{"id":377,"date":"2016-10-24T15:45:29","date_gmt":"2016-10-24T15:45:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/?p=377"},"modified":"2016-10-24T15:45:29","modified_gmt":"2016-10-24T15:45:29","slug":"wine-tasting-in-bordeaux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/?p=377","title":{"rendered":"Wine Tasting in Bordeaux"},"content":{"rendered":"

For many wine lovers, including ourselves, our interest in wine started with Bordeaux reds.\u00a0 Of course, we hadn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 From then on, as we were able to drink better wines, we thought of visiting Bordeaux as the summa<\/em> of wine tasting experience.<\/p>\n

And in many ways, it is.\u00a0 But in a few ways, it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 In a gross over-generalization, the vignerons<\/em> 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\u2019s Cabernet Franc; and in the Sauternes-Barsac area they make sweet wines from Semillon.\u00a0 So you don\u2019t exactly go to<\/em> Bordeaux, you go around<\/em> it.<\/p>\n

The first thing a visitor needs to know is that, as Dorothy might have put it if she were a wine afficianado, \u201cWe\u2019re not in California anymore\u201d.\u00a0 You don\u2019t just drive up to a winery, enter the tasting room and ask for a few pours.\u00a0 You need, with a few exceptions, to have appointments.\u00a0 While you can write well in advance and make them yourself, many only deal with the trade.\u00a0 That means you are either a winemaker yourself or otherwise in the wine business.\u00a0 \u201cOtherwise\u201d for these purposes often means tour organizers and brokers.\u00a0 So you wind up paying someone to be an intermediary just to get you in.<\/p>\n

Some visits are in groups; others are one-on-one with a guide who will almost always speak English.\u00a0 Anticipate a tour and a tasting, each visit lasting 90 minutes to two hours.\u00a0 The better the wine, the snobbier the visit.\u00a0 And they generally have only one or two wines, so there is less to taste at the end of the tour.<\/p>\n

For the most part, the villages aren\u2019t particularly either.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

That all sounds pretty negative, but there are many more positives that outweigh the foregoing.\u00a0 For one thing, especially in the Medoc, you are visiting real French chateaux.\u00a0 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-L\u00e9oville.\u00a0 Just driving up the main road, the D2, is to behold castles that seem to come out of fairy tales.\u00a0 Unlike many other vineyard areas, the Medoc is flatland, so the castles you pass more than make up for the lack of rolling hillsides.<\/p>\n

\"pichon\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Chateau Pichon Baron (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)<\/em><\/p>\n

The big, big exception is St. Emilion.\u00a0 It is a medieval town around which wine has been produced for millennia.\u00a0 You can see Roman ruins in the vineyards.\u00a0 Walking through the town, you\u2019ll find enticing restaurants and outdoor cafes.\u00a0 There are bakeries selling the local delicacy called canel\u00e9s, 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\u2019t need appointments.\u00a0 (To be honest, these are not the great ones you came to Bordeaux to visit.\u00a0 Even in this region you need appointments for the big names.\u00a0 But we have found a few that offer very creditable wine.)<\/p>\n

\"emilion\"<\/a><\/p>\n

St. Emilion (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)<\/em><\/p>\n

Perhaps the best reason to go wine tasting in Bordeaux is the effect of the experience.\u00a0 Once having seen the endless vineyards, seen the chateaux, tasted the wines where they\u2019re made, you\u2019ll never open a bottle of Bordeaux wine with the same feeling ever again.\u00a0 You\u2019ve 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\u2019ll carry with you forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For many wine lovers, including ourselves, our interest in wine started with Bordeaux reds.\u00a0 Of course, we hadn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 From then on, as we were able to drink better wines, … Continue reading Wine Tasting in Bordeaux<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=377"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":380,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions\/380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}