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From the New York Times
 In a few months, Bordeaux will offer the first tastes of its highly
touted 2009 vintage to members of the trade and wine writers. All
concerned will debate which are the best bottles and no doubt lament
the high prices they foresee for the top-classified wines.
Such is business in Bordeaux. Regardless of the periodic upheavals
that shake out the Bordeaux trade, the region continues to pour out an
enormous amount of wine annually. Yet most of that wine is routinely
ignored in the public discussion of Bordeaux. Instead, the spotlight is
on the top tier, the leading chateaux that account for a very small
percentage of the Bordeaux production and yet receive 99 percent of the
world’s attention.
But what about the other Bordeaux? When I was
a graduate student in the early 1980s, wines from this other Bordeaux
were the cheap wines of choice. Whites, in 1.5-liter bottles, were
labeled Entre-Deux-Mers, for the large swatch of land between two
rivers, the Dordogne and the Garonne. The cheapest reds were plain
Bordeaux, from the most marginal of territories, or sometimes Bordeaux
Supérieur, a modest improvement, and, if we were splurging, Haut-Médoc,
a definite step up.
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