The wine tour

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Today we enjoyed our wine tour on the outskirts of the city to the south in the Pessac-Leognan area, but unfortunately no photos as I forgot to take the camera.

We left the tourist office at 9.30 (15minutes late) for our first stop, Château Pape Clement, we were quite late arriving due to heavy motorway traffic but we learnt a lot about wine growing and making in the Bordeaux area both from the guide and the Chateau and were able to taste a couple of their reds.

We then headed for Chateaux Couhins-Lurton but neither the guide or the driver knew the way which made us even later and the owner was not happy when we arrived. The Chateau was a beautiful building and after a brief history of the estate we sat down to a delicious four course lunch with copious supplies of 4 different examples of their red and white wines. As this is harvest time we were able to stagger into their production area after lunch to watch the grapes arriving, being de-stalked, and loaded into their stainless steel vats for the start of the fermentation process.

The afternoon was spent visiting Chateau la Brede a pretty moat surrounded castle which until recently had remained in the ownership of the Montesquieu family since the 1600s.

On our return to the city in the early evening, we took a bus to the Parc Bordelais to visit the area where Wendy had stayed as an exchange student in the 1960s. Quite an emotional return.

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