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whose main camps were near Bordeaux, their port of debarcation, accounted for much: they had large money to spend. But the main fact was that the French themselves, when money became plenty, all had the same idea; they drank the wines they had always wanted to drink. France has a real feeling for excellence, and they expressed it as thoroughly as they could. The result was shown to me in one great establishment. "There are half a million bottles here," said the owner: "there used to be a million and a half before the war." But the exhaustion of stocks in the older vintages is far more complete than this figure conveys. He had gone to look for a parcel of one wine of 1899 (a Brane Cantenac), and came to the conclusion that all the merchants of Bordeaux together could not produce more than fifteen or twenty dozens of it.

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than three years old: claret seldom stays longer in the cask than a third year. The oeremony of tasting is scientific, not convivial. The maître de chai (in Bordeaux a cellar is never called cave" unless it is underground) produces a glass syringe, and, removing a bung from the top of a barrel kept for demonstration, draws out some of the wine and fills it carefully into tumblers : everything is meticulously, surgically, clean. From these tumblers you sip-and if you are wise, you do not swallow. Indeed, the raw red wines in them do not tempt you: the white do; but after drinking some of them I did not find myself the better of it. These were the very strong Sauternes growths, needing to mature.

What I set down here is offered in all humility: having just discovered elementary facts about the distribution of Bordeaux wines, I think they may be of interest to other winelovers who are not versed in the subject. Briefly then, all

In short, if the world wants really good red wine from Bordeaux in profusion, the world must wait. Quantities the Quantities the great wines wines are grown of it have been made in a series of good years from 1914 on, but it is not mature. White wine comes much quicker to its prime; Yquem (or any of its neighbours) of 1925 was already delicious to taste out of the cask; Haut Brion or Lafite even of 1923 were quite unpalatable.

What we tasted-for every vintage time brings visitors to Bordeaux, and I went round with parties-was never more

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along the left bank of the Garonne-which a few miles below Bordeaux becomes the Gironde, where the Dordogne joins it. There is one exception. Emilion is on the north bank of the Dordogne, and therefore is divided from the other districts by two broad tideways and from fifteen to fifty miles of land. This was the first wine district I visited, and, going there without guidance, Í entered no vineyards; my object

was to see the little old town, which grew up about a hermitage hewn in the rock some eleven hundred years ago. Few places even in France have more varied interest; but what concerns me here is the grand ordinaire of its restaurantwhere I realised for the first time that a particular type of Bordeaux wine, quite unlike the rest, is St Emilion: also, that I was for the first time drinking it in matured perfection. It cost nine francs, and was very good but it was like a Burgundy. They call it in Bordeaux "le Bourgogne du Bordelais." Certain growths of the St Emilion district, though so small in quantity that no wine merchant troubles to make them known abroad, fetch a higher price almost than Lafite or Margaux. Chief of these is Château Ausone, which commemorates the Latin poet Ausonius, a Gaul from Bordeaux, who praised the wines of his district in fine hexameters about A.D. 300. Another is called Cheval Blanc, and while I was in Bordeaux the yield of this little vineyard was eagerly bid for at auction before the grapes were in the press.

It is not unnatural that this wine should be unlike the others of Bordeaux: for on the right or northern bank of the rivers there are steep coteaux, while the left bank rises very gently from the water to an undulating plain. The wines of St Emilion grow on steep slopes; and presumably these

small choice growths have found some special exposure or favoured pocket on the hillside. But all the main treasures of Bordeaux's cellars come from rich land which is only not quite level. Yet the "not quite" makes all the difference. Actually along the marshy water's edge, vines grow freely and yield largely but the choice growths lie a mile or so back.

The districts on the left bank are not continuous, and there are three of them: one, the Médoc, yielding red wines; one, one, Sauternes and Barsac, yielding yielding white; and one, Graves, yielding both. This district is the nearest to Bordeaux.

To all English people, Graves stands for a light white wine; but in Bordeaux it is valued rather for the red which it produces-and which includes one of the four "first growths." A recent correspondence has made many aware that Haut Brion is grown on the outskirts of Bordeaux, and that the town is invading this famous estate to which I was first taken. Happily, the vineyards are intact, though suburban villas are springing up about them. There are two properties

one, La Mission Haut Brion, formerly owned by some religious order: the other, the Château Haut Brion itself. Only a road with walls on each side divides the two; the exposure of the ground is the same in both; but it is the wine of Château Haut Brion

-and experts uphold the judgment. There must be some small local variation in the soil. Even at Haut Brion itself, we saw men transferring wine from one cask to another. They were, they said, "equalising" it. Certain spots in the enclosure yield a betteror a different-quality.

which ranks as a " first growth" of Bordeaux, who, as Clement V., transferred the Papal seat to Avignon. On the other hand, Margaux is a commune of the Médoc, and any wine made in the commune is entitled to be sold as Margaux— and will probably be very good. But the "first growth" is Château Margaux. The other two "first growths," La Tour and Lafite, escape this confusion: they are the names of estates in the commune of Pauillac. Château La Tour is a Pauillac, as Château Margaux is a Margaux: and both are wines of Médoc.

Another fact was new to me. Every vineyard is planted with different kinds of vines, which vary as, for example, apples do. One sort of grape gives more colour, another more abundance, and so on: the vine-growers' art consists in suiting the distribution of kinds to the particular ground. Those who say that the official classification of Bordeaux wines made in 1855 is not quite trustworthy (though it is still officially recognised) will tell you that when the phylloxera forced a general replanting, the old distribution was not always maintained changes were made, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

Médoc is the triangle of low land enclosed between the Gironde, as it runs north-west from Bordeaux, and the Atlantic, which here makes a coastline straight north to south. A line from Bordeaux to the Bay of Arcachon is the base of the triangle. Most of this big territory-for the sea and river sides are nearly 100 kilometres long-consists of landes; and as we motored out, having the Gironde half a mile on our right, we passed through outlying bits of these vast heaths and pinewoods before we came to Margaux and its tract of fertile yet gravelly soil. Next

I cleared up my mind on one point, which may be unclear to inexperienced readers of wine lists. Haut Brion, for instance, is an estate: there is no village or commune of that fifteen kilometres on-came name. What is sold as Haut St Julien, a commune which Brion must be either Château has no "first growth" but Haut Brion or La Mission several seconds," which run Haut Brion. Each, in its the others hard-the three wider classification, is a Graves: Léovilles, the two Laroses in as is also another famous red particular. A little farther on wine, Pape Clément, grown in is Pauillac, and beyond that what was once the vineyard of again St Estèphe-furthest out Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of the four main divisions of

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the Médoc wines. Probably Bordeaux has many experts who can at once distinguish a St Estèphe from a Pauillac (speaking now of the lesser wines in these districts), and either of them from a St Julien or a Margaux: I have no such pretension. But anybody should be able to know a St Emilion from any of these wines of the flat Médoc land. On the other hand, coming back through Paris, I dined with French friends, and drank a decanted wine which my host and I averred to be a St Emilion, till his wife sent for the bottle and showed us it was a Burgundy.

In Pauillac I saw the extreme example of this local distribution of excellence; for we lunched at Pontet Canet, where the vineyard lies in between those of Lafite and La Tour. Only a footpath divides the property from that of Château Lafite most revered of all these names. Pontet Canet is one of the wines which in practice ranks far above its official classification: yet nobody denies that Lafite is definitely a much greater wine. But looking over those undulating acres of vineclad country, it was impossible to guess what freak of nature, what subtle combination elements in one patch of soil, decided that it should be so.

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All the same, Pontet Canet will to me be always venerable, for I was privileged to drink then the oldest bottle of claret I have ever met. It was wine of 1878, matured in bottle long

before the hosts who gave it me were born: and it was of a ripe perfection. No doubt my host was right in saying that this was only possible because the wine had never been stirred from the place when it was pressed from the grape.

That phrase-as I learnt at Pontet Canet and elsewhere is not exact concerning red wine made by modern methods. The grapes are brought by ox-carts, in great tubs which the vintagers have filled, and in the upper storey of the chai is a tackle which lifts the tub with its half-ton of grapes on to a huge table. The grapes are then shovelled into a machine which tears away the stalks from the fruit. This is

new labour-saving ccatrivance formerly men used to detach the grapes by rubbing the branches along a wooden grid, through which sieve they fell. Now, however, they are generally forced through a long tube, and come spattering out into a great vat-apparently liquid: but when you stir the contents with a pole you find a semi-solid mass. There is no pressing the skins of such grapes as have come through unbroken burst during fermentation: and at the end of a fortnight the wine can be run out. At Pontet Canet they do not like the idea of tubing, and arrange so that the égrappilleur or stalk-separator is set up on the table, and grapes and juices flow from it, and are let fall through wide holes in the floor into vats (the

table moving on rails). In this way the wine touches nothing but wood.

Making of white wine differs, because in it the skins are not allowed to ferment with the grapes, and there must therefore be a pressing, which is done with a machine. But the white wine of Bordeaux that ranks with Lafite has a special technique of its own with a very curious history, which I learnt when I was taken to the Sauternes district.

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To get there from Bordeaux you turn your back on the Médoc, and follow the river up - stream that is, you go south-east instead of northwest. The Graves country is on your right; you pass between it and the Garonne : and after about twenty miles you reach Barsac. But the great wines are all made still farther on, near the village of Sauternes : Château Yquem, the old castle of the Counts de Lur Saluzes, is on a hill overlooking the village.

Here was always made a first-class wine, but conforming generally to the type one associates with Barsac, till about sixty years ago a strike occurred on the Yquem property. Before labour could be found to gather them, the grapes had all withered and shrunken on the branches. The owner counted his year lost, but decided to press some kind of a juice out of the unsightly clusters. Anybody who has tasted a grape in this state knows that it is candied and sugary; and

the wine made from these developed extraordinary strength. Two or three years later, a Russian Grand Duke visited Bordeaux, and was offered some of this Yquem as a curiosity : he fell in love with it and bought the whole yield: the fashion was established, and now not only Yquem, but Château Filhot (where the Count de Lur Saluzes nowadays lives), Château Vigneau, Château d'Arche, Château Suduiraut and all the vineyards which touch each other here, make their wine in the same way. The grapes are left to grow over-ripe: when they are brought in, workers go through them and take off every grape that has remained plump and clean-skinned. The unattractive-looking residue goes into the press, and there issues a muddy, greenish, distasteful fluid. Yet within a year it is crystal clear: there could be no more surprising proof of the cleansing that wine undergoes in complete fermentation than to set, as I saw done, a glass of 1925 Yquem from the cask beside what poured into the vat this year.

I do not know whether one year's white wine really differs less from another than is the case with red-but certainly I could detect very little difference between those of '23, '24, and '25; and other visitors were candid enough to admit the same lack of discrimination. But not even the least educated palate could fail to distinguish, say, Haut Brion

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