Bordeaux 2016 Primeurs: St Julien
Standing among the vines, twenty or so teenagers surrounded their tutor – who to my eye seemed barely a few years older than her charges – as she introduced them to the fascinating topic of vine pruning. The mob of grease and hormones stared with fiery disdain at the vines before them, so much so that I can only imagine a little pied of Merlot had just asked them if they could perhaps switch off that light as they left the room, or place their dirty plate in the dishwasher, or maybe they could stop thinking of themselves ahead of the entire human race for more than a moment or two. It wouldn’t surprise me. These French vines, they know how to rattle a teenager.
The freshly post-pubescent students were a quite motley mix. Some wore jeans and loose-fitting fleeces, seemingly having come straight from the local lycée. I presume the promise of a trip to a vineyard had more appeal than enduring an hour of Critical Thinking and Creativity for the Modern World, module nine in their International Baccalaureate philosophy syllabus. If true I couldn’t blame them; I would have signed up to a field trip to an arsenic factory to escape a philosophy lesson, and for double philosophy I would have put my name down for the tasting at the end of the tour as well. And here, in the vineyard, while communing with La Dame Nature, the students could at least ponder the universe’s most vital questions including “why is there something, rather than nothing?”, “do we have free will?”, “what are numbers?” and of course my personal favourite, “did that vine just ask me to put my plate in the dishwasher, who does he think I am, give me a break, what did your last slave die from, why is life so unfair?”.
Among their number were some who eschewed the jeans-and fleece look, and instead appeared to have been told to wear fancy dress, and in a worrying case of groupthink they had all decided to turn up in the attire of a world-weary waiter in a French bistro. Not a French bistro in the 6th arrondissement of Paris mind, the open door a portal onto a street brought alive by the rattle of an aged Citroen Traction Avant and the calls of characters from À Bout de Souffle. No, more like a French bistro in some corner of not-quite-suburban northern England, like the Wirral Peninsula, maybe. Or Shrewsbury. One that served meringue swans cast adrift on a sea of Blue Curaçao liqueur, and where the laminated wine list featured offerings from Graves, Crozes-Hermitage and Châteauneuf du Pape (of course), wines so anonymous even the semi-psychic Colombo himself would have struggled to see through the fog of mystery and intrigue. Guess the domaine. Guess the vineyard. Guess the vintage. Sacré bleu, you might even have to guess the colour.
