The wine capital of the world — 18th-century port city on the Garonne where cannelés fry at dawn and Saint-Émilion waits 45 minutes by train
Bordeaux is the most beautiful city in France that most visitors skip for Paris or the Riviera — a UNESCO World Heritage city of 18th-century neoclassical architecture on the Garonne river, where 347 of its monuments are listed, the Miroir d'eau (the world's largest reflecting pool) mirrors the Place de la Bourse in a sheet of water 45mm deep, and the food-wine culture is inseparably intertwined. The Bordeaux wine region produces the world's most prestigious and expensive red wines — Château Pétrus, Château Margaux, Château Lafite Rothschild — but drinking well here doesn't require a second m…
Bordeaux was the Roman city of Burdigala — one of the most important cities in the western Roman Empire, where the poet Ausonius planted the first Bordeaux vines in the 4th century CE. The city's rise to European importance came through its 300-year connection to England: when Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry Plantagenet (future Henry II of England) in 1152, Bordeaux became an English city, and English merchants drove the development of the wine trade that still defines the city. The Bordeaux wine châteaux classification system of 1855 — ranking the top producers by price and prestige — was…