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
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
