Bordeaux makes a confident start or finish to a ride, and you feel it the moment you come along the left bank of the Garonne: a curved river front of honey-coloured eighteenth-century facades that runs for kilometres, the Place de la Bourse at its centre, and the shallow Miroir d'eau in front of it reflecting the whole thing back at the sky. The crescent bend of the river gave the city its old nickname, the Port of the Moon.
The money that built all this came from wine and from the port. For three hundred years after Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry Plantagenet in 1152, Bordeaux belonged to the English crown, and the trade in claret to London set a pattern that never really ended. Later the port grew rich on Atlantic trade, including, it should be said, the slave trade, which the city now acknowledges in its museum. In the 2000s Bordeaux cleaned its blackened stone, brought back the tram and gave the quays to pedestrians, and the change was startling.
For riders the city is a place to arrive, not to ride. The ring road, the rocade, is busy and often jammed at rush hour; inside it, tram lines, cyclists, narrow one-way streets and a 30 km/h limit across most of the centre make for slow progress. Mind the tram rails in the wet. The best riding starts once you leave: north up the Médoc to the great chateaux of Margaux and Pauillac on the D2, east across the river to Saint-Émilion and the rolling Entre-deux-Mers, or south towards the pine forests of the Landes.
Food is the reason to linger. Canelés, the little caramel-crusted cakes, oysters from the Arcachon basin, entrecôte cooked over vine cuttings, and of course the wine, which is cheaper here by the glass than you would guess. Fuel is everywhere on the outskirts, less so in the centre; the large supermarkets along the rocade are the easy option. Summer afternoons can be properly hot and humid, so a morning arrival and an evening walk along the quays, when the stone glows and the whole city seems to be outside, is the way to do it.