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We were having coffee in the city's spacious central plaza, which is flanked on one side
by the restored opera house, at one time the largest in Europe, and on the other by a man-
sion that is now the city's only five-star hotel. I told Harté that I was naturally suspicious
of the Cinderella story about a politician resurrecting the city. Juppé is a brilliant former
prime minister from a conservative political party who was on the path toward even high-
er office when he was convicted in 2004 of misusing public funds for his political party,
in effect taking the fall for his party's corruption. While he was prime minister, Juppé was
also mayor of Bordeaux. (In France officials can hold several offices at the same time.)
Harté laughed. “I am sure, without a doubt, that none of this transformation of
Bordeaux would have happened without Juppé,” he said. “He changed the whole look of
the city, and rapidly. Before, we used cars for everything, now we walk and we have the
tramway. . . . We are all rediscovering our city.”
So are tourists. Walking around Bordeaux, across the clean modern tramway tracks,
past the golden stone façades of the Old Town's eighteenth-century architecture and over
to the glorious promenades along the river, it was clear the town's rejuvenation was con-
templated with tourism in mind. There was evidence everywhere. L'Intendant, the city's
famous wine shop with an interior shaped like the Guggenheim Museum, has a full-time
Chinese sales clerk. The tables at the two-star St. James restaurant are filled with foreign
tourists like my husband and me.
Charlie Matthews, a thirty-six-year-old Englishman fluent in French, agreed. He left
his job as a wine salesman in London and moved to Bordeaux a few years ago to join the
tourism gold rush. As Bordeaux beautified, he saw a niche for himself. No one was doing
wine tourism. Through his contacts selling the wine of various châteaux in the region,
he put together a tour agency to bring Brits to Bordeaux to visit those châteaux and drink
their wine. “I knew the English market very well and the French market. I wanted to be in
France,” he said.
Like everyone else in Bordeaux, he aimed for the top. Matthews's tour agency is called
Bordeaux Uncorked, which for $1,600 a person, offers a visit of four nights and three days
through the city and top vineyards. Each tour is tailor-made “to avoid château fatigue.”
Within one year Matthews was making a good profit with a staff of two—himself and his
wife. His core clients, he said, are the exclusive clubs of London: “The Carlton Club, the
St. James Club—the traditional market where red wine, or claret, always means a glass of
Bordeaux.”
When the tour is made up of men from an elite London club, it includes meals in the
best châteaux. “These clubs buy lots of wine and that will open doors.”
It all seemed of a piece, this renovation and the tourism boom. I asked Stephan Delaux,
the president of the Bordeaux Tourism Bureau and the deputy mayor of the city, how it
had happened, the chicken-and-egg question about which came first. Delaux had been at
Juppé's side as the plan for the city took form.
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