Left Bank Wines and Chateaux

 October 18, 2021

Left Bank Wines and Chateaux

Today we drove up the left bank of the Gironde.  In France, rivers are labeled the left and right banks which are oriented as you face the direction of flow.  Bordeaux is on the Garonne River.  Just downstream from Bordeaux, the Garonne is joined by the Dordogne River and the joint river is called the Gironde as it flows to the ocean, about 80 km from its origin.  The left bank of the Gironde comprises the Medoc region which has some extremely well-known and prominent appelations such as Pauillac, Margaaux, Saint-Julien, and so on.  We learned about the 60 appelations of Bordeaux wines and the rules about naming, grape content, etc.

French wines are almost all blends of grapes, and the blend from each chateau will vary from year to year depending on the character and intensity of the flavors.  Most blends from this area are predominately Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, usually with small amounts of other grapes, such as Cabernet Franc.  We were told that people knowledgeable about French wine pick the chateau and the year when making purchase decisions, as the grape variety balance will change from year to year.  When blending time comes in the wine-making process, the winery owner and the winery employees will hire a blending expert to come and taste samples from the barrels of the wines made from different grapes of that vintage and together they will determine the final blend proportions depending on the qualities of each of the wines made from each kind of grape.  There are very few wines made from a single grape variety.

As we left Bordeaux, we drove past a vast concrete building which had been a U-Boat base when Bordeaux was occupied by the Nazis during WW II.  It looked like there were spaces for 10 or 12 submarines at a time!  It has been turned into a modern art gallery; we did not stop there.

We drove about an hour northwest of Bordeaux and learned about the 1855 classification of wines dating from the World’s Fair of that summer.  There have been very few changes at the top of the five categories (premier cru) with only five chateaux currently at that level: Margaux, Latour, Haut Brion, Lafite Rothschild and Mouton Rothschild.  These Medoc classifications do not change on any regular basis, but yesterday we learned that the Saint Emilion wineries are re-evaluated and can change categories every ten years.  It’s all very complicated.

The soil of the left bank is very rocky:

 

The balance of wines here favors the cabernet sauvignon grapes in a higher proportion than the merlot, although that varies from chateau to chateau.  As we went through the St. Julien region, we passed the chateau of one of our favorite wines, Beycheville.  We stopped at the tiny town of Margaux and took photos through the gates of one of the premier cru chateaux, Chateau Margaux:

There are beautiful chateaux scattered among the vast fields of grapevines.  We drove mile after mile through fields of vines—think of corn in Iowa, it’s just as vast.  Here’s Chateau Palmares:

Our first stop was at Chateau Baudan, where we had a tasting comparing the same wine from different years!

With guidance from the vintner, I think I was able to discern the somewhat subtle differences between the two.  Maybe not.  We tasted the newer one first, then the older one, and then the newer one again!  We had lunch there, with much wine, and then traveled to another winery, Chateau Kirwan where we had an extensive tour of the somewhat unusual facility.  They don’t use the usual steel vats for wine making, but rather concrete ones:

 

We had an interesting lecture about the chemistry of what happens in the vats and the advantages of using concrete versus steel.  They also are experimenting with smaller clay vats for the making of white wines:

We visited their barrel storage area and witnessed some of the process of aging; we learned more about how to choose which barrel the wine goes into.  Brand new barrels impart greater oak tannins than older ones, and the barrels only last about three years, so wine is moved from new to older barrels so that it doesn’t spend too much time in new ones, and when blending wine, it’s necessary to choose not only the grape but the barrel the wine was aged in.  The wines don’t just sit in the barrels—rather, about every three months it is removed, and the sediment is then washed from the barrel.  Also, about every month, the barrel is opened at the top, and each barrel gets four whisked egg whites added as well as a top-off to account for the evaporation which occurs through the barrel walls.  The egg whites apparently help absorb the impurities and sediments.

It’s quite a process!  Of course we had yet another tasting, and then drove back to Bordeaux for dinner and preparation for departure tomorrow for Serlat-la-Caneda.  More then.