lgsjr – Page 43 – Power Tasting – The Wine Tasting Experience

Here’s to the Wines of Yesteryear

In our youth, most people we knew who did drink didn’t drink wine. Oh, there would be an occasional bottle on a special occasion, but the alcoholic beverages of choice in those days were whisky and beer. Many of us were the first in our families who took wine seriously, both as an accompaniment to a meal and as a drink that would give unique pleasure on its own.

So what were we drinking back then? By our current standards, it wasn’t very good. For one thing, we were students and we didn’t have much money. Even if a Mouton Rothschild could be had for around ten dollars, that was a lot for a starving scholar then. Also, there weren’t as many wine stores such as we see today; there were liquor stores with a few bottles of red and a few bottles of white somewhere in the back. (It was a little better if you lived in an area with Italian, French or Spanish immigrants, but not a lot better.)

Photo courtesy of J. Crew

If you were anything like us, the first wine you actually went into a store and bought for yourself was one of these: Lancers, Mateus, Mouton-Cadet or Gallo Hearty Burgundy. All these wines are still available for purchase. (One of the reasons for buying Lancers was that it came in a nice clay bottle that you could use as a vase, so it maybe doesn’t count as a wine, but let’s include it.)

Lancers was and is a light bodied rosé from Portugal. Amazingly, it is produced by the great port house, Fonseca. It was created for American tastes and it succeeded quite well in that regard. Described as “moderately sweet” on the Fonseca web site, it tastes pretty sweet to us.

Its competitor for American attention was Mateus, which some of us pronounced mat-OOS and those affecting a European elegance said ma-TAY-us. We don’t think anyone knows to this day. It’s also Portuguese, sweet, comes in a pretty, mandolin-shaped bottle and was impressive to bring on a date. It showed you were too cool for Lancers, which after all had an English name.

But what could be better than a French name, and that of a French baron no less? Mouton Cadet was originally the name that the French branch of the renowned Rothschild family gave to wines it didn’t think were worthy of being called “real” Mouton. By the time we were buying it, Mouton Cadet had morphed into a thin, acidic, mass produced wine. But we liked it. Just perfect for anyone who knew nothing about wine…and that was us. By the way, these days it’s not bad for the price.

Finally, Gallo Hearty Burgundy was, as Gallo calls it today, their “original red blend” which of course had nothing to do with Pinot Noir from the east of France. But it tasted pretty good and showed your fraternity brothers that you were above (sneer) mere beer. You probably can’t do much better even today for six bucks.

Other than a nice walk down memory lane, what’s the relevance to today’s wine tasters of even moderately good taste? These wines are where we got our start. Even if they weren’t very serious wines, we took them seriously. If we’re honest with ourselves, we liked them back then although we couldn’t have said why. They brought a little glamor and sophistication into our lives and opened some horizons as to how people lived across the ocean or the continent.

In short, these wines of yesteryear were the first steps that led us to wineries in Napa Valley, Tuscany, Bordeaux and numerous other outposts in Wine Country. Sure, we can look down our oh, so elegant noses at those bottles we wouldn’t think of buying today. But consider: there’s probably some wine you like today that won’t be as appealing to you in a few years. Our tastes grow and change, and they had to start somewhere.

Lost Wineries

This is an unusual “Places to Visit” article, because you can’t visit the places described here. They’re gone, vanished into corporate policy, Napafication, wine economics or just the passage of time. We’re talking about wineries that we have loved in the past that are no longer there. These musings were occasioned by a recent visit to Joseph Phelps’ Freestone winery in Sonoma county. Phelps is one of the best known Napa Valley wineries and they added a tasting room way out towards the Sonoma Coast when they bought vineyards in the area in the late 1990’s. It has been open since 2007 and as of December 31, 2016 it will be closed.

phelps_freestone

Joseph Phelps’ Freestone Visitors Center

The tasting room had a gracious farmhouse feel to it and we hope that someone else decides to share their wines there. Even if someone does, it won’t be the same without those wonderful Phelps wines, which will still be available at their St. Helena winery. How sad that future wine lovers won’t be able to enjoy it the way that we did. (Actually, we’d love to buy it as a home but Phelps isn’t offering and we doubt that we could afford it.)

Not so many years ago, Michael Mondavi Family, owned by the son of the great Robert, had a winery in Carneros. It was similar to the Phelps Freestone winery in that it also gave visitors a sense that they were stopping by an old friend’s home. Sure, there was a bar and a server, but with a fireplace and some easy chairs, you felt that Mike would be dropping by any minute to offer you a glass and a welcome. Okay, this was all in the imagination but for one thing, wine tasting calls for some imagination and for another, that feeling is part of the experience.

[Today the Michael Mondavi tasting room has been replaced by that of a businessman who has turned the winery into a monument to ego and garish taste. No more need be said about the sense of loss.]

The former Michael Phelps Family tasting room

Perhaps the saddest loss was the Stag’s Leap tasting room built by the master winemaker, Warren Winiarski. Oh, you can still visit Stag’s Leap Vineyards and taste their famous wines. But Mr. Winiarski hasn’t had anything to do with them for some years now, since he sold his vineyards and winery to a conglomerate. Today, there’s a stunning stone and glass Visitors Center there, a truly modern Napa building. But there used to be a wooden building, a bit too crowded to be sure, with an inviting terrace and shady trees that told you that wine making is about farming and artistry, not just business.

The former terrace of the Stag’s Leap winery

There was that same sense in a lot of the wineries that have upgraded to meet the demands of tourism and trade. Perhaps it’s just wistfulness, but there was an immediacy to the experience when you stepped up to a plank stretched between two barrels and got a glass of wine from the fellow whose name was on the bottle. You can still experience that in Paso Robles and other out-of-the-way corners of Wine Country. But for Americans, it all started in Napa Valley and it is missed there.

There is more than simple nostalgia to these memories. Wine has a history; that’s why they give it vintage years. And wine tasting, as a voyage and as an experience, has a history as well. Our children won’t encounter a visit to Wine Country the way we did. It will be great fun for them too, but it won’t be the same fun. We have no yen to bring back the good ol’ days. They weren’t always that good; some poor wineries have been replaced by great wineries
in places that were only orchards back then. But it is important to keep the memory alive, if only to measure progress. As the economics of wine making and selling have changed the product, so it has changed the sensation one gets when going wine tasting. As wineries like Phelps Freestone and Michael Mondavi Family disappear, a bit of our lifetimes disappear with them.

Tasting at Harvest Time

September is a wonderful time of year to go wine tasting. Wine is necessarily grown in warm climates, and by September the heat has slackened a bit so it’s more comfortable to pass through the vineyards. And even better you’re there to watch the process of transforming agriculture into art: harvesting grapes, pressing them and turning them into wine. There’s something romantic about watching grapes being picked, placed in baskets and walked over to nearby trucks that will soon be piled high heading to the press pads.

Léon-Augustin L’Hermitte, the Grape Harvest, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

September is a terrible time to go wine tasting. There is a constant threat of rain. The roads that were never too easy to travel at the best of times are packed with trucks that are heading, full of grapes, to the wineries. Even worse, you get to be a witness to the transformation of art into industry, turning nature’s bounty into a factory product. If you get there on the right day, you might still be able to see vines with great clusters hanging from them. A day later and the vines are bare. And all you can see as you watch the grapes being harvested are ill-treated migrant farm workers.

The crush at Saintsbury winery

Okay, you must be asking, which is it? Is harvest time a good time to go to Wine Country or not. And the answer, of course, is both. (If you’re going wine tasting in Australia, Chile, Argentina or South Africa, harvest is likely to be in February or March, but let’s keep this simple.)

For personal and business reasons, we often travel in September and our voyages almost always include wine tasting. This works better in especially hot years; the 2014 harvest in Northern California began in July in some vineyards. Thank you, global warming. August is the usual time to pick grapes in much of Italy. So we have experienced all the positives and negatives of the vendange, as the French would put it.

The biggest question is how does the time of year affect the wine tasting experience. If you’re traveling in an area where the wineries you’d like to visit are large, well-funded and likely to derive significant revenue from vinotourism, your wine tasting experience should be only minimally affected. They have lots of bottles on hand and the tasting room employees are servers, unlikely to be in the fields filling baskets. But you may not find all the wines you’d like to taste because they have all been previously consumed. Worst of all, you may find that some wineries are closed, because they have sold out the previous year’s wines and haven’t made this year’s yet. We encountered this in California’s Central Coast at Linne Calodo and Booker wineries in 2011. So call before you go.

In areas where the wineries are all or mostly small family affairs, you are indeed more likely to find the doors locked while moms, dads, kids and cousins are out in the vineyards bringing in the crops. This recently occurred when we were out tasting in Beaujolais. “Desolé, monsieur” a somewhat grimy teenager would shrug. The only choice left to us was to taste the wines served in the local cooperatives. These are open in all seasons and you do get a good education about the grapes and winemaking practices of the area. Unfortunately, the wines most of them pour are good but hardly representative of the quality that attracted you to that region of Wine Country to begin with.

Should you go wine tasting at harvest time? Yes, you should, because you should experience all the seasons that pass through Wine Country. Each month has its attractions and drawbacks, so there’s no perfect time of year. All the same, if you are new to the fun of wine tasting, it might be better to hold off on being a “part” of the crush until you know better what you are likely to get.

Grapes You’ve Never Tasted

Let’s face it: in terms of the grapes we drink these days, we’ve all become pretty boring and pretty French. The majority of what we drink and the majority of what we sip when we go wine tasting are derived from four regions of France. There are the Bordeaux grapes, in particular Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Burgundy provides us Chardonnay and Pinot Noir; the Rhone Valley chips in Syrah and Grenache and the Loire Valley adds Sauvignon Blanc. Go wine tasting virtually anywhere in America or Australia and that’s what the wineries will pour for you.

Oh, yes, it’s quite different in Italy where you’ll get their grapes, in particular Sangiovese, Nebbiolo, and Nero d’Avola in the reds. There are hundreds of local varietals that rarely find their way into export crates. Spain, too, has its own specialties, Tempranillo being the best known. But sometimes in your travels, both in Europe and North America you’ll come across a varietal you’ve never tasted. Hell, you’ve never even heard of it. How do you know if you like it? How do you know if the wine made from those grapes is well made or just plonk?

Of course you can taste strange grapes in some out-of-the-way places on an overseas visit, but increasingly this is also a possibility in more familiar areas. For example, David Coffaro Vineyard and Winery sells all sorts of odd varietals, like 100% Aglianico. Grgich Hills offers some wines that Mike Grgich has been producing in Croatia, like Pošip and Plavac Mali. You’re more likely to enjoy the wines than pronounce them. Tablas Creek Vineyard in Paso Robles has a Tannat. Tannat anyone?

You should remember that even among the best known grapes, there was a time you hadn’t tasted them either. You were probably pretty young and your taste buds not very experienced, but still, how did you react? Steve well remembers the first time he tasted Shiraz, and alternative name for Syrah and very popular these days. But at that time, Shiraz was limited to Australian wines, primarily from the Barossa region. His first reaction was, “This wine has gone bad.” Then he realized that it wasn’t sour or distasteful and, in fact, it was quite good. So that’s the primary advice: Keep an open mind. And mouth, for that matter.

We recently traveled in Southwest France and discovered wines from the area between Albi and Gaillac, known by the name of the former town. The primary grapes in Gaillacs are Duras and Braucol. Never heard of them? Neither had we. (Braucol, according to Wikipedia, is a local name for Fer. That doesn’t help much, because we haven’t heard of Fer either.) So the first thing we did (and we recommend that you do) was to think about what the wine tasted like and smelled like. Gaillac, based on a sampling of six or so bottles, is relatively light bodied, fruity, with a similarity to a Cabernet Sauvignon from somewhere other than Medoc or Napa. Think a lesser area of Bordeaux, like Cote de Bourg. The idea is not to be a wine geek, but to orient your taste buds and relate what you’re tasting with what you’ve tasted before.

Albi

Now that you’ve thought about what a wine made from previously unknown grapes is like, give some thought to why the wine is different from what you’ve ever tasted before. This doesn’t have to be a deep exercise in oenology; wine snobbery is not required. Just trust your mouth. If you like this new wine or even if you don’t, try to articulate why, without reference to anything else you already know. Words like deep, round, acid, flat, fruity, flowery, and mellow should come to mind. In other words, you should be using a normal vocabulary. By putting your taste into words, you’ll have a much better understanding of what make a unique wine (to your experience) unique.

In the long run, you are most likely to continue to buy the wines made from grapes you’re already familiar with. There is, after all, a reason that they are the most popular in the world. But the core of wine tasting is discovery, so keep trying wines with funny names, made from grapes you never tasted before.

Clos de Vougeot

One of the pleasures of going to Wine country and visiting wineries is the chance it gives you to think to yourself, “Imagine if I owned this joint!” A lesser pleasure among all those of wine tasting, but a pleasure nonetheless. Nowhere in the world are such imaginings so fertile as in France and nowhere in France are they better than at the Clos de Vougeot in the Côte de Nuit of Burgundy. Pronounce that Kloh de VOO-zhoh.

A clos is an enclosed field, or in this case and enclosed vineyard. Yes, there’s a wall around it but the vineyard is enormous, the second largest of the grand cru vineyards in the Côte d’Or. (Corton is larger.) There is a hierarchy of vineyards and thus wines in Burgundy and grand cru is the highest level. As beautiful as it may be, the reason to visit is not the vineyard but the building sitting in the middle of it.

Photo courtesy of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin

The chateau of Clos de Vougeot has a history, in fact quite a lot of it. It was erected in the 12^th century by Cistercian monks. The name originates from the nearby abbey of Citeaux, which is the mother house of the Cistercian order (known as Trappists in the United States and elsewhere). It was one of the most influential monasteries in medieval Christendom. It was eventually abandoned, restored in the 19^th century, damaged in World War II and once again restored after the war. That latter task was carried out by the members of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, a definitely snobby club of rich and famous Frenchmen. Today the Confrérie has, according to its web site, 12,000 members. It’s still rich and snobby but no longer exclusively French.

You can visit the chateau and pretend you’re one of the 12,000. It’s worth doing on its own merits, just to see a 12^th century castle in the heart of a great vineyard. You can do a self-guided tour and watch a film or you can be shown around by one of their guides. Based on our experience, the guided tour is worthwhile. The cellars and the formal rooms bring on that imaginary ownership mentioned above.

Perhaps the most exciting part of a visit is knowing that you are at the epicenter of Burgundy winemaking. Sadly, the one thing you can’t do at Clos de Vougeot is taste wine. That is, you can’t taste wine. But every year in spring and fall they hold a “tastevinage”, a grand wine tasting with a jury of 250 of the finest connoisseurs that can be assembled. They’re famous wine-growers, great merchants, heads of viticultural unions, wine-brokers, oenologists, government officials from the government’s wine office, restaurant owners, enlightened amateurs. Maybe you’re one of them, otherwise you’re not going. Out of the tastevinage comes a seal of approval, the emblem of the Confrérie des Chevaliers des Tastevin that the selected winery can put on its bottles.

By the way, what is a tastevin? It’s a wide, flat cup that sommeliers use to slurp a little bit of well-aerated wine before serving it to you. Or at least sommeliers used to do that (maybe some still do) in restaurants that had sommeliers. If you take the guided tour, they give you one.

Photo courtesy of Amazon.com

Artesa Winery

The first time we ever tasted wines at Artesa (http://www.artesawinery.com), it was a rather exclusive visit. We needed a reservation and as we approached the property, we had to enter a code that they had given us. A large gate opened slowly and then we drove up a long road to a mountain top. Okay, maybe a hilltop, but it was pretty high up.

Today, the gate is left open during business hours. The road and hilltop are still there but it is hardly exclusive. In fact, in recent years the tasting room is quite busy, seemingly every day of the week and twice on weekends. Aside from the wine, of which more later, the reason for Artesa’s popularity is the architecture of the winery and its view out over Carneros. Oh, it’s a Napa palace all right and those aren’t always to our taste. (See Not for Everyone.) But in the case of Artesa, the winery itself make a visit worthwhile.

As you walk towards it from the parking lot, you’ll pass lovely terraced fountains but you won’t see the winery, just the hilltop. Oh, wait, there’s something black jutting out of the hill over there. And there’s a portal entering the hill. You’ve arrived.

The modern interior is airy and spacious and has a lot more than a bar and a gift shop. There are side rooms and reflecting pools, with paintings and sculpture everywhere.

The utter joy of visiting Artesa is the view, as you can see in the photo below. The term “sweeping vista” hardly does it justice. That little dot in the distance is Domaine Carneros, the champagne (oh, excuse me, sparkling wine) house and its impressive chateau. At the horizon is the north end of San Francisco Bay. And in front of it all are vines, lots of vines.

The actual wine tasting experience is a bit dodgier. The tasting room space is quite large but it also can be quite crowded. Because of the aforementioned beauty of the place, Artesa has become a tourist attraction as much as a wine lover’s destination. So you may well be there with large groups or families with children. We well remember one visit in which a baby was literally crawling between our legs as we sipped our wine near the child’s parents. We do love little kids, but there are times and there are places. (See Taking or not taking your kids to wine tasting.)

Before our first visit, we were familiar with some of Artesa’s wines, especially the Sauvignon Blanc. A wine store had recommended this wine as an accompaniment for asparagus, which worked quite well. We have also enjoyed their Merlot in the past. To be honest, we weren’t as impressed in recent visits as we have been in the past. That’s the beauty of wine tasting, though; maybe next time we’ll fall in love with Artesa’s wines again.

L’Ecluse

Let’s suppose that you are in Paris, perhaps on business. You have no time to leave the city, so even though you’re in France, you will have no opportunity to go wine tasting. You have that old “so near but so far feeling”. Fear not, redemption is at hand.

We’d like to point out to you a chain of restaurants called L’Ecluse (http://www.lecluse-restaurant-paris.com), which means the lock, as in a lock on a canal. (To be honest, we only tried the L’Ecluse alongside the Madeleine church in the 8^th Arrondissment. There are also sister locations in on rue Francois 1^ier also in the 8^th, St. Honoré in the 1^st, in the 17^th not far from the Arc de Triomphe, and along the Seine in the 6^th.)

L’Ecluse restaurant, near the Madeleine in Paris

We at Power Tasting are not in the business of restaurant reviews, so we will only note that you can get a meal at L’Ecluse from a limited menu long on Bordelais cuisine, especially sausages and patés. In nice weather, you can sit outside, which is generally a pleasure anywhere in Paris and particularly so in the better neighborhoods. All the L’Ecluse restaurants are in better neighborhoods.

The reason for avid wine tasters to go to these restaurants is the wine. If you love Bordeaux wines (and which wine lover does not?) this is your chance for sampling a wide variety of wines from that region while still in Paris. What part of Bordeaux do you like the best? Margaux? Got it? Paulliac? Got it. St. Emilion? Got it. Get it?

Perhaps the most fun is to try wines from sectors you’re not as familiar with, such as Lalande Pomerol or Listrac. The good news, especially if you’re visiting as a couple, is to try a few things previously unknown to you and then follow them up with your favorites. We noticed something interesting: we each ordered wines we particularly liked, shared sips and found that we liked what the other had chosen better. Isn’t that what wine tasting is all about?

Not sure what to order? You’ll find the manager (more so than the wait staff) very knowledgeable and willing to listen to you (in English or French), find out your tastes and try to match them.

As stated, we don’t do restaurant reviews. But here’s a tip. If you do visit L’Ecluse and if you do have a meal, finish it off with the chocolate ganache and ask for advice on the best Sauternes to go with it. Believe us, you’ll remember the experience.

Vineyard Beauty

Something there is that loves a vine.

As we have traveled throughout Wine Country, around the world, we always feel a little thrill when we see vineyards. As we’re driving closer to grape-growing areas, the first to spot some vines growing in the distance will point them out and both our hearts will expand a little in our chests. The sight of the orderly rows of grape vines marching in orderly rows across a valley or a hillside, like an army of benevolent green soldiers. Seeing the vineyards adds enormously, for us, to the pleasure of going wine tasting.

The beauty is even more enticing in harvest season, when the leaves are pruned back and the ripe fruit is hanging from the vines. (Don’t tell anyone, but we have been known to sneak up on some unsuspecting vines and taken a few grapes. There’s nothing like the sweetness of these grapes just before they are turned into wine.) It is hard to count the number of photos we have of big, juicy clusters just hours before the crush.

Chimney Rock Cabernet Sauvignon, almost ready to pick

What is it about the vines? We are no farmers although we have read a few books about the agricultural aspects of wine production. Of trellises, pruning and irrigation we know virtually nothing, so we bring only the amateur’s eyes to our visits. All we can says is that looking at the sun glistening off seemingly endless rows of vines gives us a jolt of joy.

By way of comparison, there are times when we go wine tasting and don’t see vines at all. In some cases, that’s because we might be visiting tasting rooms in a town. This is mostly the case in California where wineries that cannot afford to build a palatial “visitors center” take a storefront in, say, Paso Robles, Calistoga or Healdsburg. (See our previous article on tasting in Napa Town.) There is a certain charm to wandering from one winery’s offerings to another and another. There is also the advantage of not having to get behind the wheel of a car, if we are staying in that town. And while it was once the case that only subpar wineries had in-town tasting rooms, that is not universally the case anymore. But without the sight of vineyards just outside, there is definitely the sense that something is missing.

That sensation is certainly multiplied when the wineries are far from the fields and the tasting rooms are in the industrial buildings where trucked-in grapes are crushed and aged. The total dissociation of wine from nature, no matter how good the wine is, leaves a rather empty feeling inside us.

And that is really the point: Wine tasting at its best combines product and place. You just cannot really understand Burgundy, in our opinion, unless you’ve seen Burgundy. Of course, the same applies to all of Wine Country. Wine tasting should engage all the senses, not just taste and smell, and the emotional attachment to the land is a factor in the passion for wine that almost every winemaker speaks of. Call it terroir, if you please, but actually seeing the soil and the sky and the vines where the stuff in the bottle actually come from adds enormously to the pleasure of the experience of wine tasting.

Sbragia Family Vineyards

At the very end of the Dry Creek Valley, just before Dry Creek Road peters out, perched on a high cliff, is Sbragia Family Vineyards. It is just about the northernmost winery in Dry Creek so it’s a bit of a drive. Because Sbragia Family sits athwart the closure of the fault line that created Dry Creek Valley, you will be rewarded with one of the most dramatic views in Sonoma’s Wine Country.

The winery itself is sleek, modern but not overly showy. The interior is a typical tasting room, with a wide bar and, unusually, some scattered tables where you can actually sit and enjoy your tastes. The colors in the room are somber, giving the overall experience a somewhat more intimate feeling than is often the case in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys, especially in tasting rooms as large as this one.

But you’ll want to take your glasses out to the spacious terrace. There you’ll look straight down Dry Creek Valley. You can’t see San Francisco Bay from there, but your imagination will try to fill it in. Often, when you see aerial photos of vineyards the pictures have been taken from an airplane. Not at Sbragia Family. The picture below, courtesy of the winery, gives only a hint of what it’s like to see it with your own eyes.

Photo courtesy of Sbragia Family Vineyards

Of course, all that scenic beauty would be for naught if the wine was no good. You can rest easy on that point. The wine tasting itself has some special attractions, beginning with Ed Sbragia himself. As chief winemaker at Beringer in St. Helena he took an old, well-regarded winery and drove its reputation sky high. He started his own winery in 2004 and four years later he left Beringer to focus on Sbragia Family. He is still Winemaster Emeritus at Beringer and a consultant there. So when you taste wine at Sbragia Family, you’re tasting a lot of winemaking heritage.

And in fact that heritage is on a continuum. Ed’s grandfather immigrated from Tuscany and worked in the vineyards of the early 20^th century. His father, Gino, owned his own vineyards as well. Today, Ed’s son Adam is being positioned to take over from his father, after spending some time at Beringer himself. And we were once served in the tasting room by on of Ed’s daughters.

The wines are an interesting mix. As you might expect from someone who earned his spurs at Beringer, the Cabernet Sauvignons are in the spotlight at Sbragia Family. There are Cabs to try from Dry Creek, Alexander, Sonoma and Napa Valleys. We have found that one of the most enjoyable aspects of a visit to Sbragia Family is trying to discern the differences from the four different locations. Gino’s Zinfandel is named after Ed’s father and is the original family vineyard. They also have Uncle Italo’s Zinfandel from Alexander Valley. (It is Sbragia Family, after all.)

Our personal favorite over the years has been the Merlot. One year we served it at Christmas dinner with our family in Québec and they simply didn’t realize that American wines could taste like that.

The combination of the wines, the history and that incredible view make Sbragia Family a worthwhile destination if you’re going tasting in Sonoma County.

Wine Tasting in Bordeaux

For many wine lovers, including ourselves, our interest in wine started with Bordeaux reds. Of course, we hadn’t tasted the greatest of the great Bordeaux chateaux when we were younger; maybe it was Mouton Cadet that first caught our attention and our taste buds. From then on, as we were able to drink better wines, we thought of visiting Bordeaux as the summa of wine tasting experience.

And in many ways, it is. But in a few ways, it isn’t.

For one thing, the wine growing areas around the city of Bordeaux cover a lot of ground and produce rather different grapes and styles of wine. In a gross over-generalization, the vignerons of Medoc north of Bordeaux and Graves to the south make wines heavy in Cabernet Sauvignon; St. Emilion and its satellites to the east favor Merlot; in Pomerol it’s Cabernet Franc; and in the Sauternes-Barsac area they make sweet wines from Semillon. So you don’t exactly go to Bordeaux, you go around it.

The first thing a visitor needs to know is that, as Dorothy might have put it if she were a wine afficianado, “We’re not in California anymore”. You don’t just drive up to a winery, enter the tasting room and ask for a few pours. You need, with a few exceptions, to have appointments. While you can write well in advance and make them yourself, many only deal with the trade. That means you are either a winemaker yourself or otherwise in the wine business. “Otherwise” for these purposes often means tour organizers and brokers. So you wind up paying someone to be an intermediary just to get you in.

Some visits are in groups; others are one-on-one with a guide who will almost always speak English. Anticipate a tour and a tasting, each visit lasting 90 minutes to two hours. The better the wine, the snobbier the visit. And they generally have only one or two wines, so there is less to taste at the end of the tour.

For the most part, the villages aren’t particularly either. The port at Paulliac is a good place to eat oysters right off the boat and Margaux has a few nice bistros, but save your dining experiences for the city of Bordeaux.

That all sounds pretty negative, but there are many more positives that outweigh the foregoing. For one thing, especially in the Medoc, you are visiting real French chateaux. They are gorgeous to behold and to be in; you never know when you might see some nobleman out with the hounds, as actually happened to us in Barton-Léoville. Just driving up the main road, the D2, is to behold castles that seem to come out of fairy tales. Unlike many other vineyard areas, the Medoc is flatland, so the castles you pass more than make up for the lack of rolling hillsides.

Chateau Pichon Baron (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

The big, big exception is St. Emilion. It is a medieval town around which wine has been produced for millennia. You can see Roman ruins in the vineyards. Walking through the town, you’ll find enticing restaurants and outdoor cafes. There are bakeries selling the local delicacy called canelés, which are small, rich cakes flavored with rum, vanilla and caramel. And in town and on the outskirts, there are tasting rooms for wineries, where you don’t need appointments. (To be honest, these are not the great ones you came to Bordeaux to visit. Even in this region you need appointments for the big names. But we have found a few that offer very creditable wine.)

St. Emilion (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

Perhaps the best reason to go wine tasting in Bordeaux is the effect of the experience. Once having seen the endless vineyards, seen the chateaux, tasted the wines where they’re made, you’ll never open a bottle of Bordeaux wine with the same feeling ever again. You’ve been there, seen it, smelled the grape-sweet air (and maybe stolen grape or two if you go in autumn) and the wine will have an impact on you that you’ll carry with you forever.