I thought my love affair was over, but it's all right now.

In 1980, when I was fifteen, I went to France for the first time. I went to stay with a French family in Annecy on the school exchange and was immediately absorbed by, and into, the French way of life. I marvelled at the fact that everybody had two hours for lunch and everybody went home to eat an extraordinary meal that the matriarch of the family prepared in what appeared to be a matter of moments. I was amazed that there were only three types of car on the road: Peugeot, Renault and Citroen and everybody who smoked either smoked Gitanes or they smoked Gauloises. I loved the fact that every single person, from 10 – 100 years old, drank wine with every single meal and it was perfectly acceptable to add water to make a refreshing lunchtime drink. I loved the sense of national and regional pride and I loved the enormous sense of difference there was about the place.

Over the years, my love for France grew. I learned to love the heat of the Midi and the grace of Paris. I learned to love the beaches at the edges and the mountains in the middle. I learned to love and understand about the cuisine, about how eating was bound up with family and the seasons and a sense of place, and then, about seven years ago, I fell under the spell of the wines of the Medoc.

I can remember precisely the moment of my bewitching. For years, I had been carting back cheap table wine and for years, my friend Alastair had been taking the mickey out of me and telling me that I really did need to develop a better palate. So one year, I did bring back some half decent bottles of Bordeaux and, one night, in October 2003, sitting in my chair in my old house, I discovered that with each mouthful the wine was getting more and more interesting. The taste was changing and developing according to what I was eating and how long it had been in the glass. This wasn’t just a wine to drink; it was a wine to think about. So I did think about it, and read about it and learn about it and drank an awful lot of it until I was entirely under its spell and had to go and see for myself where it was made.

The Medoc is the region of France that sticks up north of Bordeaux, bounded by the Gironde River on the one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. Here, many of the greatest of the Bordeaux region’s wines are made. The peninsula is about thirty five miles wide at it widest, narrowing to a point fifty miles north of the city. The western two thirds is made up of boggy pine forest that has little agricultural value but plays an excellent host to a range of wildlife, while the eastern third is dominated by a vast sea of vineyards that grow Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Cabernet Franc together with tiny quantities of Malbec and Carmenere. There are no major towns and only a few places that could be called anything more than villages. There is no industry of any kind which means that the air is stunningly pure: the Atlantic brings in beautiful fresh breezes that pick up nothing but the scent of pine before wafting around the vines. The coastline is an unbroken line of golden sandy beach protected by dunes that stretches all the way down to the Spanish border.

On my first visit, I was so excited I was like a kid in a sweet shop. As I drove along the ‘routes des vins’, I was amazed to actually see the places that had, until then, only existed on labels or in books. From the village of Arsac in the south to St Cristoly in the north, I drove up and down, with my jaw dropping as the famous names presented themselves: Giscours, Lascombes, Margaux, Latour, and even the smaller chateau that I could afford and happened to be my favourites, places like Tour St Bonnet and Moulin Rouge. I loved pulling up in my car at the latter of these and meeting the man who had been making the wine all his life, taking over as he did from his father and his father before him, stretching back in an unbroken line to the Seventeenth Century. I loved his passion (and his hysterical accent when he tried to speak English) and I loved him letting me taste his wines, including the new wine still in the 225 litre oak barriques that, over the period of a year or so, turn the wine from grape juice into something magical and unique.

Most, if not all, serious wine drinkers fall under the spell of the wines of the Medoc and for most, they remain the benchmark wines. Yes, Burgundy. Yes, the Rhone Valley and we might, at times, even drink some ‘foreign’ wines like a Rioja or a Chianti, but everything is judged by the standard of claret, everything is compared to claret and if it is Christmas or a birthday or some other big day, then it is always claret that will grace the table. So, to actually be there, to be able to get out of the car and wander, at will and liberty, into the vineyards of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, was a wonderful thing. If you then factor in that the beaches are wonderful and empty, the food is cheap, the sun is shining, and Bordeaux is one of the world’s great cities (as recognised by UNESCO), you have a recipe for a truly wonderful holiday destination. So, after my 2004 visit, I returned again in 2007, found I loved it even more and so returned for my third trip this summer.

But this time it just wasn’t the same. I know that familiarity breeds contempt, but that is far too simple an explanation. Yes, it’s true that the first flush of my love affair had definitely passed. I had anticipated that: I knew it would no longer be good enough for Mistress Medoc to simply flutter her chateaux at me and expect my knees to go weak as they once did. But my sense of disquiet was based on something a little more fundamental. There were things about the place that were actively disappointing.

Firstly, the simple fact is that France is no longer a cheap country to visit. The exchange rate doesn’t help of course, and neither did the introduction of the Euro that saw a rise of 20% or so of the price of everything, but the fact is , even leaving these factors to one side, prices have simply gone up. Fuel used to be cheap. Fifteen years ago, I would drive to Andorra to fill up with diesel because it was – and I jest not – cheaper than bottled water. Now, petrol on the motorway is £1.35 a litre. When you factor in motorway tolls, simply getting there is now a serious percentage of the holiday budget. And when you do get there, things are expensive and not always of the quality that you would immediately associate with Continental living. One of the main reasons for this is that the French have been seduced by the supermarket to an even greater extent that we in England have. Just like here, the society has been cheapened by the embracing of so called ‘cheap’ food that has gone a long way to wipe out small independent producers so that even in middle sized towns there is very often no way of accessing the produce that is being grown in the fields less than fifty km away. At home, I know the origin of the meat and vegetables I eat and the vast majority of them come from within fifty miles of my house and they have not – as supermarkets dictate – then gone off to Wigan or wherever the central distribution point is. It is hard, if not impossible to do that in France, which would not be so bad if the quality of the produce in the supermarkets was excellent, but it very often isn’t anymore. I remember, in previous trips, being almost overcome by the smell and flavour of the white peaches of Roussillon: they were unlike anything we could hope to encounter in England. Now they are often unripe and often bland. And they are expensive.

Eating out too is not now the virtually guaranteed pleasure that it once was. It, like food shopping, is expensive, quality is unreliable and imagination sadly lacking. The days of each small town having two or three eating places (usually a family run restaurant, a brasserie and maybe somewhere a bit more fancy) that sold good local food at reasonable prices, have gone. Restaurant menus are now routinely 25 Euro a head for distinctly average food: French cooking has lost so much ground over the past ten years or so that the average British pub meal is now often half the price and twice the quality of yet another French offering of ‘steak frites’ with greasy chips and an anonymous piece of meat sourced from somewhere in Holland, or more often these days, Ireland.

Also, the French attitude to food and wine is changing. There is a creeping, insidious Americanisation of attitude that is starting to undermine what used to be a wonderful attitude to the dinner table. The French are turning their backs on their own table wines and are ‘drinking less and drinking better’. They are worrying about making sure they eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day (who the hell came up with that? My generation grew up on less than five portions a week and we seem to be doing ok) and are having to put up with endless messages on every advert telling them to be careful with what they eat instead of just heaving down the fois gras with gay abandon like they used to. President Mitterrand’s last meal was said to be of Ortolan, a tiny bird that is captured alive, force-fed, then drowned in Armagnac before being roasted whole and eaten that way, bones and all, the diner having first draped a linen napkin over his head to hide such an indulgence from God. Now, as shameful as such a meal may be, I can tell you now I am in awe of a country that could come up with such a dish and would certainly want to follow its gastronomic lead rather than go down the path blazed by the nation that brought us the Zinger burger. But it is to America that France continues to look, even if the Americans –as Homer once said – consider them to be nothing more than ‘cheese eating surrender monkeys’.

Can you believe that only 15% of French people aged between 15 and 75 now drink wine every day, with 37% drinking wine only ‘occasionally?’ Now I am prepared to accept that if this means that the lorry drivers are no longer guzzling half a litre with lunch before getting back into their thirty tonne lorries, this is probably a good thing, but that is not really where the reductions are coming from. The French as an entire nation have slowly been lowering their consumption for forty years (it has halved since 1970) and yet the intake of anti-depressants has doubled in the same period. The media and successive governments have done their best to virtually criminalise the daily drinking of wine, despite the fact that the French have always had astonishingly low levels of heart disease despite a somewhat fat rich diet. Part of the decline can be explained by wine no longer being the populist, blue collar ‘everyman’s drink’ but the main reason is that the middle classes have gone into an American style health panic, driven by highly influential anti-alcohol lobbies. The middle classes have been seduced by the ‘it gives you cancer’ argument, wine sales are plummeting and France is becoming the sort of country that only Daily Mail readers would want to live in: a place that embraces blandness because blandness is better than the terror that will be unleashed if we take absolutely any pleasure out of life whatsoever.

And just to make me feel really at home, the traffic was a nightmare. It didn’t use to be, but it is now. Really, a nightmare. On one occasion, I left our accommodation to pick up a pre-ordered pizza (because we couldn’t afford to go out to eat every night) from the place in the local town, about 4km away. It took me half an hour to get back. The traffic was solid, nose to tail, like the M25 on a Friday afternoon. One Sunday we tried to drive to Cap Ferrat for a bit of lunch, but gave up because the queue to get into town was 21 – I repeat, 21 – Km long.

But.

On our last night, we had an excellent picnic supper and then walked out of our apartment, through the garden and straight into the vineyard of Chateau Clarke that was planted right up to the lawn of our chambre d’hote. It was after nine and the sky was a dark blue, flecked with the last bits of pink reflected against a blob or two of cloud. I stood amongst the vines and listened to nothing but the sound of the grapes ripening, the crickets doing their thing and the buzz of a motovelo somewhere in the distance. The air was warm in that evening way that evenings are only ever warm on holiday: fragrant and fresh and clear and still. The street light came on on the telegraph pole on the road up to Listrac adding another layer of light and colour. It was our last night in Moulis en Medoc and the truth was, that despite it all, I didn’t really want to go home. As I looked out, all I could see in three of the four compass points was nothing but vines. Row upon row of vines gently turning from green to black, waiting to be harvested and transformed into great wine, wine that I can still afford even though I have to look harder and dig deeper to find the smaller, better producers. Which is, of course, part of the fun. I walked into the region six years ago with my eyes only on the names I had seen on the price lists of the big importers and in the text books written by American critics, but over the years I have learned that the joy is in keeping your ear to the ground and buying wonderful wine for 6 Euro a bottle made by a man and his wife that will never be sold outside the village limits. They are there. You just have to find them. And they do taste just as good at home.

And we had found one place to go for an excellent lunch: 12 Euro for three courses of well cooked, simple dishes, with wine. So we went for lunch regularly and enjoyed the fact that there was no menu, just a choice of two home cooked dishes at each stage which just goes to show again that you just have to look harder for what was once everywhere. They haven’t completely forgotten how to do it.

And as I stood there and soaked it up I wondered if the problem was just with me and my ageing, jaded eyes but I decided that it didn’t really matter and it didn’t really need thinking about: all I needed to do was stand and listen and watch and enjoy my last moments in a place that is unique on the face of the earth. And I know that everything looks better when viewed through the romantic glasses of a last night on holiday, but it was good enough for me and, much like a successful marriage, despite the niggles and the frustration, I knew that I was still very much in love and I knew that I would be back.

David Izod August 2010