chateaus

I have no idea how the ancient beams in my room in this 17th-century Bordeaux chateau are holding up the ceiling. The current owners, Mr. and Mrs. D., apparently rebuilt the place from the bottom up when they purchased it; what remains is an old skeleton, the bones tossed in the closet by a family that apparently had plenty of both in the very small town of St. Emilion.

We got a dose of the heart of the town this evening. With no actual facts, I've always imagined Bordeaux to be a polished silver kind of place, with plenty of modern touches and little left of the peasant-farmer life. It may be further removed than most from the salt of the earth, but it's still surrounded by history carved in limestone blocks and ancient Gothic-inspired churches, one wall of which stands like a tireless sentry at the entry of the town. The "city" spills in reds and browns down the chalky hillside, a wash of tiled roofs under the imposing hulk of a 14th century church built on the top of one from the 1100s. We eat at a local restaurant; I would not be exaggerating to say that there is no way any location could be more local. The owner is the ringleader, orchestrating introductions and tourist agendas, glad-handing and glancing at new faces over reading glasses always perched searchingly on the end of his nose. Mr. D. was immediately sucked up into one table, while we wandered outside to gawk at the terrace seating under one of the eaves of the church. A pity that it was both cold and raining.

Halfway through dinner the ringleader saunters over and nobly announces that the evening will begin; at this cue another bespectacled older man starts to recite poetry, an ode to wine and winemaking. From what I can parse out the French is both flowerful and sticky; I slowly chew my first course while the ringleader and poet exchange reading stanzas with alternating levels of emotion. A party is in full swing in the private room upstars, interruping the recital with frenzied "shhhh!"s every few minutes; at a particular high point the church bell tolled, giving the moment extra resonance. "I don't know what he said but it sounded serious," sez P. "Blah blah blah," said winemaker D. He understood the poems; and told us later that the man had never raised a pair of cutting shears in his life.