Queens of Bordeaux

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Over a lingering lunch, I broach the topic of women’s increasing presence at all levels of Bordeaux’s wine culture. Raffard remembers: “In the 1970s when a friend of mine applied to the Faculté d’Oenologie de Bordeaux, the chairman asked, ‘Are you looking for a husband?’” Today more than 50 percent of the students are women. Verdeun says, “Even so, the French can’t believe that there is a woman cellar master at d’Yquem. The czars and kings who used to be the only people who drank the wine could never have imagined a woman in this role.” Evidently they never saw a woman winemaker tuck into a light lunch of veal brains and blood sausage, which is not only quite sexy but makes them seem capable of anything.

After lunch we visit Château Paloumey, where Cazeneuve is animated about her food and wine education group, called Les Médocaines (also including Armelle Falcy-Cruse of Château du Taillan, Florence Lafragette from Château Loudenne and Marie-Laure Lurton from Château La Tour de Bessan). They host seminars and tours during fall harvest season and when the vineyard comes back to life in the spring. (Note to self: a good time to return to Bordeaux, just as my fancy begins to turn to love.)

The next day, after another gargantuan lunch at La Ferme auberge Gauvry, Verdeun drives while I give myself up to the pleasant hallucinations resulting from a surfeit of rendered duck fat, clafoutis, wine and the proximity of French wine heiresses. When I awake, we are amid the 90 hectares of vineyards surrounding the prestigious Château Lynch-Bages estate, beside a 17th-century monastery that’s now a hotel, Cordeillan-Bages.

I meet Sylvie Cazes-Regimbeau who, with her brother Jean-Michel Cazes, is responsible for the hotel, the château and its wines. And it’s time for another meal! We dine in the hotel’s two-star Michelin restaurant, where Thierry Marx’s inventive food like “virtual sausage” and pork cracklings with gingered pumpkin and oyster tempura somehow manages to revive my overtaxed appetite. Accompanying caramelized veal with spiced hazelnuts, new potatoes and a beer foam, we drink the Château Lynch-Bages 2002, a powerful and almost opaque wine with flavours of blackcurrant and leather. We discuss a few of the other projects she is working on. “We are renovating the hamlet of Bages,” she says, as though it were nothing more than painting a kitchen. In what must be her spare time, she curates a yearly art exhibit and travels the world promoting her family’s wines.

While Château Lynch-Bages dates to the 18th century, my next stop, Château Peyfaures, was purchased by its current owner only nine years ago. Although it faces the vineyards of Saint-Émilion, where some of the grand crus of Bordeaux are produced, it has never achieved that kind of renown. Nicole Godeau wants to rectify that.

Godeau invites us into her 19th-century château, which is well lived in, in that exquisite French way. Japanese and African artifacts share space with a plastic Tasmanian devil golf trophy. The thick dining table is laden with bunches of grapes from the row of unharvested vines nearest the kitchen door, various cheeses, tiny petits fours and savoury snacks. Godeau’s friends are at work in the kitchen preparing jars of quince, apple and pear jam, “with a little rosewater,” she explains, “just like in Morocco.” Martha Stewart, eat your heart out, it says in my notes.

Godeau, a chemist who operated a pharmacy for many years, completed a wine-tasting diploma and began making changes to her 17 hectares. “We started quietly with the pruning in the vineyard first, and then the techniques in the cellar,” she explains of her innovations to reduce yield and increase quality. She pours tastes of the well-received 2003 Château Peyfaures and 2002 L’Alpha du Château Peyfaures. The 2002 is particularly stylish and modern, tasting of honeyed almonds and plums with soft, warm tannins.

Godeau takes me on a tour of her new Guy Tropes-designed cellar and presents me with a bottle of her aptly named Dame de coeur 2003. With it she bestows on me an all-important quote from the famed Spanish winemaker Miguel Torres: “Every clever man should order a wine that women like.” 

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