Wine Tasting

 I was feeling much better on Tuesday, so into Bordeaux I went to catch my tour of Chateau Margaux. Or at least I thought it would be of Chateau Margaux but it turns out that it was visits to two wineries in the appellation of Margeaux.  And the real irony was that the Chateaux were very close to where I'm staying. I thought about calling and asking if I could just meet them up at the Chateau, but I figured I would miss something that the driver/ guide would be saying on the way there, so I drove into Bordeaux and parked where I had before. Unfortunately had the same problem getting in but I think I finally figured it out.

An appellation is an area that identifies its native wines.  Medoc is the larger purple area on this map, but Margeaux is in deep purple.  Every wine that is grown and made in that area can call itself Margeaux.  But put a grape from outside of the area in a wine and it ceases to be a Margeaux.  If it is outside of one of the appellations like Margeaux but in the Medoc, it is called Haut-Medoc.  If the wine is made from grapes outside of any of the larger wine locations, i.e., outside the purple, it is called Bordeaux.  Who knew?

Of course, because calamity is always nearby when I do anything, I realized once I was on the tram to downtown that I had left my phone in the car. So, I had to get off the tram, cross over the tracks, get on the tram going back to the parking garage, get my keys out of the car, and get back on the tram. Because I know myself so well, I had built in quite a lot of time to get to the tour office, so I made it in plenty of time.

Our tour consisted of five people including me. Three were from Lithuania and one was from Malaysia. I have yet to meet an American here in the Bordeaux area. It's very strange. Usually wherever you go there are Americans everywhere. But not here.

It turns out that the United States has played a big role in European wine production and not in a good way. More about that later.

Our guide Tevye (I think that was his name, or mabe it was Zevye??), a native of Bordeaux, explained to us the various areas of wine growing in the Bordeaux area. There is a Right bank and the Left Bank here. The Medoc, which includes Labard where I’m staying, is on the Left Bank. The village of Margeaux, which is only a few miles from Labard, it's also on the Left Bank. Chateau Margeaux itself is a private chateau, and they don't do wine tastings there. But we did drive by, get out of our car and take a few pictures in front of the magnificent building that is the main house on the property but not the “Chateau.”

The house was built in the 18th Century, according to our guide.

Chateau is a very regulated word in France, like a lot of things. A Chateau is a building where they make wine from grapes grown on their own property. You cannot be a Chateau if you buy grapes from somewhere else and use them in your wine-making. A Chateau can only have 44, I think he said, hectares of vines and the number of bottle bottles per year is also restricted. I guess that's to make the wine more valuable.

Our first visit was to Chateau Paloumey, a winery that is very conscious of the environment. In fact, the wine is all organic, a designation that is very hard to get in France, apparently. We were shown around by a nice young woman who never identified herself but told us a story about the family that owned the vineyard now.

It was actually bought by a woman who was an economist and a teacher not that long ago. Her son went to school to learn how to operate a very ecologically-friendly winery. That means they don't use any insecticides or anything artificial when growing the grapes. This can be difficult, especially in a wet spring when the vines can get mildewed as they were when we looked at them that day.

In this operation, the main house is very picturesque

 but the winemaking building, i.e. chateau, itself is very modern.

Our guide told us the story about the vines in the early 19th century. At that time, someone from the United States came over with some American grapevines. These vines contained an insect that eventually ruined virtually all the vines in Europe. It attacked the roots of the vines. American vines were immune, having had to deal with the insect for many years.

To save the industry, someone came up with the idea of using American grapevine roots and grafting on the heritage vines of the European vineyards. This happened in the Bordeaux area and everywhere in Europe, according to our guide. I asked if there were any old grapevines with original roots in Europe and our guide said they were very, very rare. I had never heard that story before. it's quite amazing. Sorry, I said, as the only American in the room.

Here is another thing I didn't know. Winemakers in France are prohibited from irrigating the vines. They depend on the weather totally. That's why the vintages, i.e. years of the wine harvest, can vary so much. A good weather year can produce great wines, a bad year can produce wines that are so so.

Once harvested, usually in September or October, the grapes are put in these large vats to ferment and for the juice to separate from the skins.  But they need the skins for color, so the juice is constantly stirred up with the skins to extract the color.  After a few weeks, the juices are placed in wooden kegs for a year or a year and a half.  Then they are put into bottles.  They continue to age in the bottles until they are ready to drink.  This is usually a few years, but can take many.

We tasted 3 wines from the vineyard, the main wine Chateau Paloumey, a secondary wine from the same vineyard and a third which was basically the same wine as the Chateau Paloumey but came from a small field of grapes in the Margaux appellation, so it could be

designated as a Margeaux.   And I have to say, despite the same percentage of Merlot and Cabernet, it did taste different.

You can see the Chateau Paloumey is called a Haut Medoc which is the area outside of the Margaux Appellation. I liked the second one best and bought a bottle. We next went to the Chateau Dauzac, which our guide indicated was an unfortunate name. I don't really know why.

It had quite a grand entrance, like most of the chateaux. The original chateau, now in disuse but still pictured on the bottle label, was built in the 13th century.

Chateau Dauzac is a classic Chateau. That means it was listed in the exposition of 1855 as a wine of Bordeaux. Tevye says there are some 5000 Chateau on the Right and Left Bank of the Gironde River, but only 50 classic chateaus like Chateau Dauzac. 

The wines at the Chateau Dauzac are vegan. You might think that all wines are vegan. But at a certain point many vineyards use egg whites to purify the wine. Dauzac uses potatoes to capture impurities. Both, and apparently most, chateaux in the area use a combination of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grapes to make their wines. What distinguishes them is the percentage combination, and sometimes a small percentage of another kind of grape, and the location of the vines.

Dauzac produces its wines in much the same way as the Paulomey, but on a much larger scale.  Its wines are also quite a bit more expensive, but then it produces Margeauz, not Haut-Medoc.

On our way back, Tevye suggested a good restaurant that was very near where we were dropped off if we wanted to have lunch. So I went over there and sat outside on the windowed patio. It was a little warm, but I was quite surprised to be misted every few minutes by an overhead sprinkler. It was very gentle, but it was surprising.

Near the end of my lunch, an ambulance came down the street and stopped in front of the restaurant. EMTs got out and came into the restaurant. I was expecting that they would come back out with somebody who had fallen or fainted, but they did not. Eventually, I left and as I was going past the door I saw a man being treated who was lying on the floor with his chest exposed. It looked like perhaps he had had a heart attack. It was very frightening.

I had originally wanted to do some shopping downtown on Tuesday afternoon, but my back was tingling a bit after hours on my feet so I thought discretion would be the better part of valor.  I got on the tram, arrived at the parking garage, found the car and drove home.