Chateau Biac

Here is the wonderful Chateau Biac, where we are staying at the moment. This is the view from halfway down the driveway. We are staying in a section of one of those buildings.

The view from one of our bedroom windows.

The view from the other.

Youmna and Tony purchased this property four years ago, and since then have been working (and investing time and money) to repair all of the buildings, replant and maintain the vineyard, and turn the property into a producer of fine Bordeaux wines.

They have, I believe she said, 8 hectares under vine (Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cab Franc, Petit Verdot and {Semillon for the sweet botrytis wine they make}).

She took us down to see the winery, and to witness what they have done there in such a short time is amazing. They had to replace the roof, chip away the cement from the original stone, install toilets, showers, kitchen and changing rooms for the workers, install air conditioning, plumbing, drainage, a water treatment facility, as well as the computerized center that controls the temperature in each of their stainless steel vats. Not to mention purchasing all of the vats, barrels and bottles!

They are hoping, when the vines mature enough and they are up and running at capacity, to produce around 40,000 bottles a year.

Stainless steel vats.

Youmna giving us a barrel tasting of 2009 Merlot.

Chateau Palmer and Chateau LaGrange

Yesterday we went to two other wineries in left bank Medoc communes.

The first one we visited was Chateau Palmer.

Like most Bordeaux wines in this region, the predominant grapes are Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Chateau Palmer is in the Margaux commune of the Medoc, and these wines are considered more "feminine" than those of Saint Estephe (where we went the day before to tour Cos D'Estournel).

Our tour guide attributed this femininity (a certain round lushness in the wines), to the fact that Palmer uses a higher percentage of Merlot in its blend than Cabernet Sauvignon. Merlot is known to impart a round smoothness to wines (although, after telling us this, we observed that the 1996 Palmer we tasted was actually 55% Cabernet Sauvignon, 40% Merlot and 5% Petit Verdot). Perhaps it is not so much the quantity of the Merlot as it is the quality.

I had been told this about France, but I had completely forgotten how proud each winery and wine region is of its individual product, and of the different soils and terroir that make their wine different (and, of course, better!) than the wines of another region.

We saw this everywhere we went: people sharing with us the details of the type of soil they had in their vineyards, and why that type of soil is so great for the vines. Palmer for example, had sand and rock soils.

Another fact I had forgotten, is that France is not alowed to irrigate their vines. This returns to the idea of Terroir, and the notion that whatever nature gives you that year is what you have to deal with, and what gives such a strong character to each different vintage.

This year, for example, they had a cold wet spring. Since vines are pollinated by wind, the damp caused the pollen to stick to itself rather than to blow away in the wind, which has led to poor pollination of the vines. That combined with the cold meant that Palmer's Merlot vines currently have sparser, smaller grapes, which means that the winery is going to have to cut off a lot of clusters to allow the remaining ones to produce better quality fruit.

Finally, it was time to taste: She started us on a 2007 Alter Ego, which is the "second" wine of the Chateau, or rather the wine that they felt was good, but not good enough to be their main wine.

This wine was 60% Merlot and 40% Cabernet Sauvignon. This wine was created, in many ways, to compete with the New World Wines, because it is lush, fruity and ready to drink now, with black and red fruits and chocolate notes.

The 1996 Palmer she tasted us on next was a completely different animal, in that it had much more earth and mineral in addition to the fruit, with notes of mushroom, damp earth, smoky leaf-pile in addition to the rich cassis and black currant fruit. The Petit Verdot also added spicy notes of licorice and floral. Just 5% really adds depth and complexity to the wine.

From what I can gather, it seems that Cabernet Sauvignon gives the backbone and structure to the wine, as well as age-ability, while the Merlot gives softness and plushness and the Petit Verdot adds depth and spice. Massive generalization, but you begin to hear similar comments made when touring these wineries.

After that tour we moved on to Chateau Lagrange in Saint Julien. Again, different soil types, different terroir, different flavors to the wines entirely.

Chateau Lagrange was purchased in (I believe) 1983 by a Japanese beverage company, and they brought in all the latest technology. It is pretty amazing to see these 18th century Chateaux with all these massive stainless steel tanks, and computerized panels which control the exact temperatures of each tank during fermentation.

Here is a picture of what essentially comprises the first few meters of soil there. You look at these rocks and think that nothing can grow in there, but the vines thrive in it, and the red rocks, apparently, are the most prized for adding an iron minerality to the wines.

What I found interesting here is that the grapes they use for their main wine, Chateau Lagrange, come from the older vines, most of which are about 45 years old (apparently Merlot vines can still produce beautiful fruit at 100 years), while the grapes for their second wine, Les Fiefs de Lagrange come from the younger vines.

This reinforces something I learned earlier that the older vines tend to produce superior fruit.

Both of the Lagrange wines have a significantly higher proportion of Petit Verdot in them, 14% in the 2008 Fiefs de Lagrange and 13% in the 2002 Lagrange. These wines definitely had much more pepper, clove, allspice and floral (violet/rose) than the Chateau Palmer wines.

Overall, the tours we went on so far have been really enlightening, and I'm looking forward to Monday when we will explore two Chateaux from Saint Emilion, on the Right Bank.

Cos D'Estournel and Chateau D'Yquem

Yesterday we did the first of our Bordeaux wine tours.

First off, let me say that wine tasting and touring is a completely different animal here than it is in Napa and Sonoma:

First off, many of the Chateaux and vineyard properties are gated, with locked gates, and you often can't even get in without an appointment. For both of our tours and tastings, we were the only ones there.

Second, they don't charge you for the tour or tasting, at least the two we went to so far didn't; that might not be true for all of them.

Third, they don't have a tasting room. The woman at Chateau D'Yquem didn't even know what that was, we had to describe it to her. So you can't just walk in off the street, pay money and taste a sampling of all of a certain winery's wines.

Fourth, a lot of the Chateaux don't even sell their wines on the property. You have to buy them somewhere else.

In an effort to keep the posts short(er), I won't describe in detail both wineries from yesterday, I will instead just talk about Chateau D'Yquem (photo above), since that visit was absolutely fascinating.

As I believe I have mentioned before, I am completely obsessed with the botrytis (noble rot) sweet wines, and Chateau D'Yquem, it seems, produces some of the best of these wines in the Sauternes area. I have not tasted loads and loads of Sauternes, partly because they can be pricey, so I can't say for certain if they deserve their reputation and pricetag, but all I can say is, I was impressed.

I knew that trying to make a botrytis wine was difficult, because since the fungus is naturally occurring, the wineries cannot know if they will have a proper infestation of it or not from one year to the next, but I never realized just how complicated and how exacting making these wines is.

Chateau D'Yquem uses Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc grapes for their sweet wines; on the property, there are different sections of soil, so some of the grapes are growing in clay soil, some in limestone, some in gravel and, I believe, some in sand, though I will have to double-check.

The Sauvignon Blanc grapes and the Semillon will taste different, depending on which soil they have grown in, which adds depth and complexity to the wine.

When it comes time to pick the grapes, that's when things get complicated. First of all, there can be three different types of rot that will infect a cluster: grey rot, which turns the fruit to dust; sour rot which causes the fruit to burst and turn to vinegar; and finally the botrytis, or "noble rot", which shrivels the fruit but turns it to sugary deliciousness.

The pickers must be able to distinguish which rot is which, but it doesn't stop there. Botrytis infects a grape cluster at different rates, so the picking of these grapes can take up to 11 different passes.

The pickers will look at the bunch, determine which sections of the cluster have just the right amount of rot, cut those away, and leave the rest. They will return multiple times to pick additional clusters as the rot develops on them. Interestingly, the woman who took us on our tour said that very often the women pickers do a better job of cutting away just the right section of grapes due to usually having smaller, more nimble fingers. It's more like having to be a good seamstress than a picker.

Each time the botrytis grapes are picked, a fermentation is begun, separate ones for the Semillon grapes and Sauvignon Blanc. This means that at some points they can have up to 40 different fermentations happening, since there is a different one for each day of picking and for each grape varietal.

The fermantation must be stopped at just the right time to maintain the right balance of sweetness, acidity and alcohol. The wine is then blended, aged in new French oak barrels (each barrel is only used one year for the sweet wine, after which it is used for the dry wine they also produce), and blended again.

After learning all of this, I suddenly felt that maybe the steep pricetag wasn't so steep. Then came time for the tasting.

She gave us a taste of 2007, which is one of the less expensive vintages, but was absolutely delicious nonetheless. Sweet, but not too sweet, with a bright fresh acidity, and amazing notes of dried and fresh apricot, honeysuckle, and vanilla. I would drink this as an aperatif, an appetizer wine with foie gras or cheeses, and as a dessert wine.

In fact, let's be honest, I would just stick a straw in the bottle and drink it all day. It's absolutely delicious. And it can be both a drink-it-now wine and an investment. Because of the balance of sugar, acid and alcohol, these wines age beautifully. Our guide said she tasted a 1904 D'Yquem and it was incredible. Some day...

Heat Wave

Hello from the Bordeaux region of France.

We are staying at the beautiful Chateau Biac in the small town of Langoiran, in part of an old stone cottage complete with small kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living and dining room.

It is part of a larger complex and winery which we have not toured yet, but plan to before we leave.

I will include pictures later, but right now we are too busy melting to even go outside to take any shots. It reached 100 degrees today, and yesterday it wasn't much cooler. Of course there is no air conditioning, and we don't even have a fan, so let me tell you, it is hot in the room at night.

It's also airless because we can't keep the windows open because then the mosquitos get in, so the windows are closed all night. And, because of the heat, the bugs are coming out in droves. Last night we had a line of tiny ants going from under the front door, all the way across the living and dining room, to a hole in the stone wall.

There were multiple large beetles sashaying along the floor, too, but by far the worst moment came when I was rinsing my mouth out over the sink after brushing my teeth, leaning forward, and a millipede came out of the emergency overflow hole in the sink, almost right up into my face.

I shrieked, I really did. In nine years of being together, Steve said he'd never heard me make a sound like that before.

I'm not normally afraid of millipedes, but that sucker came dangerously close to jumping into my open mouth, and of course, when i saw those tentacles appearing, the first thing I thought was that it was a big roach.

And millipedes move fast, they move really fast, and I'm sorry but all those legs are a bit creepy. And as I sat in bed reading, I couldn't stop myself from imagining that as soon as the lights went out and I fell asleep, that millipede and maybe a few of its friends, were going to crawl into my ear and burrow into my brain.

Needless to say, I got up and watched a movie.

Are you Out There??

To anybody out there reading this blog, I would LOVE to hear from you!!

Would love you to post your thoughts, observations, questions, reactions, ideas, in the comments section.

You don't even have to create a google account or sign in; you can simply choose to comment as Anonymous, and then, if you want, sign your name at the end of your comment, or don't!

Please let me know if there are any ways I can make this blog more comment-friendly.

It means so much to me to know you're out there!!

Thank you for reading...

Paris Wine Toes

This is a photo of the Eiffel Tower from my room last night. Not too shabby. Though I was reading my book today (I am currently reading Spies of Warsaw by, Alan Furst; very good book), and came across the quote "...beautiful places [are] hard on lonely people".

I would hardly call myself a lonely person, and I love doing things on my own, but there is something lonely about seeing these beautiful sights by myself, and not being able to share them with Steve, or a friend, in the moment.

The daytime is easier; I am quite happy wandering around in my own world, reading my book over a meal or an espresso. But when nighttime comes, I feel a bit more uncomfortable. There is something about going out to eat dinner by myself that feels awkward; harder to just read my book in my own world. And I am not adventurous enough to go to a wine bar by myself at night, because (and maybe I flatter myself here) I don't want to get chatted up by random people, especially not in French. Is that lame of me?

I know I should just enjoy it, though, because over the next 4 months Steve and I will, I'm sure, drive each other crazy, and we will wind up begging for a few days to ourselves.

Anyway, I spent the morning at my favorite museum in Paris, the Musee Rodin. It was pouring rain outside when I went, which on the upside was very atmospheric but on the downside, it may have made the museum busier.

And the humidity, my god, the air was so thick I could barely breathe. I don't want to sound like a spoiled American here, but a little air conditioning goes a long way. It doesn't even have to be cold, just get some airflow going. Or just a fan, how about that? Just a fan on rotate so that the air actually moves in the room. Just a suggestion.

After that I went to a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant. Yep, you read me right. Conveyor-belt sushi. I had read about it in my Zagat guide, and the place was absolutely packed. The way it works is this: You sit down at a seat which faces a moving conveyor belt. The chefs prepare various dishes and then place them, covered with clear plastic covers, on this conveyor belt, and you just grab whatever looks good to you. The plates are color-coded, with each color being a different price. When you are ready to leave, the waiters simply add up how many of each color you had and voila, your bill!

Now since it was warm out and since it is, after all, conveyor belt sushi, I didn't actually eat anything raw. I did, however, have a lovely crunchy cabbage salad, a veggie roll, and a cooked salmon and tuna roll. It was just what I was in the mood for, since I just couldn't face another heavy meal.

Today I also went to the Musee du Vin. This was, I have to say, the oddest museum I have ever been to. The audio tour was so strange I wondered if it was a joke. The museum is basically a restaurant with some tunnels leading off to the side. These tunnels contain a lot of wine-making and grape-growing paraphernalia from the 18th and 19th centuries.

The audio tour felt to me as though it had just been recorded that morning by some girl with a microphone in her living room. I could hear her turning pages, taking deep breaths, and at one point sighing, as if she was bored out of her mind.

Every so often, something she said would be punctuated by loud classical music, the same bars each time. The music would suddenly start playing, and then would just as suddenly cut out. At first I thought it signified a transition to the next display of the tour, but that turned out not to be the case, as when the music stopped, she started talking about items displayed in the cases back where I had previously been standing.

And it was just so poorly organized that I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking at when. The tour gave you no real clue. She would say: "Items 2, 12, 85 and 16 were used for decanting in the 18th century", and I would be struggling to locate these items which were, of course, nowhere near each other, and were sometimes in different cases, so I was whipping around trying to locate things, giving myself whiplash.

As soon as I had located at least one of the items she referred to, she had already rattled off 16 other items I should be looking at, and then the music would play.

Then there were wax-people displays set up, one of which showed Napoleon and two other dudes, standing amongst wine barrels. The audio for this was: "Here is Napoleon. He liked wine." And the music played.

I just didn't understand what was happening.

By far the best moment came when I reached the corkscrew display, and the audio mentioned that the cork became the preferred preservation method, replacing hemp, muslin, paper and toe.

I'm sorry, did she say toe? Now I'm sure that word is probably spelled differently and means something else, but it was too late; I was off.

I couldn't stop imagining all of these wine bottles corked with the toes of vintners and their families. How relieved they must have been to see the cork become fashionable. Now the mystery of the toe-less winemakers of the 18th century has been solved.

London for a Day

Yesterday found us back in London for the day and night. We spent the morning at The Cabinet War Rooms Museum. If you are ever in London, it is really worth a visit.

The museum takes you on a guided audio tour through the rooms that Churchill and his various strategists, advisors, cabinet members, secretaries, typists, etc, used as their war command center throughout World War II. The rooms are located deep underground near 10 Downing Street, and are fortified with concrete and steel, to protect those within from bombs.

What I love most about this museum is that on the day the war ended, people who worked in this space literally turned out the lights, locked the door and left. And everything that was down there just stayed as it was.

Some of the rooms were later cleared out before the space became a museum in the 1980's, and so these rooms have been faithfully recreated to match photographs, but one room in particular, The Map Room (my favorite), is exactly as it was the day the war came to an end. Even down to the sugar rations of one officer that were found in a desk drawer.

I just love to think of that when I look at this room, that everything here is just as it was on that historic day. The string on the maps, the push pins, the books and phones, the strategic logbooks, the code scramblers, the desks, chairs, everything, still somehow holding all the fear, the effort, the tension and finally, the elation and relief that this room once contained.

It just really felt like stepping back in time, being in these rooms, imagining all that had gone on in them for so many years, while bombs exploded above them, and the city crumbled while still struggling to stay alive.

Pretty amazing stuff.

After visiting the War Rooms, we did what anyone would do, and we went to a fantastic wine shop. Berry Bros & Rudd. Talk about stepping back in time: this shop has been there for 312 years. In the same space. I have included a link to their website on the left-hand side of this blog in the Sites I Love, Things I Mention section. Take the virtual tour of the shop, because you can see the underground cellars, function rooms and classrooms that you cannot go to when you just pop by the shop.

Today, I am back in Paris, and will be here until Wednesday. Already, it feels like the time on this trip is flying by. I am in a very large business hotel which I booked through Priceline. The room is clean and a bit spartan, almost like a very nice dorm room, but this view from my window....what can I say?