From Sangria To St Emilion

Back from Bordeaux much the wiser (mostly). Thirty-five years of wine-drinking and I wouldn’t have expected that the first glass of the stuff I would ever drink in its alma mater… in it’s inner sanctum would be … ¡Sangria! Well it was and – caramba – it’s a long story why, but if there was ever a better sangria, I’d like to know what went into it.

Seems my Scoffing (geddit?) at English claims to have got the whole Bordeaux bottle rolling was ill-founded. When Eleanor of Aquitaine took up with the soon-to-be Henry II in 1152 the deals that were done to the advantage of English importers kept us rosbifs in the driving seat long after the 300 years of English rule ended.

The staid and stodgy town of my imaginings is also history. Former Conservative French Prime Minister Alain Juppé is in his second term as mayor of a vibrant and elegant city. So elegant that a) the whole of the city centre is a Unesco “World Heritage” site, and b) that the super-sleek trams snaking around on the new transport system don’t have straps for commuters to hang on to because people standing up would spoil the profile of the big windows. Honest!

My sangria shock deepened into near-panic with my first tasting of the following morning, when a glass of Clairet was poured my way. That’s not a typo –  I’d never heard of the stuff either – and it turns out to be a little-exported classification for wines that are a bit too red to be rosé and a bit too rosé to be red (and are thought to be much like the original claret that those Plantagenets took such a shine too). My nerves were soon soothed by a big, blustering glass of Château Talbot 2002 (funny about all those English names …) and it was plain sailing from there on towards serenely lovely St.Emilion.