Ljs: Bordeaux uncorked

The city of Bordeaux is gleaming after a makeover and the region's conservative vineyards are casting off their haughty image and welcoming visitors

The English have always liked Bordeaux. It presents them with a neat and nifty range of familiar French staples: old patissiers, echoey churches, pretty cafes with unsmiling waiters, old cobbled streets, and women who swoosh past, helmetless, on bicycles. For a couple of hundred years, this land, Aquitaine, was English, a chivalrous region roamed by troubadours and ravaged by plague and perpetual war. And it's near the sea, of course, just a few miles over the dunes from the chilly Atlantic breakers.

Or perhaps the English see something of themselves in the proud, reserved character of the Bordelais. This is a town that never bothered with tourism, that didn't have to: it had already made its money on spices, slaves and grapes. In 1855, Napoleon III oversaw a list classifying the "best" Bordeaux estates, a census of allegedly top "growths" that still dictates the hierarchy and prices of specific wines. Twelve bottles of Chateau Lafite 2009, a "premier cru", are yours today for around �14,000. Whatever else, the 1855 classification was a shrewd piece of marketing. It cemented Bordeaux's entitled, Gallic haughtiness even as the town itself went to seed.

A decade ago, Bordeaux's buildings were soiled by age and neglect, the town a shabby sump of rotting docks and stagnant industry. Things are visibly changing. Modern trams now purr and whine through scrubbed boulevards; in the main square, the Corinthian columns of Victor Louis's Grand Th��tre seem to glisten. Over at the Place de la Bourse, they've installed the "miroir d'eau" or water mirror, the most beautiful puddle in Europe. We stayed at the renovated H�tel de Normandie (7 cours du XXX Juillet, +33 (0)5 56 52 16 80, hotel-de-normandie-bordeaux.com, rooms from ?95, breakfast ?15pp), brilliantly placed in the city centre and near the successful, funky wine school, Ecole du Vin de Bordeaux (3 cours du XXX Juillet, +33 (0)5 56 00 22 85, bordeaux.com, two-day course on Bordeaux wine from ?218pp). The city is cleaning up the knackered old cathedral, too, which the Pope consecrated in 1096 in an early example of urban planning. Sweaty local students pedal tourists around the town in flimsy plastic rickshaws, pointing out the sights in broken, demotic English.

Food

But parts of Bordeaux still seem timeless. The old city is spliced by rue St Catherine, one of the longest shopping streets in Europe, flanked by boutiques and shoe shops. Near the big clock, one of the few surviving landmarks from the medieval period, a spice shop called Dock des Epices (20 rue Saint-James, +33 (0)5 56 44 41 57, dockdesepices.com) fugs the street with the smell of cumin and cassia. I bought some livid purple salt flavoured with local wine ? it goes beautifully with fish. A rather grand cafe, Baillardran (55 cours de l'Intendance, +33 (0)5 56 52 92 64, other branches at baillardran.com), serves exquisite canel�s, the local delicacy of tiny cakes of caramelised custard.

La Tupina (6 rue Porte de la Monnaie, +33 (0)5 56 91 56 37, latupina.com, lunchtime menu from ?16, evening tasting menu ?60) is a stalwart side-street bistro that's been open for almost 40 years. It was one of food writer Jonathan Meades's favourite restaurants, and it appeals to a very English ideal of French hospitality. Inside, a huge hearth roars and spits, roasting chickens and braising lamb, and there's a vast board of pink, fat-studded charcuterie. The restaurant is famous for the heavy cooking of south-western France, but my starter was a huge slice of beef tomato, thick as a pack of cards, criss-crossed with padr�n peppers, while a main of roast veal with vegetables was similarly light. They play birdsong in the loos, which is somehow a very French conceit. Another fabulous restaurant is Le Petit Commerce (22 rue du Parlement Saint-Pierre, + 33 (0)5 56 79 76 58, le-petit-commerce.com, two-course lunch menu ?12), a bijou fish place with rickety tables, brusque service and a refreshing lack of tourists.

Wine

Bordeaux's wine industry has been typically slow to welcome visitors. Max Bordeaux (14 cours de l'Intendance, +33 (0)5 57 29 23 81, maxbordeaux.com) is a wine shop with a couple of spartan black and white rooms and almost nowhere to sit down. But you can drink some of the most expensive vintages in the world here on a relative budget: they serve it in 2.5cl thimblefuls. A scant sip of Mouton Rothschild is ?15, and Lynch Bages and Ch�teau Margaux's second wine are both only ?4. It's a cracking idea ? borne, perhaps, of a sudden realisation that the world is threatening to overtake Bordeaux, that lazy reliance on history and standoffish tradition might no longer do in a future of cheap long-haul and boxed Rioja.

Driving through the gnarled and corrugated vineyards of the M�doc, you can feel Bordeaux's persistent sense of entitlement or noblesse oblige. Prim, privileged chateaux sit like dowager aunts behind forbidding iron railings and old stone walls, staring with miserly joy at the writhing lucre of the vines. Billboards of the most famous names in the wine world flick past: Latour, Lafite, Margaux, Pichon Longueville. The signs could just as easily say "Keep Out: visiting these places is almost impossible for ordinary people".

So it's exciting that a few of the younger chateau owners are beginning to open up to visitors. The "tasting room" of Ch�teau La Tour de Bessan (Route d'Arsac 33460 Cantenac, +33 (0)5 56 58 22 01, marielaurelurton.com) is a rusty old telegraph building that somehow Tardises into a sleek, elegant space. They teach people how wine is blended here, letting visitors mix tannic and complex cabernet sauvignon with hot, boozy merlot. One rather grand chateau, Gruaud-Larose (33250 St-Julien-Beychevelle, +33 (0)5 56 73 15 20, gruaud-larose.com), even holds cookery courses alongside its wine tastings, while a wing of Ch�teau Marojallia (marojallia.com) is now a comfortable hotel.

Perhaps the most innovative recent development is a place called, in bolshy Franglais, La Winery (Rond-Point des Vendangeurs 33460 Arsac, +33 (0)5 56 39 04 90, winery.fr). It's run by a family of Algerian winemakers who came to Bordeaux in the 1960s. La Winery is a gigantic greenhouse branded in Trainspotting orange, its crystal panes in stark, intentional contrast with its forbiddingly opaque neighbours. They sit you in a bright room and you answer a series of questions to determine the wines you might prefer. The quiz asks whether you prefer pizza or curry, for instance, or the smell of "honey and apricot" over "loose tobacco and undergrowth". A person working there told me, rather unsurprisingly, that they faced scepticism and hostility from the old Bordelais winemakers. La Winery's approach might seem dumbed-down or gimmicky, but it makes a refreshing change from the esoteric babble of much of the wine world, and its very existence signals a partial shift from the reactionary model of the established Bordeaux wine industry.

Outside the ludicrous prices of its most famous wines, Bordeaux faces a difficult task: how to retain its relevance against increasing competition from the rest of the world, a currency situation making export difficult, and a perception that it's fusty and overpriced. But most Bordelais know they can ill afford to jettison the heritage that is the source of their fame. The true winners in this debate are visitors to the region, who can both experience a newly gleaming city and inspect those few vineyards that have opened their gates.

Getting there

By plane: Easyjet (easyjet.com) flies to Bordeaux from Bristol, Gatwick, Liverpool and Luton; British Airways (ba.com) flies from Gatwick

By train: Eurostar (eurostar.com) from London to Bordeaux starts at �109 return

Further information: Bordeaux Office de Tourisme (bordeaux-tourisme.com/uk)