Chateau de Myrat

​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.