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 visitors

Walking on water ... Bordeaux's Miroir d'Eau. Photograph: T Sanson

The 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 tourism, that didn't have to: it had already made its money on spices, slaves and grapes. In 1855, Napoleon III oversaw a list classifying the "best" Bordeaux estates, a census of allegedly top "growths" that still dictates the hierarchy and prices of specific wines. Twelve bottles of Chateau Lafite 2009, a "premier cru", are yours today for around £14,000. Whatever else, the 1855 classification was a shrewd piece of marketing. It cemented Bordeaux's entitled, Gallic haughtiness even as the town itself went to seed.

A decade ago, Bordeaux's buildings were soiled by age and neglect, the town a shabby sump of rotting docks and stagnant industry. Things are visibly changing. Modern trams now purr and whine through scrubbed boulevards; in the main square, the Corinthian columns of Victor Louis's Grand Th¨¦âtre seem to glisten. Over at the Place de la Bourse, they've installed the "miroir d'eau" or water mirror, the most beautiful puddle in Europe. We stayed at the renovated Hôtel de Normandie (7 cours du XXX Juillet, +33 (0)5 56 52 16 80, hotel-de-normandie-bordeaux.com, rooms from €95, breakfast €15pp), brilliantly placed in the city centre and near the successful, funky wine school, Ecole du Vin de Bordeaux (3 cours du XXX Juillet, +33 (0)5 56 00 22 85, bordeaux.com, two-day course on Bordeaux wine from €218pp). The city is cleaning up the knackered old cathedral, too, which the Pope consecrated in 1096 in an early example of urban planning. Sweaty local students pedal tourists around the town in flimsy plastic rickshaws, pointing out the sights in broken, demotic English.