We shook off the disaster of the broken bottle to somehow enjoy several wonderful days in Paris. My goddaughter, Ana, was living there at the time, playing flute at the Conservatoire de Paris as part of her training to become a professional musician, so Jane and I enjoyed following along as Ana showed us her favourite parts of the city and we shared our own highlights with one another.
We had each been to Paris often enough that we didn’t need to tick off all the tourist hotspots. We had more fun poking around some of the more obscure arrondissements. I took Jane to Belleville, with its artistic shops and great cheap restaurants. She took me to the Jardin du Luxembourg where we watched hip Parisians parade.
Secretly, in my head, a debate was raging. Should I tell Jean-François what had happened to the bottle? Would the heads of Château d’Yquem still deign to waste their time with a reckless Australian who had smashed an antique bottle of their wine? What if they wouldn’t even bother to open the Perrier bottles? I thought back to the sip of wine I’d shared with Jane after the breakage. That liquid had looked like Yquem and, as best as I can remember given my discombobulated state, it certainly smelt and tasted like you would hope a century-old Yquem would. Surely that could only come from a wine that had started life, 130 years ago, as something quite superb? Wouldn’t the winemakers at Yquem be curious, even if it was now being presented in the ludicrous form of Perrier bottles?
We finally headed to Bordeaux, taking a high-speed train through glorious French countryside. I never tire of France, and it felt good with Jane’s head on my shoulder, to watch the regions zoom by the window, signified by subtle differences such as the way slate roofs gave way to terracotta as we made our way towards the south-west.
The actual old city of Bordeaux is a port town and one of the most beautiful in Europe, I believe. It’s on UNESCO’s World Heritage List as a spectacular urban and architectural example of the eighteenth century, with what feels like hundreds of historic buildings, including at the port itself, and a huge town square, as well as two impressive cathedrals. The Saint-André Cathedral has sections dating back to before the year 1100, while Église Sainte-Croix is perched on the site of an abbey from the seventh century. It would be fair to say that Bordeaux is not lacking in history. Jane and I wandered the town and took in some works by Renoir, Picasso, Matisse and other masters at the city’s museum of fine art, and of course I couldn’t help but drag Jane into the Musée du Vin et du Négoce – a museum devoted to the history of the wine trade. It outlines wine production techniques in the area going back 2000 years, which is impressive unless you happen to be Georgian, with four times that much history among the grapes.
We eventually made our way to the office of Jean-François, who greeted us warmly. He and Jane hit it off, as I knew they would. We sat down for a suitably overblown dinner to reacquaint ourselves, and of course Jean-François said he couldn’t wait to see the famous bottle. In fact, go and get it, he suggested, as he walked us past the enormous Corinthian pillars of the Grand Théâtre to our hotel.
‘I’d love to see it right now,’ he said.
‘All in good time,’ I replied. ‘I don’t want to spoil the surprise.’
Which was absolutely true, although probably not in the manner that he imagined.
As well as the next day’s Union des Grands Crus tasting, which is always a highlight of my trips to Bordeaux and was an important day for my Bordeaux Shippers business, we visited Château Léoville Las Cases – a second growth Saint-Julien – which is a very highly regarded château and one of my favourite wines from the Saint-Julien appellation. As far as local château owners go, Jean-Hubert Delon is not known to be the most social. I wasn’t even sure we would meet him, as we arrived, greeted the winemaking executives and began tasting several vintages.
I always made a point of dressing very well for these château visits. Some international buyers turn up in jeans, but I took the view that I was being granted entry to the centre of the wine making world, often by châteaux that carried hundreds of years of history, sometimes by generations of the same family. The least I could do was wear a jacket and look like I was a respectable wine merchant, rather than a tourist.
Maybe that’s why, when Jean-Hubert did happen to drop by the tasting room about halfway through, he joined our tasting and seemed to warm to Jane and me. He already knew Jean-François quite well and became friendly and talkative as the tasting went on. I had been told by other buyers that Jean-Hubert only spoke French and so was mildly surprised when he chatted to us in passable English. But only mildly surprised. As happens with a lot of the Bordelais, when they want to speak English, they can! All in all, it was a worthwhile and enjoyable visit, I bought some stock for the business and we all parted as firm friends.
‘An early night tonight,’ Jean-François said as he dropped us back at our hotel. ‘Tomorrow we visit Yquem! À bientôt.’
‘You’re sure you don’t want one drink before you leave, Jean-François?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ he said, hesitating in the driver’s seat. ‘It’s been a big day, but it would be rude not to. We French do like to set an example in hospitality,’ he explained to Jane, eyes twinkling.
‘And we Southern Hemisphere interlopers genuinely appreciate it,’ she said.
Jean-François laughed that easy laugh of his and said, ‘Un moment. Je vais garer la voiture.’
‘You still haven’t told him about the bottle,’ Jane said as we watched my friend drive away, searching for a car park.
‘I know. I feel very bad about it,’ I said. ‘I’m worried I’ll humiliate him or disappoint him. He’s been very good to me, but how do I tell him? I don’t want him to be bundled out with me when I become the first Australian wine buyer physically ejected from Château d’Yquem.’
‘At least Kevin would find that an acceptable end to the story,’ Jane pointed out.
‘True. Now that Jean-François is joining us, we have to make sure this remains an early dinner and only two glasses each! I am not showing up there with a smashed bottle and a hangover,’ I said.
‘I thought he was only joining us for one drink?’ Jane asked.
In the end, we were good and only had three.
It was midway through the third glass, a lesser Sauternes than the château we were due to visit tomorrow, that I said to Jean-François, ‘Mon ami, there is one thing I need to tell you.’
And so I did. I didn’t try to sugar-coat it. I told him I had been tired and not at my best after the dinner with Linden, and that I should have taken more care, but that the bottle had broken and I’d turned it upside down and eventually saved a lot of the wine in screw-top Perrier bottles. I felt pretty bad.
Jean-François listened intently, his eyes growing wider with each twist in the story. When I finally finished, and produced one of the Perrier bottles as proof, he looked at it, looked at me, stared at Jane, looked back at the bottle and then absolutely roared with laughter.
‘I can picture the whole scene,’ he said. ‘John, we’ve all carted valuable wine when in a self-induced world of pain. You just drew the unluckiest card.’ He started laughing again.
‘You broke the bottle,’ he said, waving his hands incredulously. ‘You destroyed the oldest Yquem that I will – well, would have ever seen.’
‘Jean-François, if you want to cancel the meeting, I will understand. I do not want to embarrass you or damage your reputation among your wine colleagues,’ I said.
‘Oh, no, there is no need for that,’ he said, waving a hand dismissively. ‘Look, we have a meeting already arranged with Sandrine Garbay. Of course we should go.’
‘Who is Sandrine Garbay?’ Jane asked.
‘She’s the chief winemaker at Yquem,’ Jean-François said.
‘The chief winemaker is a woman?’ Jane said, genuinely surprised.
‘Sure,’ Jean-François shrugged. ‘And the absolute top of her field. Pierre Lurton, the château president, might turn up as well.’ My friend shot me a cruel grin. ‘I’m sure he’ll be interested to see the shattered remains of his ancestors’ work.’
‘Mais arrête!’ I said, but I was smiling, relieved the meeting was still on.
Jean-François was savouring the last of his glass. He frowned and said to me, ‘Explain again how you saved the wine? Did you say you turned the bottle upside down?’
I laughed and told him a few war stories of the long-time wine hunter. He shook his head.
‘Well, tomorrow was always going to be an interesting day,’ he said, rising from his seat. ‘Now it’s just become even more interesting.’
THE WINES OF BORDEAUX
Most histories of the Bordeaux region date the first vines to somewhere around ad 43–60, during the Roman army’s occupation of Gaul. The idea was to provide the soldiers with a local supply of wine, but word about the quality of the produce didn’t take long to spread. No less a historical figure than Pliny the Elder, who had been a Roman commander in Germany, wrote about wine from Bordeaux on his return to Rome (and only a few years before he was famously killed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, near Pompeii). The first-century incarnation of Britain also became aware that there was some decent wine emerging from what would later become known as Bordeaux.
The perfect vine-growing soil and climate, matched with easy access to the Garonne and Gironde rivers meant wine could be shipped to the ocean ports and then to the wider Roman empire, and really the recipe for Bordeaux’s success hasn’t changed much since, apart from the scale.
Fast forward to 1152 when a local, Eleanor of Aquitaine, married an English noble, Henry Plantagenet, soon to become King Henry II. Bordeaux wine featured at the royal wedding and Bordeaux was on its way, even becoming the second largest city, after London, under English control, with wine shipped regularly to Britain. King Richard the Lionheart made Bordeaux his centre of European operations, all the better to be closer to the grapes themselves.
Despite the region’s popularity as a wine-growing precinct, it still had one problem as the 1600s rolled around. Most of Bordeaux along the river was flat, swampy and wet. The Dutch arrived and drained the swamplands, offering more useable land for vines and also allowing better roads to be built, for quick transport north.
The region’s wine industry has ridden many bumps and highs, including the French Revolution–era confiscation of estates from royalty and aristocrats (though many were soon controlled by groups of shareholders to continue operating), and Napoléon III’s marketing decision in 1855 to classify the region’s wines into the famous five growths: first, second, etc. – along with appropriate price tags. Bordeaux’s wine industry has survived two world wars, the Great Depression and numerous natural threats such as multiple devastating hailstorms and the vines being decimated by microscopic but lethal attacks of invasive fungi, oidium and later downy mildew, and then phylloxera, a tiny insect.
The phylloxera invasion had a lasting effect as future vines could not be planted so densely, meaning vineyards could only produce a reduced number of bottles each harvest. This limited produce, especially of signature years – such as 1982, the first vintage loudly lauded by renowned wine writer Robert Parker – coincided with an acceleration in the growth of new markets across Asia, and especially China, dramatically pushing up prices for the most sought-after wines from the top châteaux. It’s the magic formula for any retailer, whether selling fine wine, fashion or cars: have a wildly desired product of which there is only a limited amount. The price tag will reflect that hunger.