The Bordelais is a pays of Aquitaine in France, the region surrounding the city of Bordeaux. The vignoble Bordelais signifies in French the wine-producing region round Bordeaux, notable for the wines that were traditionally called claret by their greatest customers, the English. These wines are now more generally simply called "Bordeaux wines". The wine country of Médoc lies on the right bank of the Gironde, reaching north to Saint-Vivien-de-Médoc. The vignoble of Graves extends south from Bordeaux along the Garonne to the canton of Langon. Less familiar wine-country of the Bordelais are Blaye and Bourg, Libournais, and Entre-deux-mers. Capital Bordeaux Area 41,309 km² Regional President Alain Rousset ( PS) (since 1998) Population   - 2004 estimate   - 1999 census   - Density (Ranked 6th) 3,049,000 2,908,359 74/km² (2004) Arrondissements 18 Cantons 235 Communes 2,296 Départements Dordogne Gironde Landes Lot-et-Garonne Pyrénées-Atlantiques Aquitaine... City motto: Lilia sola regunt lunam undas castra leonem. ... Claret is the chiefly British name used in English for red wine from the Bordeaux region of France, along the valleys of the rivers Gironde, Garonne and Dordogne. ... The Médoc is one of the most famous of the French wine-growing regions, consisting of the region in the département of Gironde, on the left bank of the Gironde estuary, north of Bordeaux. ... Gironde is a département in the southwest of France named after the Gironde Estuary. ... Graves (meaning gravel land in French) is an important wine region of Bordeaux, producing over 20 million bottles each year. ...

The wine country is bounded in the south by the pine forests of Landes, western Europe's largest stretch of forest. Landes is a département in southern France. ...

The region produced its distinctive black-and-white dairy cows, the Bordelais cattle all but extinct today [1].