​We were supposed to sail up the Garonne River to the small town of Cadillac (ll pronounced y, not l like the car), where we were to tour a Chateau making sweet white wines.  Unfortunately, the river level was too high for the Viking ship to pass beneath one of the bridges, so the tour was entirely by bus.  Not that much fun.
Cadillac at one time was home to a close (very close) friend of Louis XIV (the “Sun King”), who built a fabulous castle in the city.  Unfortunately, the castle was sacked during the French Revolution.  The town was built as a trade town, with the market square the center of the city.  Some pictures follow, and there are more at the end of this post.

​By the way, the people in Cadillac must love pizza.  Why else have a pizza vending machine in the central square:

​One of the first things I noticed on arriving at my first Bordeaux Chateau (i.e., winery) was how low the vines were.  You can see this in the picture below.  This is done to keep the heat in, and is actually a regulation both on the ground to leaf distance and the total height of the plants.

​Sauternes sweet white wines are made from grapes attacked by bortrytis, or noble rot.  I kid you not.  To do this, only the rotted grapes are used.  Now, as you might expect, all of the grapes don’t rot at the same time, so they can’t be picked at the same time.  To make matters worse, not all of the grapes on a bunch rot at the same time, as seen in the picture below.  The grower has to hand-pick the individual grapes with the rot – the gnarled, shrunken grapes in the picture.  That makes for some very tedious work, especially given how low the vines are.

​The winery we visited was Chateau de Myrat.  Per Wikileaks, Chateau de Myrat is a winery “belonging to the Sauternes appellation in Gironde, in the region of Graves. The estate is located in the commune of Barsac”.  Primary wine is, of course, the sweet wine Sauternes made largely from Semillon white grapes with some Sauvignon Blanc, two varieties that are subject to bortrytis attack.

​We did a vertical tasting, i.e., three of the same wines from different years (vintages).  You can see in the picture below how the color of the wine changes with age, going from light amber to dark amber.  If you go back to my About section on tannins it would seem that white wines do not have the antioxidant tannins to protect them during aging unless they are oaked.  As you can also see below, that is how it is done in Sauternes.

​As far as the taste, all three are very sweet, pretty much dessert wine sweet but with a much lower alcohol level.  The oldest wine has distinct flavors associated with aging – caramel, wet leaves, and maybe even some mint.
Let me finish this blog with three more pictures of Cadillac.  The first one was taken in the archway of the town gate, showing water levels from flooding at times in the past.  Cadillac is on a river, and sometimes the river visits the town.  The last two are of the castle.

​It was the best of wines, it was the worst of wines…
Your intrepid explorer has again crossed the Atlantic Ocean, back to the origins of the wine industry.  This time, my wife and I took a Viking Cruise to Bordeaux, one of the leading wine-producing regions in France.  As the misquote of Dickins above implies, some of the wines we tasted were quite good, but some were among the worst we have ever run into.
Over the next few weeks I will review four wineries that we visited.  As per my general approach, I will not review the wineries that had, let us kindly say, less than desirable offerings.  We also visited a barrel making facility, which at some time I will discuss in the About section.  But, first a review of our trip.
We began in Bordeaux where we boarded the Viking river boat and met the amazing crew.  They were great, but the really great part of the trip was making new friends among the other passengers.  Of course, it was cold and rainy the entire trip, so we probably spent more time with the other passengers than normal….
At the end of the trip we spent a couple of days in Paris:

​Now Bordeaux is an unusual part of France in that it was under English rule for three hundred years, beginning when Eleanor of Acquitaine married Henry II of England in the 1100’s.  The area became a trading post of the English, and many of the towns are market centered rather than Church centered.  The Bordeaux region is split by an estuary fed by two rivers running southeast to northwest.  The area can be divided into two regions – the left bank and the right bank, left and right determined when facing downstream.  Now wine has been produced on the right bank for many centuries.  On the other hand, the left bank was mostly marsh until Dutch engineers helped the French with water control, recovering the land for agriculture sometime in the mid-nineteenth century.  Now soil in the recovered land is really not soil – it’s mostly rocks.  Not much you can grow there accept grape vines….
The two leading red grape varieties in the area are Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, and grapes from these two varieties must dominate any red wines made in the area.  It is generally believed that the rocky soil on the left bank produces better Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, while the clay soil on the left bank is better for Merlot grapes.  Most of the wines produced in Bordeaux are blends of these two, sometimes with small additions of Cabernet Franc, Petite Verdot, Malbec, and the recently reintroduced Carmenere.  Some of the most expensive red wines in the world come out of Bordeaux.  However, our guides were quick to point out that the average bottle of red wine in Bordeaux sells for around ten dollars!  More about this in my reviews.
The southern part of Bordeaux is considered to be better suited for growing white grapes, specifically Sauvignon Blanc, Semillon, and Muscadelle.  Sauvignon Blanc is the primary grape for dry white wines, whereas Semillon for sweet white wines.  Of particular note is the wine Sauternes, a sweet white wine made from grapes that have been attacked by “Noble Rot”.  I kid you not.
OOPS!  Getting boring, so here are some more pictures of Paris:

There are technically no wineries in Bordeaux.  Rather, wine is made in Chateaus, such as Chateau Margaux or Chateau Mouton Rothschild.  OK, enough blather about Bordeaux that you can easily find on the web.  I found it interesting, but cruising the rivers in the region extremely boring.  So more pictures of Paris:

​Some things get better and better, and there are always new things that are pretty good, at least that is what awaited our gang of intrepid winers at Vineyard Grant James.  We were a bit under the weather before our trip, as seen in the picture below:

​Of course, after a few glasses of wine, we looked like this:

​As for the better and better, Susanne Sapier, winemaker extraordinaire, introduced us to her 2020 vintage Nebbiolo.  Their past vintages have been very good, but this one is just that one step above even though it has only aged two years! I hope to see what it is like with a few more years of aging, but, well, it is really, really good right now and sometimes I get very thirsty and the dog ate my homework….
As for the new things, we got to taste both a Carmenere and an Alicante Bouchet.  Carmenere is often referred to as the lost grape of Bordeaux.  Back in the 19th century, most of the vines in Europe were wiped out by root louse from America when some idiots brought live North American vines to France and planted them in Bordeaux.  Carmenere was widely planted in Bordeaux at the time and was wiped out entirely from Europe.  Fortunately, the grape had already made its way to Chile, being mistaken for Merlot.  Anyway, we got to taste the Grant James version, and it is pretty similar to the Chilean version, with a very unique jalapeño flavor.  Hope to buy some as soon as they have labels on the bottles.
During Prohibition, you were allowed to make wine at home for your own consumption, so growers in California grew grapes and shipped them east.  As Alicante Bouchet is a very thick-skinned grape that could handle the long train ride, it was the grape of choice.  It is a bit of a rare type of grape in that its skin and flesh are both red.  It is a cross created by Henri Bouchet, who crossed Grenache with Petit Bouchet, itself a cross created by his father.  The Grant James version is a very nice wine, of which we consumed very large quantities.