A Town of Rare Vintage

The following morning I visited Chateau Figeac, another classic Saint-Emilion estate, housed in a three-story 18th-century bourgeois home with just enough outward wear and peeling paint to give it real character.

At the end of an hour-long tour with a chateau secretary who used the "jam" word again, I met chateau manager Count Eric d'Aramon in Figeac's tasting room -- a hall with an immense fireplace, massive timbered ceilings, Oriental carpets and tapestries. D'Aramon, who married into the family that has owned this estate since the late 19th century, opened a half-bottle of 1990 Figeac.

Whereas most chateaux open only young and often rudely astringent vintages for visitors, Figeac is known among Saint-Emilion's prestige estates for offering older riper vintages for all its visitors.

We sat in plush red velour chairs swirling the velvety wine in the glass and sticking our noses inside to inhale the earthy aromas of underbrush.

A compact, energetic man in his early fifties, d'Aramon explained in English that Figeac has always welcomed visitors and has always served older vintages -- "to give people the possibility of tasting wines as they were meant to be drunk."

"To offer a young Saint-Emilion," d'Aramon said with a smile, "would be like someone giving you a bicycle and telling you in a few years you will get the seat."

Performance Art

From the outside, Chateau Soutard is another slightly faded 18th-century manor on the plateau north of Saint-Emilion that produces fine grand cru classé . But one step inside the small whitewashed room that begins the visit and it feels like an edgy art gallery.

On the wall to the right is tacked one plain white piece of paper with a French translation of a poem by Italian poet Claudio Parmiggiani titled "March 5, 1953."

March 5, 1953: Stalin's funeral : immense crowd.

March 5, 1953: Prokofiev's funeral: twenty persons.

On the wall facing the entrance is a narrow table with neatly arrayed objects: different-size jars containing soil, vine cuttings, grapes preserved in alcohol, a set of large springs and a basket containing a whistle, a wooden faucet, light bulbs and more.

The proprietor, Francois des Ligneris, is an iconoclast, environmentalist and as close as one gets to being a revolutionary in Saint-Emilion. At 50, the salt-and-pepper-bearded son of a count and countess has challenged the French appellation system and has helped found a group of winegrowers calling for a ban on herbicides, pesticides and other chemicals. He's also shocked Saint-Emilion's establishment by buying land on the other side of the Dordogne to produce inexpensive table wines, such as his Vin des Promesses ("Wine of promises"), which bears the inscription, "Tomorrow I will stop drinking."