I’ve been longing to visit Bordeaux ever since I learned of the place and its wine as an undergrad in Cornell’s famed Wines course. As I soaked up the samples of Bordeaux wine, I absorbed images of picturesque French villages, complete with cobblestone streets, bougainvillea spilling over balconies, and vineyards (of course, vineyards).

So, when nearly 30 years later my best friend, a winemaker in the Finger Lakes, breathlessly told me she’d been asked to represent NYS wines at a trade show in none other than Bordeaux, I had no choice really. “You have to come!” she pleaded.

“But I just got back from Scotland!” I protested. “I can’t just jet off to Bordeaux!” But it was clear I had to go. So, I shuffled some money around, found someone to cover my shifts at the hospital, and bought a steerage class ticket to Bordeaux.

I researched all the things to do in and around Bordeaux. I love speakeasies, and oddly enough, Bordeaux seemed to have these in abundance. We could take a train to a nearby village and rent bikes and explore the narrow roads that wove around the vineyards! We could laze the afternoon away sipping wine in a Bordelaise wine bar! We could while away sunny afternoons wandering adorable French villages, snapping pictures, and…drinking wine.

Reality was different. We visited no speakeasies (they’re not really my friend’s jam). We did not rent any bikes. The sun was elusive, and we spent two afternoons during torrential rain drinking wine and watching “Sneaky Pete” on Amazon Prime in our Airbnb. We did, however, take a train to St. Emilion, where we visited an underground church; and after exhausting all that that village had to offer culturally, we did in fact laze away that afternoon drinking wine in a wine bar.

I drank hardly any red wines. I discovered a new favorite, the crisp, slatey whites of the Entre-deux-Mers region of Bordeaux, so named because the ancient Romans apparently did not realize that the two bodies of water bordering the region to the north and south were actually two rivers, now known as the Garonne and the Dordogne, rather than two seas. Nevertheless, tasty wine is produced there.

So, Bordeaux wasn’t what I imagined all those years ago, but is any place ever what you imagine? If it were, there’d hardly any point in going.