Bordeaux, the wine country

We left the Loire (hopefully not for the last time) on Tuesday and drove for a few hours to one of the famous wine areas of France: Bordeaux. Probably most Americans, if asked to name the big wine districts of France, would be able to recall Bordeaux and Burgundy. 

We briefly visited Burgundy (Bourgogne, in French) about four or five years ago. We happened to be there in a small town called Beaune just as they were having a festival with marching bands in traditional costumes.

I would have sworn that we were in Alsace-Lorraine because the bands surely sounded like oompa-oompa beer bands and the players were wearing variations of lederhosen. We were, however, quite far away from the Alsace.

When Larry asked me what part of France that I would like to visit on this trip, without hesitation, I said Bordeaux. I loved the look of the vines on the rolling hillsides of Burgundy and I was curious to see the vineyards of the other side of the country.

In fact, of course, vineyards look like vineyards regardless of where they are located. The vines are neatly lined up thousand rows after thousand rows just far apart enough to accommodate the mechanical harvesters that hover over the vines as they go up and down each aisle, gently shaking the mature grapes off of their stems.

So, this could be Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Loire, Provence, Languedoc, or even Tuscany.

In actuality, it is a vineyard in a nearby town from our apartment.

Our apartment, or gite, is located on a vineyard also, although a very small one by commercial standards. The production is so small that it cannot be reasonably distributed in the U.S., so its name, Clos Vieux Rochers, is not known to Americans.

The vines cover only about five acres. The owners tend to the vines themselves, pruning them, training the new ones, cutting them back each autumn and generally hovering over them just enough to ensure their proper seasonal growth. They also produce the wine themselves, as opposed to selling their grapes to a larger winery for blending and processing into a standardized wine. The wine produced here will vary depending upon the conditions like the various components of weather; that is, rain, drought, sun, humidity, morning fog, temperature.

As part of the stay at this gite, the owners provide a tour of their vineyard and end, of course, with an opportunity to taste the wine. 

These owners want to produce a young wine that is drinkable within a couple of years. I actually found that it would no doubt be better with another couple of years of aging because I thought it to be just a bit rough for me. So I would put it on a shelf and drink something else in the meantime.

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By the way, along the drive through the countryside there are signs for lots of famous wineries and also signs that tell you that you are in Bord d'eaux, or, the land bordered by waters (eaux). I had never thought of that before.

Wednesday, November 6

We only have a few days here in the wine country before going to the city of Bordeaux, so we had to make some choices about what to see, how far to drive and what would be interesting. The weather was not totally cooperative. The driving day to get here was rainy/drizzly for most of the drive, and Wednesday was not much better. None the less, with limited time, we didn't want to sit around the gite and read the news of the election.

Our first trip was about an hour away to a small medieval town called Duras. We didn't really have a plan of what to see there, so we went to the Tourist Information and found an English-speaking guide who strongly suggested that we go the chateau which was roughly a block away from us. With a bare minimum of tourists in town, there were plenty of parking spaces everywhere (free!), so we decided to take her suggestion.

The chateau was quite different from many others that we have seen in that although it had defensive walls and towers, it was primarily a residence. After falling into disrepair, it was taken over by the city a couple of decades ago and is now mostly all open to the public.

I had to look hard to find any other tourists there, but eventually I found about a half a dozen, or maybe I was just seeing the same couple over and over. Therefore, taking photos was a breeze.

Here are some of them:

Photos were forbidden in the furnished rooms and there were signs saying that there were surveillance cameras in use. I decided to err on the side of caution and not take any photos in those rooms.

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Thursday, November 8

We have a beautiful day for a change. I was beginning to think that we should rethink the idea of traveling to France in November since we have had so many gray days. And, then, what do you know. We get a glorious day.

On this sunny day we went to Saint-Emilion, a very famous wine town. Larry said that he read somewhere that there are 40 wine purveyors in the town. One could not go a block without finding a wine store. Saint-Emilion is a lovely medieval town with all of the requisite accoutrements of such. It has an upper town and a lower town, 

it has a tall clock tower, 

a large church, 

stone-paved streets, 

and beautiful photo shots everywhere.

We stopped into the church just to see what it was like inside. Upon entering, we heard quite a lot of talking which is unusual because people in a church are usually rather quiet. This turned out to be several classes of elementary students that we judged to be probably second graders. There had to have been a couple hundred of them, so you can imagine the noise in a place where sounds just reverberate off the stone walls.

The kids are just barely visible in this photo. We were asked not to take any photos because they are kids, but this was from before that.  They were there to rehearse for a concert that they are giving this weekend.

I am struck by the difference in Italian and French churches. The Italian churches are art galleries full of frescoes and mosaics, not to mention that even the floors are works of art. French churches have gorgeous stained glass windows, but otherwise than that are rarely ornamented. Occasionally there will be the vestiges of frescoes but they are typically in the antechamber, not in the sanctuary. Perhaps the sanctuaries were once painted but have been stripped in the intervening centuries.

The interesting thing about this particular church is that it was built on top of another church. We had already been to such a church, although much smaller, on our first trip the Loire. There happened to be a little church that was built directly on top of another church and there was free entry to both sections. Therefore, we skipped paying 9 Euros to go to the lower church of this one. I am not at all sure what the engineering aspects of such a building are. I can't imagine how the lower, older church can support the massive weight of the upper church which is always the bigger of the two. 

Before we left for the day, we stopped at an outdoor cafe for this:

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Friday, November 9

Today was another gorgeous day. We went to Bergerac which although only less than an hour away is not in Bordeaux, but in the Dordogne. The Dordogne has a different landscape. Even though it has a lot of vineyards, it is more forested and quite a bit hillier than Bordeaux. We visited the Dordogne a few years ago. I liked the towns but not the twisty-turny roads. I didn't like them any better today.

But once we got past the forest and the hills, it was smooth sailing into town where we found that at this time year, there are lots and lots of empty parking spaces. I can imagine that during the summer the town is packed.

Bergerac is another lovely medieval town with half-timbered buildings in the old part of town.

Some of these old buildings were for sale and some had evidently recently been sold because workmen were busy replacing windows in them. I suspect that these buildings had gone through a familiar cycle in their lifetime; that of being housing for the wealthy, then the less wealthy, then turning into a slum as people with money preferred to have "new" housing outside of this old part of town. Then finally, new people saw the advantages of these old buildings which were probably bought cheaply because of their need for a drastic rehab, and now they will once again be top dollar housing for people with enough money to buy into this gentrified area. And, that is not a bad thing. The alternative is to eventually tear them down. Much better to rehabilitate them and preserve this part of architectural history.

Bergerac had more tourists than the other places that we visited, but they could all be contained in one plaza cafe. Which is to say, there weren't that many. I had no trouble taking photos wherever I wanted and not have any people in them, even in this quite touristy part of town.

We often slip into the church to see what it looks like. This church held quite a surprise. Just look at that very modern chancel.

A couple of ladies were preparing flowers for masses this weekend. They worked busily while we sat for a while, rested up and took in this unusual altar.


Bergerac is, of course, known for Cyrano. The town boasts not one but two statues of the imaginary character and they are about a block away from each other. They could not be more different in style.

Cyrano was a character in a play written in the last half of the 1800s which was very loosely based on a real person who lived in Paris. Why he was called Cyrano de Bergerac is a mystery. I wasn't curious enough to read the play to find out.

Just in back of the colorful Cyrano, I found this piano which had suffered greatly from exposure, but none the less seemed to be very happy in and amongst its garden friends.

As we made our way back to our car, we walked through another parking lot (there are lots of parking lots in Bergerac) where workers were setting up for a festival of some sort for this weekend. These bumper cars looked like the backs of sneakers.

Time to say goodbye to this area of the Bordeaux. Tomorrow we will drive to the city of Bordeaux which promises to be a nice treat for me, since I am most at home in cities. I heard someone say that Bordeaux is the country's third largest city, so I am curious to see it.

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