Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [59]
BORDEAUX’S BEST ADDRESSES
Margaux (MAHR-Go)
St. Julien (Saint Joo-lee-YEN)
Pauillac (POH-yack)
Ste. Estephe (Saint Eh-STEFF)
St. Émilion (Saint Eh-mee-lee-YOHN)
Pomerol (POM-er-all)
Pessac-Léognan (Peh-SACK Lay-ohn-YOHN)
Sauternes (Saw-TURN)
Bordeaux Is a Blended Wine, Too
Like Champagne, Bordeaux is nearly always a blended wine—not of years, but of grapes. Depending on the winery, up to five red grapes may be used. The two majors are Merlot (the most widely planted) and Cabernet Sauvignon; the three others sometimes used in small amounts are: Cabernet Franc (Cabernet FRAHNK), Malbec (MAHL-beck), and Petit Verdot (Puh-TEET Vair-DOUGH). The virtues of this varied palette of grapes are several.
Complexity In the same way that the best cooks combine a little of this and a little of that to make the whole dish better than the sum of its parts, Bordeaux wineries get added complexity in their wine by blending the grapes, each of which contributes its distinctive character to the final wine.
Practicality The grapes ripen at different rates, making it much easier to get the harvest and winemaking work done in stages. If all the grapes ripened at once, picking would be an overwhelming task, and few wineries would have the tank capacity in their fermenting rooms to handle the entire harvest at one time.
Insurance Staggered ripening of the grapes also protects against complete crop loss in years of bad or erratic weather. Take the all-too-common predicament of harvest rain. If it comes early in the picking, the early-ripening Merlot may be ruined, but a good Cabernet crop is still possible if the rain stops. When wine experts speak of certain vintages as being “Merlot years” and others as “Cabernet years,” they are referring to this phenomenon.
Flexibility Bordeaux is a very large region, with growing conditions (soil, sun, rainfall, and so on) that vary from one subdistrict or town to the next. With different grapes to choose from, wineries can plant the best choice for their vineyard’s particular conditions.
Red Bordeaux—The Classic Styles
Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot are the two main Bordeaux “ingredients,” and knowing that will help you predict the body style and flavor profile of the famous Bordeaux wines. Since you know the body and taste differences of these two grapes, if you know which prevails in a particular section of Bordeaux, then you will have a very good idea of the wine style from there.
The geography of Bordeaux makes this easy, because all of the best wine estates are clustered in just three top vineyard areas, the “left bank,” the “right bank,” and Graves. To remember where they are located, think of the Bordeaux region as a peace sign, tilted off-balance to the left. Each line in the peace sign is one of Bordeaux’s rivers. The long center line is her major river, the Gironde (Jhee-ROND). The two forks are tributaries—the Dordogne (Door-DOHN-yuh) and Garonne (Gah-RUN).
The names are not important, but their blueprint is. The best vineyard zone west (left) of the center line (the Gironde River) is Bordeaux’s “left bank.” The top zone to the east, near the city of Bordeaux, is called the “right bank.” And the land west of the two forks is called Graves (Grahv). Although the word Graves is found on wine labels, because it is an official region, you will not see the words left bank or right bank, which are shorthand terms used in the trade, on the labels of their respective wines. What you will see, in addition to the château name,