Bordeaux 2024 Primeurs: St Emilion
The state of sleep dissipated slowly from my being, as I became gradually more cognizant (yes, apparently that is how you spell it, I checked) of my environment. My hearing gave the first clues, as I perceived the quiet rustle of spring green leaves in a gentle breeze. And then came the slowly rising levels of light and warmth, as the day’s first rays of sunshine began to filter into the room.
Where was I?
Without opening my eyes, I searched my memory banks, while keeping my ears ready for further clues. Was that the gentle crash of a wave on a distant beach of white-gold sand I could hear? Was it possible that I was marooned alone on a desert island somewhere, a solitary traveller in a tropical paradise?
A woman’s voice, one with a familiar North American twang, drifted in on the breeze; her disembodied words told me it was time to get up.
Not alone then. Marooned on a tropical island, me and Taylor Swift.
Oh my, I know where I am. This must be Paradise.
I smiled contentedly, and tried to bury myself deeper into the warm cocoon of white bedding. The sheets felt incredibly soft and seamless, almost like silk. Sea silk, maybe?
“Dear Lord,” came the voice once more. It was Taylor again. “Will you please get up?! We have our first appointment in less than an hour. And right now you look like something I drew with my left hand after thirteen Jägerbombs. But if you go and shower, and comb that feeble fuzz on your face, maybe – just maybe – you won’t look like something that was fed after midnight before it transformed. And perhaps we won’t get turned away when we arrive at Ausone. Or Cheval Blanc for that matter.”
Ausone? Cheval Blanc? These names could mean only one thing.
It was time to start tasting the 2024 vintage in St Emilion.
-o-
Just 45 minutes later, outside in the still cool morning air, a physical manifestation of Taylor Swift sent by the Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux to guide me around Bordeaux, and paid for using the profits of the 2022 vintage, along with a pellucid wraith, essentially a shimmering energy field in the shape of the early-20th-century English wine writer Aubrey Ealdwyn de Latour, and myself, the most widely quoted critic of Bordeaux since the retirement of Robert Parker, all piled into Twingo, a sentient vehicle now wearing the guise of a Fiat 500.
One of the four characters described above is, by the way, entirely fictional; it’s up to you to decide which is the least believable.
