Bordeaux: I forgot to take pictures of the steak. And the wine.

I’ve been to Bordeaux once before. In 2007, right after my stay in Cannes, two friends and I backpacked through Europe and stopped for a few days, between Cannes and Caen. As one can imagine, we intended to drink quite a bit of wine… and didn’t do nearly as well as we had expected. What we didn’t realize before arriving was that wine tasting in the city of Bordeaux is not nearly as easy or as pleasant as wine tasting in the wine region outside of Bordeaux. It took us too long to comprehend this to take an excursion to the wine country, so we contented ourselves with a two-hour wine tasting course and a few glasses here and there, and moved along on our merry way.

When I returned to Bordeaux this year with the Sous-Chef, I had different things in mind. I had already planned for an excursion to St-Emilion, but we spent a day wandering in Bordeaux as well, where we stumbled upon not only a wonderful wine bar called Wine More Time, with a sommelier who was, oddly enough, from Toulouse, but the restaurant he suggested for us — Brasserie Bordelaise — where I ate the most amazing entrecôte steak I’ve ever had in my life. I nearly died.

Sadly, I took pictures of neither of these things. I was much more caught up in the city that I may have taken for granted the first time around, when we were spilled onto the pedestrian shopping street, rue Sainte-Catherine. The Sous-Chef and I have an incredible talent for getting lost together, and so for an entire day, we wandered, finding Wine More Time in a quartier populaire — the sommelier was stunned that we had stumbled upon it — and examining corners of the city that we might not have seen otherwise.

They say that Bordeaux is a little Paris… I guess I can see it in the architecture, even the people and the way they interact with one another. We’re definitely not in the South anymore; there’s a closed club privé aspect that makes some people angry, but it just makes me want to be part of it. But there’s something missing. It doesn’t bother me in Toulouse or in Cannes; it must be the “little.”

I don’t get the same rush here. Though I love all the “little” aspects: the prices, the concentration of one centre-ville in contrast with Paris’ many, and yet the retained capability to wander and stumble upon, for example, a brocante on the place St-Michel or a completely empty church, ironically or not named Sacré Coeur — the school my sisters and I all attended in New York — with a Gothic facade that can’t be more than 50 years old.

The Country Boy told me once how strange it was to see Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in the middle of modern midtown, to know that this land was untouched when medieval churches were being built in Europe, and then to see an example of this form of stonework in the middle of a modern metropolis. Sacré Coeur has a bit of the same effect on me, though the bones are there, like in Paris.

I don’t know what it is exactly. I hear cars on the freeway, a bit of wind at the door, the clicking of the Sous-Chef’s new boots on the stone floor. My sneakers are rubber-soled and silent; I feel like this church doesn’t exist, except to us.

Wine More Time
8, rue Saint-James

Brasserie Bordelaise
50, rue Saint-Rémi