Wine tasting class and St Emilion tour
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| With Cristina in the wine tasting classroom |
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| Wine in Soutard |
This is a day of learning for me. Bordeaux wine has always felt overpriced and mysterious to me. The price tag, the way to read the label, knowing what region is good for what.
So intentionally, on this trip i booked a wine tasting tour to educate myself.
The tour is with bordovino.
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| Bordovino Building |
Great tour as it's a small group (max 8 person) and the first half was only me and Cristina, learning about bordeaux wine from fiona(class 2 sommelier) and Cecilia.
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| Fiona and Cecilia |
First is vineyard is call chateaux! And I learned a new word from Fiona 'terroir'. Pronounced as "Teh-gua". As far as i can tell, it's the feel/taste/aroma of a complex drink like wine or tea. For eg, soil, climate, processing steps can affect the terroir of wine.
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| Wine region seen by latitude and Bordeaux is perfect for vines |
Bordeaux area has 7500 château and 850 in st emilion.
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| The Bordeaux wine region, with a small slice of St emilion in the green |
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| Different wine region in France |
In the 1850, napolean classified the wines in bordeaux into 5 categories which didn't include st emilion. This system does not get reviewed. Then 1950 st emilion did their own classification of 3 systems, for 56 château out of 850.
Bordeaux region has 6 reds and 3 whites.
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| The number of Bordeaux wines |
The merlot is left to the river, the cabernet sauvignon is medoc region that used to be swamp land that's drained.
The whites are only 13% of the bordeaux production and concentrated on the right of the river.
Then we had some tasting and i realized i don't like bordeaux white as it's great on nose but fails to deliver on the taste.
Then we had fun mixing 2 glasses of wine, one is100% merlot with 100% cabernet sauvignon. Interestingly, i find the merlot from bordeaux much more velvety and less tannic than Australia or Usa!
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| Mixing Merlot and Cab in test tubes |
Finally, we did a blind tasting of 4 wines, one pinot noir from loire valley, one cabernet franc from rhone, one syrah from burgundy and one merlot from bordeaux.
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| 4 bottles in blind tasting |
It's interesting to see the contrast of the 4 wines in the tasting.
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| Fiona extracted wine by needle from one bottle for me to try |
After that we had a great quiche for lunch and apple tart for dessert.
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| Quiche and tart lunch |
And we are ready to head out for st emilion and 2 more chateaux for tasting.
First is we headed to st emilion for the city tour. It's very small city but charming..
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| St Emilion city view |
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| The steep streets of St Emilion |
That's 200km of lime stone caves below the city, excavated from 4 levels.
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| Wine cellar showing the excavated tunnels |
All the stones are used to build the nice buildings in bordeaux and the region.
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| St Emilion Catherdral |
They also have a church made of one piece of stone monolithic cathedral (one of the biggest in the world), on top of a gothic/romesque church
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| World's largest monolithic church |
Then we proceeded for wine tasting in Chateau de Baleau, which is sold 2013 for tax purposes. Unfortunately, the wine isn't to my taste but i do love the Chateau. we also played a game of "guess the flavour" to train our palette to detect smells
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| Love the chateau but not the wine |
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| Pretty estate |
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| Flavour challenge and wine tasting |
Then we went to Soutard for another tasting. This vineyard is really modern and pretty and I enjoyed their wine a lot.
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| Soutard property |
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| Soutard wine tanks |
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| Soutard vineyard |
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| Wine tasting in Soutard |
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| Fun stuff in St Emilion |
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