Bordeaux at its best: You’ll make the journey for the wine, but stay for the magical culture

The daughter of Bacchus shrugs.

“We tell the owners they’re ready but they do not come,” says a mystified Laetitia Guix de Pinos.

ROAM’s wine guide gestures towards the bottles lying beneath decades of dust in a corner of a little caveau at Chateau Prieure-Lichine. These are the orphans of optimism, forgotten or just unclaimed — magnums stacked deep in the cellar of a grand Margaux estate along the Route des Chateaux near Bordeaux.

“We cannot say why they do not come,” continues Guix de Pinos, stepping between barrels scented of oak and earth, row upon row stretching toward foundations laid by Benedictine monks in the twelfth century.

Bottles age on their own timeline here but there’s many a slip “twixt the cup and the lip” for those who buy the dream and fail to claim it. Death or divorce, emails unopened, bequests unmet, history has its way of settling accounts.

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During the French Revolution, the estate was seized and fragmented like so many of that turbulent era, left to ruin until Alexis Lichine bought the neglected property in 1951.

Lichine was an irrepressible Russian American known as the “Pope of Wine”, a title earned partly through sheer audacity, scandalising neighbours when he opened the first professional wine tasting room made available to the public.

Too commercial, cried the Bordeaux winemakers, but Lichine titivated his blessed pocket of land with the kind of zeal that binds agricultural tradition to a fastidious French garden. He rests here, buried on the property in 1989, no doubt content that the gravelly soils of Margaux kept their promise to produce extraordinary wine.

Gaspard Mendelson, driver on an Olala Bordeaux tasting tour of the Margaux appellation, takes a philosophical view. “Wine is gambling in a really sort of magical way,” he offers. “The only thing I know for certain is that wine is not certain.”

If you really want to speculate “buy magnums”. A magnum holds twice the wine in a bottle with the same sized neck, half the air means less breathing in the bottle, smoother ageing.

Mendelson is mapping jeroboams and balthazars with his hands on the wheel driving through vine-braided hills until, quite suddenly, we’ve reached the city that’s been gambling on grapes since at least the Middle Ages.

While you come to Bordeaux for the wine, you stay for the food, the architecture, the history and the people.

“It is the way of life,” states Mendelson.

For much of the late twentieth century, Bordeaux was grand and mercantile, revered even, but closed in on itself. Since 2007, it’s been UNESCO-listed as one of the largest urban World Heritage sites, with its magnificent promenade along the Garonne River ranking among Europe’s great waterfront walks.

We drive past the soaring Cite du Vin, a shimmering aluminium-and-glass facade designed to mimic wine swirling in a glass, hovering above the redeveloped Bassins a Flot docklands.

You can drink in the landscape here with panoramic views from the eighth-floor belvedere and a wine tasting experience that dissects the world. Most rightly fly home with a trophy bottle or two.

It’s September when ROAM lands. Harvest time. The summer crowds are thinner and the locals reclaiming the terraces around the Place de la Bourse.

The boulangeries continue an eternal trade in caneles, those burnished rum-soaked pastry cylinders invented by the nuns who understood, as Mendelson puts it, that “the spirit of the canele is not to be exquisite, it’s for every day, with coffee”.

“Cholesterol is the collateral damage of happiness,” he laughs. Skip the specialist shops, any boulangerie will do. “C’est Bordeaux!”

An enticing table awaits at Cent33 in the honey-coloured Chartrons district. Chef Fabien Beaufour, whose training spans Michelin-starred kitchens in New York and London as well as France, centres his cuisine on a Japanese robatayaki grill.

There’s a pandemonium of scent and flavour that arrives in a smoky miso-glazed black cod cloaked in passionfruit Grenobloise sauce. Try it to believe it?

A more casual foodie experience resides at Echo, a tiny cave a manger on Place Saint-Pierre, blending natural wines and local product as an unpretentious Bordeaux favourite. Pull a chair half into the doorway to watch passers-by, that’s fine, or chat to the chef dicing carrots and beetroots behind the bar.

Mondrian Bordeaux Les Carmes completes ROAM’s sojourn a la Bordelaise with Philippe Starck’s reimagining of a 19th-century wine cellar as a five-star hotel. Room 336 occupies a corner above the cobblestones. It’s a lovely space close enough to the Garoone to sense, rather than see, the river gliding by.

In the morning, stillness settles over rooftops lit by the sun, and there’s irresistible magic to this city with a Bacchanalian invitation to linger longer over lunch. The glass is not yet empty.