Bordeaux Left Bank Run

Sixty Médoc estates carry the ranking drawn up in 1855: Lafite-Rothschild, Latour, Margaux, Mouton-Rothschild and fifty-six other names, as Bordeaux's tourist office lists them. Château Margaux's own account of that year supplies the detail the list hides — it was the only property to obtain the maximum mark of twenty out of twenty. The estate behind that mark covers 265 hectares today, of which about 87 hectares are red vines and 12 hectares white, along the D2 road that threads the classified Médoc.

Château d'Yquem sits outside the red hierarchy of 1855 entirely. It is the only estate in the history of the 1855 Bordeaux classification awarded the title of 1er Grand Cru Classé Supérieur, a rank above the First Growths held by no other property. The estate still trades under it: Château d'Yquem heads its own site as Premier Cru Supérieur Sauternes, at an address of Château d'Yquem, 33210 Sauternes. The rank rests on the same botrytis passes the whole appellation depends on.

Saint-Émilion answers to a third authority, and it is not a classification of châteaux. The Jurade proclaims the harvest on the third Sunday in September and announces the judgement of the new wine on the third Sunday in June. UNESCO inscribed the Jurisdiction of Saint-Émilion in 1999 under criteria (iii) and (iv), a property of 7,847 hectares. Saint-Émilion itself holds 1,876 inhabitants, about 200 of them inside the walls, and takes over a million visitors a year.

Sauternes makes sweet wine because of a river junction. The appellation body records that the vineyard is bordered by the Garonne and crossed by the Ciron, and that where those waters meet a condensation phenomenon forms and covers the entire vineyard, letting Botrytis cinerea develop. Bordeaux's tourist office describes the same mechanism from the other end: the Ciron runs cool under dense forest cover and flows into the Garonne upstream of the city, and the resulting autumn mists promote noble rot. Sauternes sits inside the wider Graves region.

The Sauternes harvest is not one harvest. Because noble rot does not develop evenly across the vineyard, the appellation body for Sauternes and Barsac states that picking can last up to three months and requires the vines to be sorted three to five times successively, with the pickers taking only the most botrytised grapes at each passage. That is the labour behind the price of a bottle: the same rows walked again and again, most fruit left hanging each time. Sémillon accounts for 80 per cent of the appellation's plantings because its skin favours the rot.

Château d'Yquem's 2023 vintage puts numbers on that method. The estate records a harvest running from 14 September to 11 October — four weeks of successive rounds of picking rather than a single pass — and a finished blend of 70 per cent Sémillon to 30 per cent Sauvignon Blanc. The wine carries 153 grams per litre of residual sugar at 14 per cent alcohol. Yquem's own language for the result is restrained by the standards of sweet wine: the estate calls it as crisp as it is concentrated, as powerful as it is delicate.

The Saint-Émilion underground tour enters a church that was cut out of the rock rather than built on it. The tourist office dates the monolithic church to the early 12th century and gives its proportions as 38 metres long and 12 metres high. Above it stands a bell tower whose climb is 196 steps, sold as a separate ticket at the tourist office desk. Below ground the rules are firm: a guide is needed to see the doors unlocked, and photography is not permitted anywhere in the monuments.

Eating well along this route means knowing which names are current. In Saint-Émilion the two-Michelin-starred address is La Table de Pavie by Yannick Alléno, at the Hôtel de Pavie in the heart of the village. In Pauillac, Café Lavinal opened in 2006 in the village of Bages, named after Berthe Lavinal, grandmother of Jean-Michel Cazes; its most recent published winter closure ran 20 December 2025 to 5 February 2026. In the Graves, La Grand'Vigne at Les Sources de Caudalie holds two Michelin stars under Nicolas Masse.