LES VACANCES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 42

with Frenchmen and foreigners who don't flinch at paying these prices for the chance to
dine at one of Bordeaux's majestic wineries.
Afterward, we tasted that wine in the château's airy salon and over lunch in the classic
high-ceilinged dining room. The menu was haute cuisine: small plates of foie gras with
quail and grape, then lamb and gnocchi, Dutch cheese and candied peach, ending with
figs and red fruit.
We were now six: Véronique, her husband Alexander Van Beek, who is the director
of two nearby châteaux, and another couple who own a glossy French magazine, Vins &
Spiritueux. Finally, I asked about Juppé and tourism. There was uniform enthusiasm. No
Gallic shrugs, no mouths turned down at the corner, no acid asides.
“He is an excellent mayor. It helps a lot that Bordeaux has had a face lift and is pulling
in so many new tourists,” said Van Beek, who added that his wineries are making a hand-
some profit in this new era.
For all of these changes, we felt we were back in the late nineteenth century while driv-
ing through wine country on our way back to the city. The landscape and the mood, the
dominance of those vineyards, still have the feel of the novels of François Mauriac, the
Bordeaux native who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952.
“There we stood together,” he wrote in The Knot of Vipers. “The future harvest of the
grapes was fermenting under the blue-tinted leaves, drowsing in the sun.”
Many of the old Bordeaux families from the Mauriac novels still live in the region and
have proved less hidebound than their reputation. Olivier Cuvelier, a wine trader and
member of one of those families, said the change in Bordeaux, and the influx of tourism,
has been “huge, huge, and very strong. Before, we were important here, in the region.
Now we sell around the world.”
The transformation coincided with the explosion of wine drinking in countries that had
never indulged before—especially in Asia. Now Bordeaux hosts regular wine expositions
and the only problem is the lack of enough good hotel rooms. “Our city breathes again,
we welcome visitors, and our wine is selling.”
More people travel, more people drink wine, more people come to newly revived
Bordeaux. Tourism, once a negligible part of the economy, now brings in 1 billion euros,
or $1.4 billion, a year to the region, second only to wine in economic importance. And
receipts for wine are growing; they are now up to 3 billion euros, or $4.1 billion, a year.
Each nurtures the other.
I spent five days trying to find a tourism skeptic in Bordeaux and I failed. Typical was
Yves Harté, the associate director of the Sud Ouest , the top newspaper of the Bordeaux re-
gion. He moved to Bordeaux when it was at its worst. “I wrote the story of the last cargo
ship to make a delivery to Bordeaux. It was around 1980 and the ship was named the Yo
Pugon and was carrying trunks of wood from Africa,” he said. “I used the event to write a
portrait of the city. Then it was closed, hidden, very dark, its charm disappearing.”