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History Bordeaux melting pot

1924 it remained stuck at just 1.5 degrees. However, even the greatest climatic up-

heavals can be tolerated whenever there are riches to be made. Mankind peered

at Bordeaux's legendary terroirs like Moses peered at God in Mann's trilogy ‘Jo-

seph and His Brothers', and thus helped them into existence. Resourceful minds

adapted the terroir to their needs and people also adapted to suit the terrior (or

less concisely: after Armenians or Greeks or Mesopotamians or whoever accus-

tomed the vine – a climbing plant from shaded forests – to the alkaline clay and

limestone soils and the burning sun and persuaded it to produce grapes which

could be made into wine, the Gallo-Romans who had already begun making wine

on the right bank but also wanted to produce it on this side of the river, adapted

the plants to the acidic soils and cheerfully damp climate on the left bank of the

Garonne). They therefore created terroir in its broadest sense, terroir consisting of

time and space, terroir made from history and nature, terroir, inextricably linked

to humans and their destiny.

The Bordeaux melting pot

More than a single lifetime would be required to investigate the thousand-

year family tree of a thoroughbred Bordelais. The Bituriges, who according to

legend founded Burdigala and introduced Vitis Biturica (the first ancestor of

Cabernet), were not the only contributors to the archetypal Bordeaux blood-

line. Novem Populi was the name of a south-western Roman province where

nine peoples were supposed to have settled. In fact it was not nine but nearly

thirty tribes who accepted Roman rule more or less willingly and with it, almost

inevitably, Roman genes: love is blind, not pure-bred. Over the centuries they

were joined by Visigoths and Saracens, Britons (themselves a mixture of Angles,

Saxons and Normans), followed by the Jews, Navarrese and Lombards, along

with the Dutch, Irish and Scots, not forgetting the Hanseatic and Baltic peoples

as well as South Sea Islanders, North Africans, Senegalese, Italians, Spaniards

and Portuguese: for 2,000 years Bordeaux has been a trade city, as cosmopolitan

as Hong Kong, Rio and New York put together, and has long been a magnet for

anyone in search of wealth and success.

Bordeaux has never got anywhere in military terms – people dominated here

not by the sword but rather with plough and sickle or abacus and stylus. The Ro-

mans never had a garrison here, remaining in Blavia (Blaye) on the right bank of

the Gironde. Citizens adapted to conquerors in public and were decadent in se-

cret. The dark chapter of the Second World War with its submarine port, depor-

tation station and Maurice Papon, Secretary General of the Gironde from 1942

to 1944 who was convicted of being an accomplice to crimes against humanity

in a sensational trial in 1998, and of the world of wine which disintegrated into

collaborators, emigrants and silent victims and which suffered from a severe