France Day 12
Again the morning was a bit cold, but right in the morning sun it was really nice, so we had our breakfast outside. After the dump/refill we drove back towards Bordeaux to drive around the delta of the Gironde river.
The other side was as you'd expect when you hear Bordeaux - it's wine fields as far as the eye can see. We were unsure what to do, on the one hand we wanted to drive further north to get back to the coast again. On the other hand Kaddi really wanted to stay at a real French vineyard and have a tasting.
Unfortunately most vineyards seem not cater to motorhome tourists. But I found one in the campercontact app in Blaye. So we decided to go there even though it was still early in the day. That was a good decision though because the place filled up fast.
It was very much like Kaddi had imagined it. A nice place under the trees, wine fields right next to us, an old chateau nearby… Kaddi went to ask for a tasting appointment - the employee spoke nearly no English again, so communicating was cumbersome but Kaddi managed to get us an appointment for 6:30pm - or so we thought.
Time to explore the nearby town of Blaye by foot. They have a very impressive old fort with a nice view over the river which is about 3km wide here. The town itself wasn't much to look at though and so we returned to our camper to relax a little and eat ice cream.
Before the wine tasting we had some more of our cheese and then walked over to the chateau.
There was a different employee who was much surprised that we expected a wine tasting at that time. Apparently the communication earlier had failed anyway. But she asked another colleague who agreed to do an adhoc tasting. He spoke well enough English to tell us a little bit about the three wines he gave us and we decided to buy a bottle of two of them. The whole thing was over relatively quickly.
A bit disappointing as we had hoped to also learn a bit about the process of making wine. Similar to the tours you get at the Scottish and Irish Whiskey distilleries. But I guess you can't have everything.
We made Spaghetti Bolognese for dinner and opened one of our new bottles of wine.
