Thinking Allowed: Wine Country

It is no surprise that when people think of France they think of wine. France had been producing wine for 2000 years and produces 20% of wine worldwide. Of all the places in France, the most popular for wine production is the Bordeaux region. Most of the world's most expensive wines come from France, and of those nearly all are from the Bordeaux region. Of the wines in the Bordeaux regions the wines of St Emilion are among the top.

We stayed for a week in Libourne which is one train stop from St Emilion. Libourne is a small city or a large town that has a cute historic core with a long, less cute, semi-circle of suburby feeling housing and buildings around it. The town felt like it has once been of great importance and was trying hard to once again feel important. Libourne had a surprisingly large population of asylum seekers. I tried to read up on why this was the case and to the best of my new knowledge it is due to the city of Bordeaux attracting an unsupportable number of asylum seekers and to appease angry residents the responsibility was shifted outwards. While eventually things will reach a new equilibrium this influx of residents seemed to give the community an off kilter sense of unity. The situation of asylum seekers against the background of the extreme wine wealth was somehow unsettling. All my reading on France and their approach to asylum seekers was a little sad. I have no miracle answer but somehow still feel like there surely are better solutions.

In contrast, St. Emilion, one train stop over, felt like a town whose wealth has never stopped rolling in since the moments vineyards were first planted. The town is postcard perfect with its immaculate quaint core and its undulating hills of highly cultivated and tended to vineyards and chateaux. We took a few walks around the hills of St Emilion and could not get over the grandiosity of the vineyard chateaux. Who knew that to live in a palace you have to be a viticulturist?