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Bordeaux were last champions in 1999, the year we arrived here. It’s also good to see a direct wine connection, in that the Président,  Jean-Louis Triaud, is the owner of two châteaux in Saint-Julien – the little-known, classified growth Château St-Pierre and the unclassified but better known Château Gloria.

I met the affable Monsieur Triaud last autumn in his smoke-filled office, just opposite Château Ducru-Beaucaillou on the D2 wine route, when I went to taste his 2006s in bottle. He’s the son-in-law of the late Henri Martin, who created Gloria by buying up parcels of St-Julien over many years, and left his mark as Mayor of St-Julien by plonking a huge, replica wine bottle near the road. I should think the Martin-Triaud household will be cracking open some fairly decent stuff up there this summer.

Cepes are in season, so these, served with scallops, and the house speciality of foie gras pan-fried with a grape sauce, were the popular choice for starters. And you can’t go wrong with Cote de Boeuf, cooked rare. God knows what the bill would have been if we hadn’t taken along all the red wine.

After gorging ourselves, it was out in the vineyard for me on a fresh sunday morning, tasting grapes with a dodgy palate. Then roast chicken for sunday lunch, which is usually preceded at this time of year by fresh oysters bought from the village. Unbeatable with a glass of chilled Bauduc blanc.

Fun, slightly exhausting, and next time we should consider hiring in some outside help. A flurry of emails though from grateful guests on their return home, including one from Joint MD Caroline Fry saying ‘your hospitality was amazing’, make homespun events like these all the more worthwhile.

“Two things surprised me about Bordeaux,” wrote Paul Shearer in an article in the Financial Times, back in June. “The first was the breathtaking beauty of the place. The second was the warmth of the welcome from the Bordelaises.”

Oz kindly agreed to sign a stack of books for our customers this November, each with a personal dedication, so an offer to Bauduc customers by email is imminent (to be included, go to ‘Chateau Bauduc’ above and sign up for the email newsletter, or contact me, as above).

Some serious players turned out for the launch in the wine bar at the CIVB, including Alain Vauthier of Chateau Ausone (pictured with Oz, and Madame Mitjaville of Chateau Tertre Roteboeuf), Alan Sichel, the head of the Union des Maisons (negociants) de Bordeaux, and Sylvie Cazes-Regimbeau, President of the Union des Grands Crus.

Afterwards, I had dinner with Oz, his publisher and his wife, and his long-suffering assistant Fiona at Café Gourmand near Les Grands Hommes. Oz and I had both eaten here before but we didn’t realise that it had recently changed hands. Stylish French cooking has given way to a Franco-American brasserie, with burgers on the menu alongside French classics. It almost works, but not quite. Although he didn’t want to order the Chateau Clarke 2003, it was the best value on the wine list. Unsubtle and punchy – a hearty drop from a roasty toasty vintage. I was reminded of Stephen Brook’s comment on this estate in Listrac in his excellent book, The Complete Bordeaux: ‘It has proved a difficult property to manage. The Rothschilds may, after years of costly investment, have realized why the property had been abandoned’.

Both books should be on every Bordeaux lover’s bookshelf – and they won’t look out of place on the smartest coffee tables.

Stuart Gillies, the chef from Boxwood Café in London, organised the trip as a birthday present for his boss, Chris Hutcheson. Chris is the father of Gordon’s wife Tana, and he runs the Ramsay empire while his son-in-law does his stuff in front of the cameras or in the kitchen.

It was the first time that either Chris or Stuart (pictured left) had run in the Bordeaux event and we were seriously impressed that this was Chris’s 71st marathon. I had met him briefly before at a lunch party at Gordon and Tana’s home in Wandsworth, and that too was after the London Marathon a few years ago. Stuart stayed with us at Bauduc a few years back so it was a pleasure to cook for him once again: gigot d’ agneau de Pauillac (Pauillac lamb), served pink with our Trois Hectares 2005 red, from magnum. Can’t go wrong with ingredients like that. (In fact, it could have done, but thankfully it didn’t).

We had a great weekend and they even volunteered for a walk around our vines on sunday morning. However, Chris was not impressed with the paltry collection of Ramsay cookery books in our kitchen, so he very kindly Fed-Ex’ed a stack of them to us on his return to London. The only downside is that they roped me into running next year. I’m looking forward to it, although, unlike for many of the runners, fine claret is not a refreshment I would choose as sustenance when running 26 miles for the first time. 

Some friends who came for our Bauduc Bondholder dinner on saturday night spent more time at the Fête on friday than I did, and they really enjoyed it.  It cost them all of 16 euros for two, including a tasting glass each and more than enough vouchers to enjoy plenty of wine from different stands.  

Here’s Dan (below) proudly holding his keepsake – a handy carry case, complete with the glass inside and a natty shoulder strap.  

Our Bondholder dinner on saturday was a somewhat smaller event, which was lucky because our local chef pulled out at the last minute.  We managed to cobble something together in time, principally by roping Dan and Zella into helping us out in the kitchen in return for a bed for the night.  The dinner was memorable for the lovely, balmy evening, our Bauduc rosé cocktail beforehand and some interesting discourse between an academic, a surgeon, a shipping baron and the UK marketing director for Google. The latter came up with the best suggestion when we discussed what to buy godchildren and grandchildren as presents: domaine names (fullname.coms, not estates in Burgundy) and fine wine for laying down.  Later on, Hugh the surgeon talked about the importance of the Miami Breast Conference, but after too much Trois Hectares 05 red we couldn’t take him too seriously.

Sunday was even hotter and the afternoon was spent with friends in the Graves at a charity wine auction. Sean and Nicky Allison of Château du Seuil generously hosted the event, while I was commandeered to be the wine auctioneer.  This is the second year that organiser Jacqui and her husband Jean-Michel have raised money for the school in the African village of Ya, in Burkina Faso, by getting vineyards to donate a few bottles to be sold off.  Sean and I managed to chisel 13,000 euros out of a willing audience, on top of the raffle and other goodies.  Most of the wine was local, of course, but I came home with 24 expensive half-bottles of Austrian sweet wine after a poor attempt at bouncing bids off non-existent walls.  So if you ever come to Bauduc and are presented with a blind tasting of sweet wines, you could hazard a guess at a Gruner Veltliner Trockenbeerenauslese.  

I slept through most of the Euro final on our return home, nodding off once Torres had nicked what turned out to be the only goal.  Viva España.