Bordeaux secures its position as the world's leading wine producer with the opening of Cité du Vin museum

Described as the region's own Guggenheim with a 14,000 bottle wine store and the backing of the man behind Bordeaux's regeneration, Philip Sweeney discovers if it can live up to the hype

Vue des vignes - the view of the vineyard (Jerome Mondier)

If you’re planning to visit the brand new Cité du Vin, the world’s greatest wine museum, you’d be well advised to rehearse a few additions to basic holiday French to field the constant queries as to what you think of it. Certainement tres frappante (certainly very striking) is the one I found worked best. The Cité sits at the edge of the river Garonne, a massive bulging circular tower clad in a patchwork of gold striped glass, atop a great shining wave of a metallic canopy roof. Just in front, the equally futuristic new Chaban Delmas bridge looks almost conservative by comparison. A carafe, and the embodiment of the swirl of wine in a tasting glass are two of the inspirational images mentioned by Paris architects Nicolas Desmazieres and Anouk Legendre. I also get notes of collapsing gasometer and Christmas bauble.

The Cité was opened last week by President Hollande no less, and there’s already a steady buzz of curious visitors to what’s being described unsurprisingly as Bordeaux’s Guggenheim. Sylvie Cazes, the Bordeaux wine grandee who presides the Fondation pour la Culture et les Civilisations du Vin which created the Cité has spent the week showing eminent visitors around the conference theatre, the spectacular circular 14,000 bottle wine store, the restaurants and wine bars, and the long curving ribbed permanent exhibition space, packed with state of the art gadgetry by the top London design practice Casson Mann. Owner of the Bordeaux’s oldest grand restaurant, Le Chapon Fin, as well as a couple of middle ranking, ie pretty splendid, wine chateaux, Cazes spent years moving forward the Cité project. “The final boost came when I got Philippe Masson on board as museum director” she says – Masson was the man who turned the Futuroscope science museum at Poitiers into one of France’s most successful tourist attractions.

The real force behind the Cité, insists Cazes and everyone involved, is one man, Mayor Alain Juppe, the instigator of Bordeaux’s great leap forward in the Nineties after the fifty year reign of previous Mayor/politician Jacques Chaban-Delmas. Juppe commissioned the sleek tramways, cleaned the soot off the elegant eighteenth and nineteenth century facades to reveal the gleaming cream UNESCO-enshrined stone and made Bordeaux one of France’s most vibrant and expansionist cities. And he may well be President of France next year assuming Francois Hollande continues to sink the Socialists and Juppe sees off his rival as candidate of the Republicains party Nicolas Sarkozy. The media success of the Cité du Vin, the third of Juppe’s grand landmark projects, after the Chaban Delmas bridge and the stadium which today becomes one of the hosts of the Euro 2016 football matches, is going to help the Mayor’s prospects nicely.

The Cité du Vin is financed not only by the City Hall, but by complex web of regional and national funds, plus considerable input from corporate and private founding sponsors: banks, wine chateaux, trade associations. It’s aimed to boost the profile of the whole region, providing a new and highly visible point of focus for its wine production and, especially, wine tourism.

Half an hour by number 32 bus from the Cité is Bouliac, the suburb known as the balcon de Bordeaux. From the terrace of the Saint James hotel you can take in the low flat cityscape, its elegant stone outline broken only by the occasional rocket like Gothic steeple and or big white cruise ship. Against such a backdrop, the sheer size of the new building, albeit no skyscraper, has a major impact, even without its most un-Bordelais bling quotient..

The Cite du Vin museum opened 31 May (Rex)

The Saint James has impressive credentials both on wine and architecture grounds. Designed in the mid Nineties by star architect Jean Nouvel it features glass walled rooms in tall metal grilled faux tobacco drying barns, and is, along with Richard Rodgers’ contemporaneous Tribunal de Grande Instance, a key element of Bordeaux’s small stock of outstanding modern edifices. It also claims to have the most complete wine cellar in Bordeaux, and its own vignoble, the smallest in the region along with the toy vineyard at the airport. The Saint James’ restaurant manager Richard Bernard, a former Best Sommelier of France, is another enthusiast for the new museum. “We’ve always had guests asking us to arrange wine visits, which is not really our function. Now we can send them to the Cité to get as much brilliantly presented information as they want, and have vineyard tours arranged to follow up, all under one roof”.

In terms of wine tourism, everyone concurs that the Cité du Vin symbolises the overdue opening up of the traditionally difficult to penetrate Bordeaux wine establishment to the hordes of curious outsiders, long after places like California cleaned up with their tourist-friendly commercial attitudes. Now venerable family chateaux more usually lent to helicopter-borne VIP guests have started to appear on Air BnB, and the Cité aims to further extend this process.

So what is the museum like to visit, finally? Its subject matter is very simple: every aspect of the history and actuality of making and consuming wine across the globe. Richard Bernard rates the content highly, equally useful for a novice or an expert, capable of sustaining a quick hour’s dip or a full day of deep exploration. The Cité sets great store by its ludique – playful – character, and each visitor is equipped with a special new iphone-like guide which mediates the interactivity with the dozens of elaborate stations, pods and mini theatres walked through. On the way, virtual wine makers and experts spring into life to offer commentaries, great screens overfly by helicopter every major vignoble in the world, brass nozzles offer sniffs of wine aroma. I particularly admired the production values of the clever simulated one to one consultations with filmed experts on topics ranging from food and wine matching to wine and health. Choosing the latter, I had a sobering ten minute chat on cirrhosis and liver cancer with a Professor Saric, scarcely alleviated by some vague but well-meaning re-assurance on the advantages to well-being of a glass of wine among friends from a bloggeuse for Le Monde called Ophelie.

The health issue, and its legal ramifications, are of some significance in the mission of the Cité. The French alcohol industry has been struggling for a decade to mollify the effects of the Evin Law, one of Europe’s most draconian pieces of alcohol suppression legislation, which banned any but a small list of public communications on their products by wine makers. Some say Juppe’s discreet advocacy was instrumental in guiding President Hollande when he recently updated and softened the Evin Law. Was this an issue in planning the Cité, I asked Sylvie Cazes. “It was a factor we had to keep in mind” she replied. “The Cité has a role in demonstrating that wine is a deep seated part of world culture, not as a vehicle to promote greater alcohol consumption. It would have been a pity if the the Cité du Vin had turned out to the Forbidden City”.

Several more important objectives underly the Cité du Vin project. Among them re-asserting Bordeaux’s role as world wine leader, and let’s face it, promoting its wares, if discreetly. Allan Sichel, the sixth generation to run his family wine making company, explained Bordeaux’s need to re-position its wine. “The French, our biggest traditional market, are drinking less wine generally, and are much more open to the world of competing wines than in the past. We considered, though some of us disagreed at first, that the Cité had to cover the whole world, not just Bordeaux, but in doing so it could re-assert in a new and modern way the fact that Bordeaux is still the world’s leading wine producer.”

For Sichel, the location of the nearby Cité has another symbolic role: the rejuvenation of the old dockside quartier of Bacalan quartier at the run down northern end of the Bordeaux riverfront. The arrival of the Cité, he says, reinforced his company’s recent decision not to move out to sensible modern warehouse premises like so many others but to stay in the elegant nineteenth century stone house with its tunnel access to the river. This is good news for Bordeaux, because the area of the Bacalan needs to cling on to as much of its historic fabric as it can: the hulking concrete World War Two German submarine base, the last remaining dockers’ bars. Luckily, alternative developers do exist: a fine example is the metal sculptor Jean-Francois Buisson who has installed a small colony of artists, a sow and two hens called Colette and Pipette in the old naval abattoir complex in the lee of the Cité, fast becoming a rather brilliant complex cultural complex of its own, composed largely of fantastically transformed junk.

Around these few beacons of character a vast building site is currently throwing up block after block of identikit flats and offices. In this scenario, the startling presence of the Cité du Vin is at least a blow on the right side. It’s difficult not to be swept up in the enthusiasm of virtually everyone you meet in this lovely buzzing city and lift a glass, yet another, in celebration of the new museum, no matter how much the virtual Prof Saric tries to cast a pall over proceedings.

For further information about the Cité du Vin and travel to France, visit www.france.fr. Saint James hotel: www.saintjames-bouliac.com