What follows is a tall tale about what one might want to get up to when faced with the opportunity to spend one night in Bordeaux, following the time last week when I spent one, exceptional, night in Bordeaux.

There are a few things that made my night exceptional, but the most notable was my friend Lily. For a number of reasons, it is unlikely you will find yourself in Bordeaux with my friend Lily, but I implore you to find yourself in Bordeaux with your own “Lily”: someone with whom you share love, and friendship and, most importantly, appetites.

I also had access to restaurateur and Bordeaux importer, Benedict Butterworth, whom I texted in preparation for our trip, “where should I eat in Bordeaux?”. The brevity of our adventure was reflected in the depth of research I undertook pre-departure. Had we been staying even one night more, I probably would have also used Google. Regardless, Benedict’s single word response (“l’Univerre”) was exactly what I needed, and did not prompt further questions. It did, however, prompt me to text Lily and ask her to call the restaurant to book a table as my French (despite years spent working in wine) is atrocious. I set off with a backpack and a restaurant reservation, and landed in Bordeaux hungry.

My first two hours in Bordeaux were no great comestible triumph. They were spent in the outdoor Starbucks attached to the B-terminal of the Mérignac airport, pretending to look at emails, pretending to read, and drinking an enormous latte I had accidentally ordered with my atrocious French.

I cannot recommend spending any amount of time in the Mérignac outdoor Starbucks, but I do, very sincerely, recommend everything that followed. The head-splitting hangover was worth it.

Things looked up once Lily had landed: a straightforward tram journey was followed by a straightforward hotel check in. Neither of us wanted to hang around — we wanted to walk and see the city. We wanted a drink.

I wanted Clairet, which is not “claret”, but the wine from which claret gets its name, and the wine that made the Bordeaux region so popular with the British (all the way back in the 12th Century).

All of the same Bordeaux grape varietals can be used to make Clairet, and the best are age-worthy, versatile wines. My favourite is made by Nicole Tapon in Montagne, but the one we drank when we arrived in the city, made by Château Moulin de Peyronin, was extremely good, and miles from the bland, celebrity-backed rosés that flood supermarkets in England each summer.

After a glass of wine — and a catch-up conversation in which Lily told me about the difficulty of buying a house, and I told Lily about the difficulty of buying good, affordable grower champagne we set off for l’Univerre.

L'Univerre is everything I want a restaurant in France to be. Bottles of wine in dark cases lined the walls and a bewildering curation of 1990s and 2000s pop music (REM, P!nk, Avril Lavigne) was playing quietly in every room. The French-Asian-Fusion menu skewed firmly French (even the panko-covered prawns came with horseradish on the side), and every single table ordered steak frites for a main.

We started with a glass of champagne (€10) whilst Lily let me peruse the wine list. It was an emotive experience for a young-ish wine-adjacent professional like myself; there were wines I’d never been able to try, things I’d always wanted to drink. I grimaced, briefly, at the €45 price (to drink in) of a 2018 bottle of Le Puy that I had spent £55 (to drink out) on the week before. I marked the pages with my fingers and napkin: Bordeaux out of duty, Burgundy out of desire, one well-priced Barolo that would’ve been a delicious mistake. There were too many wines to choose from, and I was lost.

Our skilful sommelier sensed my encroaching distress and came to soothe it.

“Let me tell you a secret,” he said, leaning into our table.

Lily and I looked up at him, hopefully, as he stage-whispered, “we are here, in Bordeaux, yes? And they think we should be drinking Bordeaux wines…” (this is where he paused for dramatic effect) “…but I do not like Bordeaux wines, and you do not have to drink them!”

Liberated from the shackles of the surrounding terroir, and encouraged by our sommelier to “follow [our] hearts,” we ordered a bottle of 2018 Chandon de Briailles, Savigny-Les-Beaune Les Lavierès, which proved a perfect accompaniment to our steak.

We had alarmed our waitress by ordering our steak “with blood”, something that she warned us about (“English people never like their steak with blood”) and that we didn’t take seriously (“we’re not like other English people!”). A few glasses into our evening and our egos had gotten quite out of control. We weren’t tourists — we were gourmands! We weren’t terrible Brits drinking Bordeaux in Bordeaux with their well-done steaks! We drank Burgundy! And ate our steak with blood! We were different. We were better.

But we weren’t different, and we weren’t better. And when our steak arrived, purple and mooing, at our table, we knew it.

Once the bleeding hunk of cow had arrived at our table, we started to drink more slowly. We had a lot of chewing to do. The steak, though terrifyingly rare, was delicious, and we made a noticeable dent in the mountain of meat that had been placed in front of us. Our waitress boxed the two remaining slices and large rib bone in a box to go, before asking if we wanted dessert.

We were so full but thank you very much and we did not want dessert but maybe a digestif, is what Lily told our waitress. She was being rational, and it was the right thing to do, but I wanted cheese and a bottle of Champagne because I am a glutton, and I made a fuss.

“Let’s have a drink somewhere else,” said Lily, knowing the promise of more wine would soothe my tantrum.

“Do you like natural wine?” asked our waitress, trying to help, “there is my favourite bar not too far from here, Au Bon Jaja.”

The great big secret to the little tiny holiday is to always say yes and always take advice, or, like the kids say, “do the thing”. But there were two things we had to do before we could go to Au Bon Jaja. One was a coffee, and the other was a glass of Jean-Marc Roulot’s Liqueur d’Abricot.

I tell anybody who will listen that Liqueur d’Abricot is my favourite drink. It’s not, really (Lily often reminds me how prone I am to hyperbole). My favourite drink is English Breakfast Tea. But Liqueur d’Abricot is probably up there, and Jean-Marc Roulot’s version is certainly the best. He makes it by slowly infusing single-varietal organic apricots from the Rhône Valley with one of his spirits.

I was completely placated, and left l’Univere drunk and happy, with a full heart and a box of steak.

We arrived at Au Bon Jaja with everything but the steak, and were greeted by a large group of attractive French 30-somethings, drinking pet nat and chain smoking furiously.

“Tres Bon,” said Lily.

“Oui Oui,” I agreed, wiping a little beef-blood from my chin.

The scene inside was a far cry from the sedate wine racks at l’Univere, where the bottles slept peacefully on their sides behind tinted glass doors. The walls at Au Bon Jaja scream at you: cartoon gnomes and pictures of cats beam down from brightly coloured labels. In the window, two plastic ET figurines are propped jauntily between wine bottles that rest precariously on wooden beams. An extensive collection of novelty teapots lines one wall; ceramic animals and vintage ice buckets (in the shape of fruit) line the other.

Arnaud, the owner, waited patiently as we pointed at and pulled down wine from the shelves. He also told us about the traditional French teapots that look like a fat bunch of grapes, of which he has two. Together, the three of us settled on a bottle of Patrick Bouju’s sparkling Festejar, the pink kind.

The pink kind was the right kind to drink at Au Bon Jaja. According to Arnaud, Bouju called him one day last year, asking if he knew of any local organic merlot he could whack into his wine to make it pinker. Arnaud knew just the guy, and this vintage of Festejar rosé contains 20% of the local varietal.

“It’s nice to drink Bordeaux in Bordeaux, don’t you agree?” he said. And we did. We also agreed to let Arnaud bring us a mandatory mystery “pudding” (he is not licensed to sell wine alone), which turned out to be rice.

Most of my favourite puddings are puddings — sticky toffee, bread and butter — I’m just not that fond of rice pudding. Especially not when it’s cold. This one was cold, and served with an anonymous brown glob on top. I was sceptical, to say the least, but needn’t have been.

Lily and I sat on the street outside Au Bon Jaja until every other chair was stacked and table folded away. We would’ve stayed longer, but Arnaud needed to close, and we needed to go to bed.

And we meant to. But on our way back to the hotel we passed a derelict church tower that was under construction. Because we were drunk and abroad and full of sugar and mischief, we tried to break in and scale it, and whilst we were failing to do that, a man with a bicycle stopped us.

“Hey girls! You will never get in! But if you would like a drink there is a nice bar where everyone goes, it’s around the corner!”

Baron Samedi is the bar where everyone in Bordeaux ends up. The small man was right. At 1am on a Wednesday night, it was full. Everyone was laughing and chatting and drinking cheap beer on the pavement. I drank pastis until I couldn’t stand, and Lily drank wine until her French was fluent. Then someone bought us each a shot, which got me back up and standing, but took Lil’s French right back down to beginners.

If you ever have the opportunity to spend a night in Bordeaux, take it. Hell, take two if you can. I’m sure enough oui-saying and advice-taking will bring you as much joy as it did us. And I can tell you from experience, the head-splitting hangover will almost certainly be worth it.