Region At a Glance: Bordeaux

Bordeaux wine is named for its region: Bordeaux is a coastal area in the southwest of France, in turn with its own many sub-regions. Bordeaux is split by the Gironde river and its two tributaries, the Garonne and the Dordogne. Andrea Immer Robinson has a helpful way of picturing Bordeaux’s geographical layout: imagine a peace sign, slightly tilted to the right, and you have a rough idea of what the region looks like from above.

Most wines from Bordeaux are blends, which means more than one grape variety makes up a bottle of wine. Red Bordeaux blends can come from five grapes: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, and Petit Verdot. Wines styles rely on the area, winemaker, and the weather; some red Bordeaux blends will be mostly Cabernet Sauvignon, some will be mostly Merlot. (Ever hear someone use the term “Left Bank” or “Right Bank”? Wineries on the left side of the Gironde tend to be Cabernet-dominated, those on the right Merlot-dominated. This is helpful when choosing wine at the store, or in a restaurant – just ask the sales clerk or sommelier which side the wine comes from, and you’ll have an idea as to what’s in the otherwise often indecipherable bottle.)

Red Bordeaux makes up some of the world’s most complex wines, whose complexity is paralleled only by expense. If you’re not up to spending hundreds of dollars for a bottle of wine, delicious as it might be, you can find Bordeaux-style blends from all over the world. Most New World wines (that is, wines from countries outside of Europe) will be labeled by their grape varieties, so you can easily recognize the combination of Bordeaux grapes. Meritage (rhymes with “heritage”) is California’s version of red Bordeaux.

White Bordeaux is much more different in style from its New World varieties than red Bordeaux is from its counterparts. White Bordeaux blends come from three grapes: Sauvignon Blanc, Semillon, and Muscadelle. Adding Semillon to Sauvignon Blanc gives the resulting wine a full body, which is further rounded out with aging in oak barrels. New World versions of Sauvignon Blanc tend to be light, crisp and fresh; Bordeaux’s Sauvignon Blanc is heady and full-bodied. If you’d like to try a Semillon from outside French borders, try an Australian version – winemakers have been successful in producing quality Semillon varietals and blends in the Hunter and Barossa Valleys.

And to round up our quick glance at Bordeaux, there is Sauternes. Sauternes is a sweet dessert wine, made from white Bordeaux grapes, and worth its weight in gold. In fact, oenologically speaking, Sauternes is liquid gold: a thick, rich, amber-colored wine. Sauternes is the product of what the French call the “nobel rot”: Botrytis cinerea, which sucks moisture from the grapes, concentrating their sugars and flavors. The resulting wine is rich, aromatic, and syrupy. Sauternes holds a very sweet spot in my heart, but it too can be prohibitively expensive. California has a few very good versions of Sauternes, if you’d like to explore New World versions. You might just want to save a few dollars and sip your dessert one night.