Bordeaux, Toulouse and Perpignan 🇫🇷 Wine, Brick, and a Border That Doesn’t Believe in Itself

Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Journal 13

Bordeaux. Toulouse. Perpignan. Wine that thinks in centuries, a city built from blush, and a town that wakes up French and goes to sleep Catalan.

Bordeaux was the first city on this journey that smelled like money before I saw it.

Not flashy money. Old money. The kind that built the quays along the Garonne in the 18th century when Bordeaux was one of the richest ports in Europe, shipping wine, sugar, and — this part the city took a long time to reckon with — enslaved people. The neoclassical façades that line the waterfront were built on colonial trade, and they’re still standing, cleaned and glowing in pale limestone, reflected in the Miroir d’Eau — the world’s largest reflecting pool, a thin sheet of water on the Place de la Bourse that turns the buildings into a double of themselves. Bordeaux is the most photogenic admission of complicated history I’ve walked through.

But the wine is why anyone says the name.

I drove into the Médoc and the landscape flattened into rows so precise they looked machine-drawn. Vineyards stretching to every horizon, each château a small empire producing bottles that won’t be opened for a decade or two. Bordeaux doesn’t make wine for now. It makes wine for later. The 1855 Classification — the ranking system that divided Bordeaux wines into five growths — is still in use, virtually unchanged, 170 years later. One reclassification in that entire time. Bordeaux decided what was excellent in 1855 and hasn’t felt the need to revisit the conversation.

I visited a smaller estate in Saint-Émilion — a winemaker who poured me a 2015 Merlot-dominant blend from a barrel and talked about terroir the way engineers talk about load-bearing walls. The soil here is limestone and clay. The vines are stressed on purpose — less water, smaller grapes, more concentration. The wine doesn’t happen to the land. The land decides the wine. I drank something that wouldn’t be bottled for another year and tasted patience in liquid form.

Saint-Émilion itself is a medieval village carved into limestone hills, UNESCO-listed, with a monolithic church cut directly from the rock underground — the largest in Europe. I walked into it and the temperature dropped ten degrees. The ceiling was carved, not built. The columns were left behind when the surrounding stone was removed. The entire structure is a negative — what remains after everything else was taken away. There’s a creative principle in that. Sometimes the work is knowing what to remove.

Bordeaux at night was quieter than I expected. The Rue Sainte-Catherine — the longest pedestrian shopping street in Europe — was winding down. I ate canelé from a bakery that had been making them since before anyone outside Bordeaux knew what they were — small, caramelised, custardy, flavoured with rum and vanilla, the crust so dark it looks burnt until you bite through it and the inside gives. Bordeaux doesn’t explain its food. It presents it and waits.

Toulouse changed the palette.

I stepped off the train and the city was pink. Not metaphorically — literally. Toulouse is built from briques foraines, flat terracotta bricks that turn the entire old city into shades of rose, salmon, and coral depending on the light. At dawn the buildings glow warm. At sunset they burn. The French call it La Ville Rose and for once the nickname isn’t marketing — it’s just accurate.

The Capitole — the city hall — dominates the main square with a neoclassical façade that stretches the entire length of the plaza. Inside, the Salle des Illustres is covered in paintings of Toulouse’s history on every wall and ceiling, and I stood in the centre of it feeling like the room was trying to tell me everything at once. Toulouse has always been loud about its own story. It was the capital of the Visigoths. The centre of the Cathar crusade. The birthplace of European aviation. This city doesn’t have one identity — it has five, and it argues with itself about which one leads.

I walked along the Garonne to the Pont Neuf — not Paris’s Pont Neuf, Toulouse’s own, built between 1544 and 1632, delayed by wars and floods and funding problems for nearly a century. The bridge has holes in its piers designed to let floodwater pass through instead of fighting it. Toulouse learned early that the Garonne doesn’t negotiate, so the city engineered compromise into its infrastructure. There’s a principle in that too.

The Cité de l’Espace sits on the edge of town — Toulouse is the centre of European aerospace, home to Airbus headquarters, and the city where Concorde was assembled. I didn’t visit the museum but I walked past the Airbus factory and saw an A350 fuselage sitting outside, half-built, enormous, and weirdly graceful. Toulouse makes planes the way Bordeaux makes wine — with patience, precision, and a total disregard for anyone who says the thing can’t fly.

I ate cassoulet in a restaurant near the Basilique Saint-Sernin — the largest remaining Romanesque building in Europe, a pilgrimage church on the road to Santiago de Compostela. The cassoulet was served in a clay pot, slow-cooked with duck confit, Toulouse sausage, and white beans, heavy enough to end a conversation. Cassoulet is not delicate. It’s not trying to be. It’s a dish built for people who work outside in winter, and Toulouse serves it without apology in July. I ate the entire thing and didn’t move for an hour.

At the Canal du Midi — the 17th-century canal that connects the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that Pierre-Paul Riquet spent fifteen years and his entire fortune building — I walked under plane trees that have lined the towpath for centuries. Some are being replaced now, diseased, cut down and replanted. The canal is still working, still carrying boats, still doing what Riquet bet his life it would do. He died six months before it was finished. The canal outlived him by 340 years and counting.

Then Perpignan. And France got confused.

I arrived and the train station looked normal. The city centre looked French. But the signs said things like “Perpinyà” and “Plaça” and the red and yellow stripes of the Senyera — the Catalan flag — hung from balconies next to the Tricolore. Perpignan is the capital of French Catalonia, the Northern Catalonia, the part of the Catalan nation that ended up on the French side of the border after the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. That was 367 years ago. The identity hasn’t settled.

The Palais des Rois de Majorque sits on a hill above the city — a 13th-century palace built when Perpignan was the capital of the Kingdom of Majorca, a short-lived state that controlled the Balearic Islands, Montpellier, and Roussillon. I walked through its courtyard — Gothic arches, Romanesque chapel, a view south to the Pyrenees and north to the French plain — and understood that Perpignan’s confusion isn’t confusion at all. It’s memory. The city remembers being the capital of something, and that memory lives in the architecture, the language, and the stubborn way the locals switch between French and Catalan mid-sentence without acknowledging the shift.

I walked through the old town and the Mediterranean crept in. Narrow streets painted in warm colours. Iron balconies. Markets selling olives, anchovies, and Banyuls wine — the sweet fortified wine from the coast south of town, where vineyards tumble down terraces to the sea on the last stretch of France before Spain begins. I ate a dish of cargols — grilled snails in the Catalan style, doused in aioli — at a restaurant where the owner spoke to the kitchen in Catalan and to me in French and didn’t seem to notice the switch. Perpignan lives in two languages the way Bolzano does — not as a performance of diversity but as the unresolved inheritance of a border that was drawn through a people, not between them.

Salvador Dalí called Perpignan’s train station the centre of the universe. He was being Dalí, but standing in front of the station, looking at a perfectly ordinary SNCF building that a surrealist declared the cosmic centre, I thought about how Perpignan has always been at the centre of something — Catalan culture, French territory, Spanish proximity — without ever being fully claimed by any of them. The centre of the universe might be the place that belongs to everyone and no one. Dalí might have been more accurate than surreal.

Three cities. One thinks in centuries and pours its patience into bottles the world will open long after the winemaker is gone. One glows pink and builds things that fly and things that fill you and doesn’t see a contradiction. One sits on a border that runs through its own identity and answers to two names in two languages without choosing.

The south of France isn’t the Riviera. It’s deeper, stranger, more divided, and more honest than the coastline everyone photographs.

Next week — Spain. But France isn’t done with me yet, and I’m not done with the cassoulet.

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