Introduction-   Bordeaux—the word alone fires the mind with the anticipation of greatness. No other wine  region is more powerful, more commercially successful, or more important as a  source  of profoundly complex, ageworthy wines. The challenge is to comprehend it all,  for  this single region—the largest Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée in France covers  more  territory than all of the vineyard areas of Germany put together, and is three and a  half  times larger than the vineyard acreage of New Zealand. In Bordeaux, some 8,650  growers  and dozens of top-class estates plus thousands more of lesser standing-  produce  more than 661 million bottles of wine every year, including many of the priciest wines in the world. While it makes stunning, long-lived white table wines and superb white sweet wines   (notably, Sauternes), Bordeaux is primarily a red-wine region. Nearly 90 percent of the  wine ...