Route des Chateaux

We started our Bordeaux tour from Medoc, the home to the famous Grand Cru wines. Medoc region lies on the west banks of Gironde river and a wonderful  route – Route des Chateaux – connects all the famous appellations of Haut-Medoc, Margaux, Moulis, Saint-Julien, Saint Estephe and Pauillac, the largest town of Medoc region.  True to the name the route is lined with Chateaux, a number of which are producing some of the world’s best and most expensive wines.  

Ch. Margaux

We came to Bordeaux just after the harvest and found out that this is in fact a very good time to visit the region. The weather is great, the vineyards are looking beautiful in autumn colours and most importantly, visiting the Grand Cru Chateaux are pretty easy.  In fact, apart from Premier Crus which were mostly accepting wine professionals after the harvest, we easily found our way to some very good Grand Crus.

But before writing about what we did (basically drinking and more drinking) some facts on Bordeaux wines:

- Although people were growing wine in this region from the early Roman times, the region put itself on the map by selling most of its production to England from 12^th cc onwards, especially when they managed to dry up the marsh lands of Medoc into world class wine growing terroir . In fact when the Spanish wine became famous among the riches of England in 17^th cc, the owners’ of the largest Bordeaux producers opened their own taverns in central London to sell their own wines and win back the British appetite.  Not very typical French, n'est-ce pas?

- England’s preference to the Bordeaux ‘claret’ is pronounced over and over in the stories of its great novelists like Forsythe, le Carre and Roald Dahl.  You might remember the scene from any Le Carre novel where the foxy spymaster invites an associate / gifted underling /clueless journalist to his Gentlemen’s Club for a ‘bit of lunch and a quiet world’ and invariably invites the ‘old chap’ to the Club’s ‘decent claret’.  Dahl wrote has two very good short stories about the Bordeaux wines (Taste and The Butler).

- As the British -and of course the French- appetite for Bordeaux wines have grown, the number of producers and prices of the wines have increased in parallel. To put some kind of an order among them, Napoleon III ordered at 1855 that a classification system to be created.  As a result, the famous Grand Cru classification was born mostly based on price & quality. Today the Grand Cru classifies 61 producers into five categories from Premier Cru down to 5th (5eme). The problem is, the list has not really been updated since then. So if your grand granddaddy was not producing & selling his wine at Medoc in 1855, you can’t get your wine classified as Grand Cru today whatever its quality may be. In order to overcome this particular problem and after years of discussions, the inventive French come up with different classifications (Cru Bourgeois, St Emillion Classification, AOC,VDP etc etc) and confuse the hell out of the wine drinkers around the world.

- Although each producer adds a special small twist, the Grand Cru Chateaux are all producing their wine using most of the same techniques that they were employing over the centuries; mainly due to tight regulations and strong tradition. For example they are not allowed to irrigate if there’s a drought, or they can’t cover up their vineyards if a bad storm is coming. Of course they don’t even think about adding any chemicals. So although they use the best available technology all through the process , their wine is still as natural as it comes.

Wine tasting in Bordeaux is easy. Or to quote Erbil who likes his computer games ‘They made Bordeaux interface user friendly’.  Most Grand Cru’s require appointments (which you can get on the internet) although some have daily scheduled tours. The smaller producers don’t even require that, you just knock on their doors and asked to be shown around and taste their wine. A typical tour is around one and a half hours including the wine tasting and costs between 7-15 EUR per person. In Champagne region the similar tours were more impressive, for example Mercier have the famous cellar train or a visit to Moet & Chandon feels you feeling grateful to taste their excellent champagne; but in Bordeaux the process is more friendly. A nice hostess welcomes you and while explaining the wine making process , she takes you to the vineyards, Vat room , cellars and finally the tasting room where she generously pours glass after glass of great wine while chatting about this or that.  Since we visited the region just after the harvest, the workers were actually performing some of the tasks that our hostess was explaining. An unseen benefit was the smell of fresh wine so powerful it made us light headed before we hit the tasting rooms.

We visited quite a few, the ones that stood out are Chateau Pontet Canet  which is the only Grand Cru that is certified as organic and biodynamic  and Chateau Pichon Longueville Baron . In the first one the process is totally natural to the point of using horses instead of any kind of machinery. I loved the second one for it’s fairy castle, beautiful cellars and excellent wine. Among other wines we tasted, the Ch.Pichon Longueville Baron 2004 was unforgettable! 

After Medoc we continued to Graves and Sauternes and took the Circuit de Sauternes which took us through the beautiful French country side. In Medoc the villages are very cute (especially Saint Julien) and the vineyards and Chateaux are lined up one after the other. In Graves and Sauternes, although the countryside is more beautiful, I found the region less charming than Medoc. One note on the sweet Sauternes wines :  I know some of my friends always prefer red wine and with good reason; however nothing beats a glass of Sauternes with a plate of home made Fois Gras !