Best of Bordeaux. Rolf Bichsel

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       15

       Ausonius and the Romans History

       Condat with a team of mules. In 1806, local historian Suffrein published a history

       of Libourne, which he took to be the former Condat. In Gallic the name means

       a place located at a confluence: today around 100 different ‘condats' have been

       identified from those times, including what are now Cognac and Angers. Libourne

       does not appear on the list. It was on the basis of this meagre evidence that Suf-

      frein established Ausonius' villa as being in Saint-Emilion, where Gallo-Roman

       artefacts have indeed been found. However, after archaeologists found the foun-

      dations of a large Roman villa near Saint-André / Montagne, Suffrein's thesis was

       dismissed as pure fabrication. Researchers still argue about which excavations

       can be attributed to Ausonius, who owned estates in Bordeaux and Saintes but

       spent a large part of his life in Milan and Trier. Whether Suffrein (whose thesis

       sought primarily to demonstrate the importance of Libourne as far back as Ro-

      man times) was influenced by Jean Cantenat, who renamed his estate with the

       unpronounceable name of Rocblancan as “Ausone” in around 1781, or was instead

       inspired by the research findings of local historians and amateur archaeologists,

       is something we will probably never know. One thing is certain: during this pe-

      riod, various other estates in the region (Pétrus, Conseillante and Beauséjour)

       also gained finer-sounding (and thus more tempting) names. This small digres-

      sion should not be viewed as an accusation of the falsification of history, but is

       rather simply designed to illustrate how fact and fiction are often intertwined in

       Bordeaux.

       Since the most important Atlantic port in southern France came to be in Bor-

      deaux, the ocean is still shaping its destiny today, and Bordeaux became the

       northernmost part of south-western France to continue successfully growing

       fine red wine – for Bordeaux is on the Atlantic, and not on the Mediterranean or

       even the Amazon despite many opinions to the contrary! True Bordeaux locals

       never go out without a cap and an umbrella, not to mention the local women

       who are constantly on the alert and generally under cover, always holding onto

       their skirts when walking through the city: if Billy Wilder had filmed ‘Some Like

       It Hot' in Bordeaux rather than New York in 1959, Marilyn Monroe's lovely knees

       could have been exposed without the need for subway grating. Here the west

       wind howls, bringing rain, gales and legendary summer storms, the weather is

       sometimes so capricious that the mercury gets the hiccups, and without check-

      ing the weather report it is impossible to know whether you should be pulling on

       a T-shirt or a woollen jumper, in the height of summer or the depths of winter.

       ‘A true Bordelais', as I was told with a raised finger by none other than Jacques

       Chaban-Delmas, ‘never goes out walking without an umbrella'. I did it anyway

       and turned up at an appointment to interview the city's legendary former may-

      or soaked to the skin, dripping on the polished and waxed parquet floor of the

       city hall like fresh laundry throughout our conversation. On 4 August 2003, the

       thermometer here shot up to an exuberant 40.7 degrees Celsius, but on 8 August

       16

       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