Driving around Medoc, Bordeaux

Fabulous weather today so we set off in the car heading for a pre-plotted route to take us in and around the Medoc area of Bordeaux. Here is where the great Chateaux's of the Bordeaux area are - Chateaux Margaux, Letuer, Mouton, I'm thinking I'm clever now but there's actually 10,00 chateaux's in the region (vineyards as we know them) - a huge number!! Surprisingly everything is closed here on Sunday's and as such not one vineyard was open for tasting. When I say everything was closed, I mean it - we only found one tiny little shop that was open in the Chateaux area - I used that to go to the loo!!!

One of our tour books said not to miss "Arachon" so dutifully headed 100kms in that direction to fin it was probably where everyone in Bordeaux went for their Sunday off!!! Managed to find a park 3 miles away from anything and a quick walk to the 'riviera' beachfront -  yes, very nice but there was no way I was driving round and round for hours looking for a carpark whn I'm not confident on driving as it is. As such we decided that yes, that was our trip for the day and headed back to base. Lovely day out though in and around the vineyards.

One thing I have learnt is that in the Bordeaux region, there is no irrigation, everything is watered purely from the rain and as such there are some very good years but also some very bad years. The other is that all Bordeaux wines are blends of 3-4 grape varieties  -okay that's my lesson for the day. We are off tomorrow on a proper guided tour so should learn lots more!!!

There is a fabulous Wikipaedia page on Bordeaux so I'm not going to go on and on here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bordeaux_wine.