St Emilion

Driving along the narrow lanes flanked on both sides by row after row of neatly coiffured vines with a different Chateau around every bend, has given us a true feeling of being in France. It has been enhanced even more so by the stillness and silence of the site we are on now.

Do any of you remember the French ‘arty’ films which were sometimes shown late evening on BBC 2. There would be precious little talking, but lots of film of maybe one possibly two people sitting or lying in long grass in the middle of the countryside with the sounds of cicadas and bees buzzing around, and the occasional cuckoo amidst the other chirruping birds, sometimes in the distance you would see a small car or motorbike or possibly a bike riding by…? Well that’s exactly what it’s like here—

St. Emilion,  the town is lovely, very quaint filled with restaurants and upmarket wine shops selling ‘only the best wine’!

We took a trip on a ‘Petit Train’ around the walls of the town and off into the surrounding vineyards. We stopped at one for a tour of the cellars and a degustation…it’s the only one left in the area which is owned and run by the original family.

There are 5,500 hectares of vineyards in the St. Emilion appellation alone, most viticulteurs have at least 30/40 hectares of vines. The one we visited today has only 3. But they say they are in one of the best positions i.e. the best soil, drainage, sunlight, etc.

Most of the other vineyards use centralised vinification and bottling centres but the owners of this particular vineyard…..Chateau Rochebelle, grow, harvest, mature and bottle everything themselves by hand. The wine stays in French oak barrels for 18 months before it’s bottled. It’s good stuff - you don’t buy their wine to be drunk that night with a take-away, it needs to be left to mature in the bottle for anything from 8 to 30 years.

We have booked ourselves into ‘The Wine School’ on Thursday afternoon to learn how to taste wines properly. I will be very sorry to ‘spit’!!!! We’ll try and write up about that experience on Thursday, but knowing us we’ll leave the school and head straight to a bar for a drink we are allowed to swallow, so our blogging will have to wait!!