Bordeaux Wine Country

We have rain!  And cooler temperatures!  But it is not going to last long. In just a few days the heat will return for one last hooray.  I did not get to wear my boots and jump in puddles.  Most of the rain came at night – very noisily!  But on several excursions, we were caught in a couple of errant showers that made us wait a few minutes under an awning or under a tree.  We didn’t care.  It’s rain!

There is so much to do and see.  We wonder if we will truly see this area by the time we leave in about 10 days.

France has many wine areas.  Bordeaux is one of the first established wine-growing regions in France and it’s the largest.  St. Emilion is one of its more famous areas.  Not like the vineyards that grow on mountainsides in Portugal in patterns like quilts, the vineyards of St. Emilion grow green and leafy in long straight rows on flat lands in limestone soil.  While it looks white and dry as crushed bone, the limestone soil is porous and absorbs moisture which is released when the grape vines need it.  The vines, though rarely irrigated, look green and lush.  Dark bunches of ripening grapes hang just above the soil patiently waiting the next step.

Even if there were no vineyards, no wine caves, no shops, and no restaurants, the village of St. Emilion is a commanding French destination.  People flock to this lovely little town.  It dates back to the 1200s. Ancient buildings from the 1700s line the narrow streets.  There’s the King’s Bell Tower, a magnificent church, remnants of the castle and its moat – just think about that, a moat!  There are narrow winding streets that go up and down holding secrets to be sought in shops, gourmet restaurants, and in stores there just for the taking-away of stuff one might never know was needed or desired. 

More than anything, there are wine caves.  A visitor can taste wine from hundreds of St. Emilion Chateaus, and buy a case of wine, a beautiful wooden box of three select wines, or just a bottle. These shops are innumerable, and all will gladly ship a selection of beautiful St. Emilion wines anywhere in the world – for a fee.

The term “chateau” means castle.  In general terms, a castle’s purpose is for defense while a “palace” is intended to display grandeur and wealth. But in the French winegrowing regions, a chateau encompasses the vineyard, the house, the crushing and fermentation buildings, and the caves, in short, the whole shebang.   We toured Chateau Villemaurine, just outside the city walls of St. Emilion, and loved hearing its story.  We heard about the wine-making process here and saw the crushers and the great metal vats where juice undergoes the fermentation process and huge casks where wine is aged and stored.  The truly fascinating part of the tour, besides the wine tasting, was the walk through tunnels.  Yes, a vast network of tunnels exists under the vineyard. 

The area around St. Emilion was annexed by the Romans in the second century.  They planted the first vineyards here long before there was a town.   Later because the region was located on the route of the Camino de Santiago, many monasteries and churches were built during the Middle Ages, and a town was chartered here in about the year 1200.  The Camino de Santiago is a well-known pilgrimage route throughout Europe leading to the shrine of Saint James in the cathedral in northwestern Spain.  It is believed the remains of the apostle are buried there.  For centuries people have walked this pilgrimage as a religious cleansing, or a spiritual experience, or like today, hikers walk the route as sport. I read that 300,000 people made the trek in 2017.   I hope Stan and I can at least walk a portion of the route to get a sense of the journey.   Bordeaux is on the French route to the Camino.  In spots around the city, we noticed pretty brass markers on the sidewalks featuring a shell to which a series of rays point.  We were curious.  We learned these lovely brass disks and other shell markers, like the markers on trees or rocks marking a wilderness trail, guide those making the pilgrimage on the path to Santiago.

The new town, now called St. Emilion sits on a limestone plateau.  As the early town developed, the abundant supply of limestone became the primary building material.  As early as the 1200s, people began quarrying it, mining the stone in tunnels – much like a coal-mining tunnel except instead of picking out the stone, stone cutters chiseled out perfectly spaced vertical cuts in the soft limestone and then applied wooden jacks to poop off huge blocks of limestone.  These blocks were used to build the first ancient buildings—remnants of some still stand today.  Throughout the Aquitaine Valley, there is a vast network of tunnels formed from limestone mining.  A bit later when wine growing became important agriculture here, growers discovered that in addition to enjoying the ideal conditions the limestone soil offered for grape production, they also learned that the ancient tunnels below the town and nearby vineyards provided perfectly perfect temperature and humidity environments for aging wine.  Voila!

The labyrinth of tunnels is sometimes on different levels, as many as three levels in some places, one below the other with only maybe 4 feet separating one tunnel from another.  And then fields of grapes grow in the sunshine on the surface, about 15 feet above the ceiling of the highest level tunnel.  I’m glad this area is not prone to earthquakes.  Rest assured, although some floors collapsed over the centuries, there is little danger of further damage.  They have been using these tunnels for over 700 hundred years.

The wine here at Chateau Villemaurine is very, very good.  In Bordeaux a good bottle of wine can be bought at a very reasonable cost, however, if it’s a Chateau Villemaurine Gran Crus the price can jump to $30 to $60 a bottle, or in the case of a Gran Crus Classe, the price can be about $1000 a bottle.