Bordeaux Wine & City

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Bordeaux Wine & City

Bordeaux Wine & City

Chateau St Georges

Bordeaux Wine & City

27 - 30 October 2007, 15 - 18 November 2007

Attempting to arrange a Bordeaux wine tour on your own can be frustrating and the result can, quite frankly, be rather disappointing. Hardly surprisingly, the wine makers and owners of the great chateaux are not just waiting in their chateaux for you to drop by for an in-depth visit with a vertical tasting followed by lunch!

Bordeaux is a complex subject and the region’s charms are discreet. You need introductions, a good wine guide and someone to do the driving. So join us for a weekend wine tour with a series of good visits and tastings, plus lunches at two chateaux.

On the first evening, you join a private introductory tasting. This is hugely informative and enjoyable, and will set the scene for the weekend.

Our first wine touring day will be spent in the Médoc with visits in several of the famous communes including Pauillac and Margaux, stopping for a private invitation to lunch at one of the chateaux. To give you an idea of the level of the visits, in the past these have included very good chateaux such as Lynch-Bages, Maucaillou, Giscours, Rivière, de Sours and Smith-Haut-Lafitte. Because of the complex négociant system, most of the chateaux would normally only have the most recent vintage to offer you. This is all very well if you are an experienced professional wine taster, but young clarets can be very difficult to appreciate. So, we visit chateaux where we arrange for you to have the opportunity to taste at least one older vintage to give you an appreciation of how the wines develop.

Our second full wine touring day will take in a good cross section of regions from St Emilion, across to Entre-Deux-Mers, where we stop for lunch, and continue on to the Graves or Sauternes for our final visit of the day. Bordeaux is a lovely city with elegant boulevards, classic 18th century buildings and an attractive riverside setting. Bordeaux’s great wealth was based more on the sugar trade than on wine, nevertheless, the warehouses of the wine merchants on the Quai des Chartons are impressive and the great vineyards of Graves Pessac-Leognan actually start inside the city.

The city has just experienced a major face-lift. There are chic shops and many excellent bars, bistros and Michelin starred restaurants that you can explore in the evenings. Depending on the programme, you might also attend a performance at the magnificent theatre that stages opera and concerts. We stay in the centre of the city, in a charming, comfortable family run 3* close to the theatre.