The Man from Bordeaux I Story/The Man from Bordeaux II Story

Good Wine Aging In Europe
Photo (c) Paul Heidelberg



EPILOGUE TO WINE AND SPIRITS WRITING/PHOTOGRAPHY TRIPS TO FRANCE'S CHARENTE AND CHAMPAGNE REGIONS

BY PAUL HEIDELBERG

So, there I was at the Brasserie Coq D'or in Cognac, seated next to a table of obvious celebrants -- a Man From Bordeaux, about 35, was treating his wife and her family (Charente Folks).

I was wearing a long-billed orange cap that could be described as Hemingwayesque, I suppose; for that and other reasons. including my resemblance to the ecrivain, the Man From Bordeaux kept looking at me, screaming (or what was very close to screaming) "You're Hemingway, You're Hemingway."

(I've been told for many years, including by a Swiss woman I was seated next to at the Brasserie Lipp in Paris a few years back, that I also look like the French Poet Paul Verlaine. Verlaine was a great poet, but an evil man, and did such things as beat up his mother, and his young son on separate occasions -- he injured each of them badly enough to serve jail time.)

BORDEAUX MAN II

I encountered The Bordeaux Man On Horseback during a trip to a 6,000 acre hunting camp in France's Dordogne Region. I had been invited to participate in this adventure by another man on horseback -- an owner of a large, privately-held Cognac house.

The two men on horseback rode into forested land that surrounded large meadows where about 20 hunters were waiting with rifles for the deer that might be chased out of the woods.

As I am not an aficionado of blood sports, I was glad that during that day spent in the French wilderness, no deer were taken.

The highlight of the trip were my friend's 20-plus Anglais-Francais hunting dogs -- you know, the brown and white kind of dogs you see used in English fox hunting. Towards the end of the hunt, one of the dogs came up to me and laid next to me in the sun on a hillside, acting as if he were my own dog of many years.

Later members of the hunting party said they were very surprised to see this, as this was the most difficult dog to "round up" at hunt's end -- it was usually the least friendly to humans.

The time spent with that chien is a fond memory.

The trip's cuisine: Vin rouge for breakfast served with large platters of scrambled eggs. After the hunt, apertifs of pastis and water and biere pression in a "hunter's clubhouse room" before we sat at tables in the large room where we had our breakfasts, where we had more red wine and dined on great loaves of fresh-baked bread and fantastique pommes frittes served with huge roasts of wild boar.