Bordeaux + Loire

Bordeaux owes its existence to two foreign interventions. In 1152 the heiress of Aquitaine married the man who would become King of England, and for the next three hundred years the region's wine flowed duty-light into England, where it was drunk young and pale and called claret — a trade that built the city. Then in the seventeenth century, Dutch engineers arrived and drained the marshes of the Médoc, exposing the deep gravel banks that produce Bordeaux's greatest wines. Without Dutch drainage, the Left Bank as we know it simply would not exist.

The famous classification was, by any standard, a rush job. For the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855, the emperor asked for a ranking of Bordeaux's wines; the brokers assembled one in a matter of weeks, using market prices as their guide. It was meant to be a snapshot. It is still, more than a century and a half later, essentially unchanged — the most durable marketing document in the history of wine.

The Loire's history is royal rather than mercantile. The French court moved here in the Renaissance, and the kings and their financiers built the great châteaux along the valley — quarrying soft tuffeau limestone out of the hillsides to do it. The resulting caves became cellars, and remain so. Because the valley runs a thousand kilometres from the mountains to the Atlantic, no other French region produces such range: bone-dry to unctuously sweet, still to sparkling, crisp whites to fresh, food-friendly reds.