Today was a rainy day in Bordeaux. But this didn't matter at all. The downtown part of the City is quite wonderful - restored, clean, tree-lined, vibrant and full of people. The central area has a main pedestrian street lined with restaurants and premier retailers.
Above, a store with a creative retail message.
This is an electric street car, or, if you wish a surface subway train. Very cool and very quiet.
The main cathedral. It was closed today so hopefully I will have interior images tomorrow.
Our hotel on a very narrow street on the edge of the upscale retail area of downtown. The car could not be parked at the hotel, and is parked in an underground structure about a five minute walk away.
When in Bordeaux, do what everyone seems to be doing - investigate wine. We signed up for an afternoon tour of two wineries that included tastings. This was great. The tour company provided a minibus, a guide/driver, and some unique add-on features.
The grapes in the field of the first winery. The grapes were harvested at the beginning of the month, about 2 weeks late. This was not a good harvest as the spring and summer were very wet. Production is down perhaps 40%. Bordeaux is one of France's premier wine regions, both for quality and quantity of production. About 7% of the production is premium product - what the wine experts go crazy over.
These are the large tanks where fermentation occurs.
Above, wine aging in oak barrels. Only the best wines in the best vineyards are aged in oak. The rest are aged in tanks - steel or lined concrete.
Part of the tour included the wine tasting. A special feature of this event was the use of wine scents. The sheet of paper with the colourful circles is a scent wheel describing the basic scents found in wine. The two little bottles to the right of the scent wheel contain blind scents that we were asked to identify on the wheel. This is quite difficult. But the scents we were identifying were part of the structure of the two wines we tasted.
These were the wines we tasted. The wine on the left is their second tier wine, and the one on the right is there best wine.
This is the second winery.
Above is an image of concrete tanks used for aging. Concrete and wood tanks are both used. The benefit of the concrete is a better use of space.
This is a new tank that has a window down the side. If you look carefully, you can see a dark zone at the bottom of the tank, and a lighter zone in the middle and top that appears to have a texture. The lower zone is liquid wine juice. The middle and top zone is the skins and seeds from the grapes themselves. In this winery, the grapes are sorted for quality, de-stemmed, and the intact grapes are put into the tank. As the fermentation process begins, the skins break and the juice separates. Once or twice a day the liquid in the bottom is pumped up and over the material at the top.
Quite a complex process.
This is their underground aging room. Very beautiful - built only a couple of years ago of precast concrete.
The wine we tasted. Quite nice.
These people rarely ship to Canada due to very high taxes and high shipping costs. Only the wealthy seem to bring it in at perhaps $200 a bottle. Otherwise, do the best you can at the LCBO.
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