Bordeaux uncorked

The city of Bordeaux is gleaming after a makeover and the region's conservative vineyards are casting off their haughty image and welcoming visitorsThe English have always liked Bordeaux. It presents them with a neat and nifty range of familiar French staples: old patissiers, echoey churches, pretty cafes with unsmiling waiters, old cobbled streets, and women who swoosh past, helmetless, on bicycles. For a couple of hundred years, this land, Aquitaine, was English, a chivalrous region roamed by troubadours and ravaged by plague and perpetual war. And it's near the sea, of course, just a few miles over the dunes from the chilly Atlantic breakers.Or perhaps the English see something of themselves in the proud, reserved character of the Bordelais. This is a town that never bothered with

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