St. Emilion!

So...on Saturday during our weekend in Bordeaux, we did a wine tour with Bordo Vino (through the Tourism Office, which hooks you up) to St. Emilion, a medieval town 45 minutes away, plus a trip through the wine country with a visit to two vineyards with tastings.    This was such a great way to get a little taste of Southern France and we got to see some beautiful sites and taste some reallllly good wines.  (But let's be honest - I don't really discriminate against ANY wines.)

According to Wikipedia, St. Emilion's "history goes back to prehistoric times and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, with fascinating Romanesque churches and ruins stretching all along steep and narrow streets.  The town was named after the monk Emilion, a traveling confessor, who settled in a hermitage (cave) carved into the rock there in the 8th century.  It was the monks who followed him that started up the commercial wine production in the area."  So there you have it.

Quintessential pic of the rooftops of the town.

This is a cathedral near the entrance of the town - huge, beautiful, old.

The Collegiate Cloisters in the same cathedral.

This is the St. Emilion Monolithic Church, part of which is built into this giant hill, into the earth and underground.  This is one side.... 

...and after descending a rocky uneven staircase, this is the other side.
Evidently there are TONS of underground monuments, caves, passageways, etc. carved into the limestone under the city.  They offer tours but we didn't have time.  Dangit!

A view of the surrounding town and vineyards from the balcony of the church (above).

A huge tower where the townspeople would watch for approaching enemies.

We walked around the city a bit, not nearly long enough cause I could have spent a few days there, and then drove on to the vineyards!

The first "Chateau" we visited (they're all called Chateaux) was called Chateau Pressac, a privately owned vineyard with AMAZING views of the tiered vineyards sloping down to a valley full of them.  Pretty unbelievable.

The vats where they hold the wine and...do all that stuff to it to turn it into wine.  Cool!
(I swear we learned how but it's too long and involved.)

Cutie with a barrel.

We played a game at the beginning of our tasting where we sniffed different scents and tried to describe what we were smelling using this wheel.  They also taught us about the color, sniffing, swirling, a sipping.  It was fun AND informative!

Wine tasting!

Heaven.

After a couple glasses of wine and some more touring, we went to Chateau Soutard.  This vineyard is owned by a big insurance company and looks a little different than the other - it was surrounded by flat vineyards with a pretty view of St. Emilion just across the way, and had a lot of fancy state-of-the-art techy stuff inside for the tour (a glass elevator to the underground, a back lit table for the tasting, a gift shop, etc.)  It was just as pretty and just as fun though - except they were stingier with the wine pours.  What gives!?

The stainless steel vats they use for wine-making.

The fancy white table so we could REALLLLY see the color of our wine.

We learned a lot about Bordeaux wines on the trip, though I'm still a little unclear on some stuff.

• 70% of Bordeaux wines are reds, and 98% of those reds are Merlot BLENDS
• A lot of dry whites are produced in the Entre-Deux-Mers region (the yellow/green area above), and they also make a TON of dessert whites.
• The entire area is divided into Regions and Sub-Regions, all based on soil and humidity
• They make a lot of Cabernets on the "left bank" and a lot of Merlot on the "right bank"(the banks are determined by which side the Garonne River it is).
• Merlot grapes are considered to be a "lazy grape" and want to find moisture easily in more shallow areas, while Cab grapes can go deeper (the roots) in rocky soil.
• For the blends....
• Merlot provides the fruity, round flavor
• Cab Savs provide power and a lot of tannins
• Malbec grapes provide spiciness
• There are different classifications and appellations and ranks among ALLLL these areas and wines, and...I still don't get what all that means.
• Younger wines have more tannins, and older wines have less tannins.  (Tannins are the stuff from the skin of the grape that adds a slight bitterness or weird aftertaste in the back of your mouth. )
• Bordeaux wines (along with all wines) have rankings in which the "year", or vintage, is particularly good.  So the years the Bordeaux wines were the best were 2000, 2005, 2009, 2010. If the grapes didn't have a particularly good year, based on the weather or environment or what have you, they say it was "a complicated vintage".  So Drew and I spent the rest of our time looking at wine lists with wines from 2009, like the pretentious wine snobs we now are.  (Kidding.)

So...that's that.  Bordeaux Wine 101 from Lauren, an expert in the field.  I also just came across this interesting article in the NY Times yesterday all about Bordeaux wines, if you want to know more!

This was definitely the highlight of our trip, as we came to see the small towns and drink the wine - and we were blessed with really nice weather, which made it that much better.  This gave us a "taste" of Southern France and we definitely want to come back when we have more time to spare (in a decade or two) to tour more.

Santé!