Bordeaux 2023 Primeurs: St Julien
I was at dinner at Château Branaire-Ducru, seated between fellow critic Jane Anson and Bordeaux University Professor of Oenology Axel Marchal, when Jane delivered the killer question.
“So, where were you this morning?”
An innocent enough question it seems, one that deserved a simple and quick response. So I fumbled around in the very superficial layers of my memory, to pull out the answer. The only problem was I couldn’t find it.
This is wholly indicative of the primeurs. Long days spent tasting, driving and scribbling, occasionally flitting from left bank to right and vice versa, sometimes with long dinners in the evening, can be disorientating. I knew I had spent the afternoon tasting in Margaux and then St Julien, but couldn’t work any further back in the day than that. Did I eat any lunch? What was I doing this morning? Where did I wake up?
No answers were forthcoming.
I spent what felt like an eternity staring into the void.
Eons passed. Stars were formed and died. Galaxies materialised, swirling maelstroms of dust coalescing to create a myriad solar systems. Planets solidified, cooled and gave birth to life. New species evolved all across the universe, developing never before seen forms of art, culture, language and science. Somewhere on a planet ten million light years away, a quadruped with an eight-limbed trunk painted an exact copy of the new Branaire-Ducru cellars (within which we were gathered) despite never having seen a suspended tronconic stainless steel fermentation vat in its life, in a rare moment of intergalactic psychic connection [this is possibly all a little over the top – apologies if so].
As for Jane, she probably thought I had just suffered a stroke.
