of the city’s residents.
“The Bordeaux consumer is very modern — very open to the rest of France and the wider world, and highly receptive to exploring new wines,” he said. “They are far less conservative than one might assume, although it runs counter to many prevailing narratives.”
He cited La Cité du Vin, an ambitious wine museum that opened in Bordeaux in 2016. Unlike most wine museums in the world, its focus is on promoting all wine cultures, not the local product.
“La Cité du Vin is not the ‘City of Bordeaux Wine,’ but rather the ‘City of Wine’ in the universal sense, a celebration of all wines,” he said.
He and others also pointed to Bordeaux’s multicultural nature. The city draws people from all over France as well as internationally to study and live, especially those from the Paris area, which historically has not been hospitable to Bordeaux.
“There are many wine professionals from all over the world working in the city,” Ms. Anson said. “Having access to great wines from other regions and countries is essential for not only professional development but for fun.”
Mr. Pervillé recalled that British monarchs ruled over the area of Bordeaux from the 12th to the 15th centuries, in many ways shaping what became the modern Bordeaux wine trade. He speculated that because of this, French royalty, based in Versailles outside of Paris, turned to wines from other French regions.
“It remains undeniably true that Bordeaux wines currently occupy a weak position in Paris, and this is nothing new,” he said. “The blame, it seems, lies with history.”
Regardless of the reasons, which all make sense, it’s striking to me that a wine with the history and character of Bordeaux could be so underrepresented on the city’s tables. But it’s not surprising, and certainly not restricted to the city of Bordeaux. Outside of steakhouses and Michelin restaurants in New York, Bordeaux is a rare commodity on wine lists. This is true in many cities around the world.
Partly, the Bordeaux wine trade is to blame. It put its bets on the luxury market and abdicated its promotion to critics’ scores. It was complacent, and now it’s stuck there as the consumers of those wines age out. The tastes of younger consumers have changed, as have their sources of information about wine.
The good news is that Bordeaux has so much more to offer than many imagine. Beyond the classified Bordeaux, which regardless of criticism can be wonderfully complex and moving, even if they are expensive and require aging, the region is slowly changing.
The ranks of Bordeaux vignerons are growing, making delicious, natural-inclined wines that are reasonably priced. And more and more of the chateaus are slowly realizing the old ways are no longer working. Many have turned to organic or biodynamic farming, and their wines are better for it, though still expensive.
Look at the Bordeaux wines that are on the lists of the local wine bars and restaurants — as more of those sorts of wines are made, more bottles will be served.
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