Peter and I were organised off on a wine tour by the agents here. They had planned it for the day after our arrival but nother of us thought that would be a good idea after the long flights so we went yeaterday. A driver picked us up and we went to the Sainte-Emilion growing area.The first stop was to a grower and merchant so we were able to see not only their production but also taste many other wines. La Mazelle have just 17 hectares and do much of their work by hand. He explained that when they took over the winery the vats had been too well cleaned so they have to add yeast now rather than use the natural occuring yeast. He said we'd notice the difference at the next winery as it is organic and we'd seee the difference. We learned all about the terroir (untranslatable French wine making term meaning the environment including minerals, water, air, light etc etc) of the area and how it can change throughout the growing area even over just a few hundred metres. Sainte-Emilion relies for it's distinct grapes on limstone and light gravel soil with the limestone area being u in the hills.

We had a lunch stop at Chatuea Grand Barrail - a lovely building with a great meal. It turns out so long as you make some wine you can call yourself a Chateau.

Our next stop was the oganic wine producer - Chateau Coutet. The story is that the old grandfather who was running the 400 year old family vineyard when everyone started using chemicals and fertilisers flatly refused to have anything to do with them. So they ended up being well ahead of the curve when other producers decided to go back to organic and had a lot of work undoing ears of chemicals. All their protedtion from disese and animals, and the health and balance of the ground is naturally occuring due to the unaltered landscape over the hundreds of years creating a perfectly harmonious environment.They had a very interesting bottle of wine that had been discovered in the cellar whcih they had no idea how old it was. In oder to discover its age tehy contacted a wine bottle expert (only in France) who dated it back about 150 years! It had a ground glass stopper which is why it had survived. Rather than open it they decided to research methods dating back to then and produceda replica wine in a replica bottle to sell.

Our guide took us into the town of Sainte-Emilion next. A very pretty medieval hill town. Their original industry had been limestone mining to build the houses of Bordeaux and locally. This created masses of underground cave and tunnels that aere now used tfor storing wine. The wine shop above owns thae caves that are under them. The one we went into were open for the public to just wander all around as you'll see in the photos the bottles all just sit there unlabelled and brought up when needed. No guards or anything on them.......and thousands upon thousands of bottles down there.

A very interesting day and not too much rushing from vineyard to vineyard as is often the case on these tours. We have boxes arriving next week - duty free!