They wore gold-rimmed robes and silver medallions. We wore stiff and silly grins. We'd come to Bordeaux to visit chateaux and to sample wines, but found ourselves in the midst of an exalted ceremony. Our shoulders draped in velvet, we were surrounded by ten men who began to chant.

"What are they saying?" I whispered to Betty, who knew a few words of French.

"Something about a test," she answered.

Like in school? I cast perplexed glances about the pillared room. Antique corkscrews were displayed in cases along the wall. A nine-foot wineglass towered above a shimmering oak bar. The glass was wearing a bow tie. Surely all this was part of some strange and elaborate hoax. Wasn't it?

The vineyards at Saint Emilion

The oddly decorated building was headquarters for the Interprofessional Council of Bordeaux Wines, a no-nonsense organization that represents more than 7000 chateaux. Like a college football team, each chateau has its own symbols, slogans, and supporters. The men with the medallions were members of a brotherhood, les Compagnons du Loupiac. If I could just answer their questions, I'd be one, too: a loopy-ac.

Thrusting a goblet of golden fluid in my hands, the head compagnon waited. Accustomed to swigging wine with Buffalo wings, I'm not an accomplished sipper. But, some fifty men and women in evening dress and wandered over to watch the formalities, so I sniffed the wine and swirled it in my goblet and rolled it in my mouth. The wine was sweet and heavy. The air dripped with expectation. I was supposed to guess the vintage and perhaps even to make a profound pronouncement like "assertive" or "loamy" or "asparagus." Gazing heavenward, I groped for something intelligent to say.

The head compagnon leaned forward. His robe was embroidered with the crest of a leering wolf. "Loupiac-Rondillon, 1983," he whispered.

"1983," I repeated, and the men and women in evening dress burst into applause. I blinked down at the parquet floor as someone slipped one of those wonderful silver amulets resembling a miniature hubcap around my neck. Squinting at the engraved letters, I read: "Lesss com-pag-nons desss Loooo-peeeee-ak."

"You did it!" Betty marveled later as we followed wide boulevards back to our hotel. "How did you know?" Moonlit statues of Montaigne and Montesquieu watched us sternly. Betty narrowed her eyes. "He told you the answer, didn't he?"

A half dozen of us, all Americans, had been initiated that night, and none of us could understand why so much pomp and ritual surrounded one rather obscure dessert wine. But then, we were not connoisseurs but tourists, and we were more interested in architecture than appellations. Early every morning we piled into our van and followed narrow winding roads through villages and vineyards to see Romanesque churches, medieval fortresses, and country estates. Hopping from chateau to chateau, we sampled so many vintages that Betty declared, "If I have to drink one more glass of wine, I'll just cry."

But we could hardly refuse the generosity of our hosts who often scurried from their offices, eager to explain to us why their wines were wonderful. For the wine masters there is something mystical about fermenting grapes. The stately chateaux may be respected for their antiquity, but the wines they produce are revered for their artistry.

And so when we crossed immaculate green grounds to enter the Chateau Pichon-Longueville, the young leather-booted wine master said nothing of the grand stone walls, the symmetrical design, or the two tall turrets. Instead, he exclaimed, "We add egg whites to every cask!" Then, with a wave of purple-stained hands, he led us through damp cellars where the heavy sweet smells of aging grapes mingled with the sharp scent of sulfur used to sterilize empty barrels. "We always blend four types of wine," he explained, "and we taste every cask to make it right."

Betty noted that the wine masters certainly do relish the fruit of their labor. Andre Negrini of the Rauzan Wine Cooperative claims he drinks fifty-five liters of his own collection per year. The venerable owners of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild sequester in darkened chambers more than 100 thousand bottles for their private use. Still, today's wine masters are not idle aristocrats who loll about tippling from their barrels. Often they go into the world to practice some other profession. Then, when they inherit the family estate, they come home to be entrepreneurs.

Nattily dressed in olive-toned tweeds, wine master Hubert Bouteiller greeted us with the impassioned air of an insurance salesman. "Many chateaux will give tours and tastings," he exclaimed, "but only Chateau Lanessan offers a little something extra." Leading us past vineyards edged in rose bushes, he swooped open stable doors to reveal antique carriages that had belonged to his father and, enshrined in a roped-off room, a collection of his childhood toys.

The massive Chateau Lanessan, crawling with ivy and surrounded by cedars, has been in Bouteiller's family for over 200 years. We pondered what his forefathers would think if they knew that for a modest fee Bouteiller invites tourists to troop through the ancestral cellar and grounds. To us such transactions seemed disrespectful, rather as though the Queen of England took up selling tickets to the royal bedchambers. But owning a chateau isn't easy these days. Properties are splintered among heirs and snapped up by wealthy investors and absorbed into vast conglomerates. The number of wine masters declaring harvests has dropped 50% in the past thirty years and, what's more, France's per capita consumption of wine has taken a plunge.

The modern chateau must compete to survive and, as each of the wine masters was eager to inform us, no one stomps grapes with bare feet any more. Now there are gears and gauges and computers and other expensive equipment. The grounds of Chateau Lynch-Bages resemble an oil refinery with steel tanks two storeys high. Fermentation is analyzed chemically and the squealing presses are adjusted automatically. Traveling in pairs least they be overcome by the fumes and rather blissfully drown, dungareed workers rush to nurse the vats, taking the wine's temperature and talking excitedly of the industrialization of Bordeaux.

The fields that surround Bordeaux are pastoral now. There are no billboards, no discount shopping centers, no high-rise condominiums. But, as the wine workers kept saying, "The rapid train from Paris is changing everything. Tourists are flocking here." Each time I heard this, I shivered, envisioning the countryside dotted with wine-tasting franchises and shops selling Chateau Mouton-Rothschild T-shirts.

These visions don't seem to haunt the wine masters, however. There's a touch of evangelism in their commercialism: They are zealous to educate the palate of the world.

We were offered our own education in the clinical white-walled tasting room of Chateau Lynch-Bages. Glass after glass of Bordeaux was poured - some persimmon dry, some velvety smooth. We sniffed and sipped - some of us spitting into ceramic basins, others of us less sensitively swallowing. Eyes closed in ecstasy, a budding sommelier in our group pronounced, "It's entering its later age at an earlier time, and it's beautiful."

If only we could evaluate our lives like wine on a time-space continuum, I thought. No wonder the French imbue the beverage with so much reverence and ritual.

Weary from a long day's journey through chilly cellars, Betty wanted to know, "Why don't we ever taste the wine sitting down?"

We did do our share of sitting, stopping in country inns and candle-lit restaurants with salmon-colored tablecloths. Wine takes on a new meaning when sipped with eel-like lamprey, immense black mushrooms, and foie gras made succulent by months of cellar storage. Accompanied by delicacies such of these, even the bottled water inspired several members of our group to exclaim, "An excellent vintage!"

But the fact that wine, unlike water, improves with age, and that its name endures for centuries, is no laughing matter in the Bordeaux region of France. We learned this when we joined several viniculturalists for dinner at the Saint James, an oddly oriental restaurant where tuxedoed waiters flutter like trapped moths inside bright bamboo-walled rooms. A saint-Emilion followed a Pauillac which followed a dry white Graves. Sipping his own Chateau Saint-Genes, wine master Vignobles J. Foures inquired whether it wasn't every bit as good as the more expensive appellations.

"Yes indeed," I lied, because wine masters take so much pride in their work.

Beaming, Foures leaned back in his chair. A slim, dark-suited man who wore a red silk handkerchief in one pocket, he boasted that in his youth he had designed important buildings. More recently he had invented a clever device that will preserve the wine in open bottles.

Yesterday the Eiffel Tower, today . . . a cork? Stammering, I asked, "But-don't you ever miss being an architectural engineer?"

The smile faded. "A building after ten years, it does not look so good. But a wine . . ." Foures raised a slender hand as if to say-what? That a wine is timeless? That a wine is complex? That a wine is deeply and profoundly philosophical? He let his hand drop, deciding, perhaps, that this was something only a wine master could truly understand.

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   Planning your tour of French chateaux 

  Fast facts about French wine

 
 Also available ... A lighthearted companion story:  

  An evening with Count Henri de Vaucelles at Chateau Filhot

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