The year in four glasses. That was the idea of a wine tasting I did in Bordeaux in late August 2026: each season got a sensation and a wine, and the food was there to bring the sensation out.
| Season | Sensation | Wine | Food |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spring | Sour (acidity) | Crémant (Crémant de Bordeaux, the region’s sparkling wine) | Radish and butter |
| Summer | Salty | Entre-Deux-Mers | Merlot salt (“sal de merlot”) |
| Autumn | Bitter | Château Belle Name | Bitter orange marmalade (not sure) |
| Winter | Sweet | Claret | Sweet jelly |
A bit of context so future me remembers:
- Crémant de Bordeaux: sparkling wine made like Champagne (second fermentation in the bottle), with Bordeaux grapes.
- Entre-Deux-Mers: “between two seas”, which are really two rivers, the Garonne and the Dordogne, with tides that reach far inland (the same tides that make the mascaret). Mostly dry whites.
- Claret: the old English name for red Bordeaux, from the pale clairet the English shipped home in the Middle Ages, when Bordeaux belonged to their crown.
The best part was winter. The claret came in an opaque glass and we had to guess: white or red? It was a red. It tasted like a white.
Seriously.
Take the colour away and the palate gets lost, because colour sets the expectation before the first sip. There’s a famous version of this: in 2001, Frédéric Brochet at the University of Bordeaux served oenology students a white wine dyed red, and they described it with red-wine words (red fruit, jammy). Wine students. In Bordeaux. Very humbling, and very reassuring for the rest of us.
Same trip: The monolithic church of Saint-Émilion.