2019 Euro Trip – Bordeaux, France
Our initial plan for the trip had us continuing west across Spain and into Lisbon, Portugal, but the days were running out and we decided to call an audible and head back into France to Bordeaux and more wine, ultimately back to Marseilles for the flights home.
We bounced our suitcases across the cobblestones and into the nearby Bilbao train station. We arrived before the train or any staff so we stood around in the cold station until they let us board around 6:15 am. Our trip takes us back south to Miranda and then up to San Sebastian. When we bought our tickets yesterday, we got the first two segments but for some reason he couldn’t get us a reservation for the leg between San Sebastian and Bordeaux, which worried me a lot. In San Sebastian we talked with the lady at the ticket desk and she gave us two options: take one train with a fee of â¬20 each, or take a free train that gets there 10 minutes later, so that was an easy choice. We walked onto the train and found a first class cabin and settled in. This is typically what I remember from 3 years ago, but now things have changed. A “reservation fee” is required on nearly every train. I see it as just another way to get more money out of you after paying huge money for your Eurail pass. So – Eurail Pass – you’re dead to me! There’s no value or convenience left and despite paying for a First Class pass, only two of our legs so far have even had first class cabins.
As we crossed the bridge over the river into France, both of our phones lit up with working Internet and messages came flooding in. Nothing like spending a bunch of money on an “International” SIM card and finding it only works in France. Come on EU, it’s beyond time to regulate the phone companies into finishing the job!
We arrived in Bordeaux and took a taxi up to our rental apartment. The rental company wanted to send us the front door key’s lockbox combination over WhatsApp. That’s dumb, we’re already communicating with them over email. Despite our request, they ended up sending the code to us via a message on the Booking.com web site. That was a pain to try to find while we’re standing in the street in front of the door and they’re not answering their listed phone number. The apartment itself is quite nice, one bedroom and a pullout couch and Mikey gets the bedroom this time!
We found a nearby pub called Sherlock Holmes. A young American guy from Kansas City was working behind the bar. He followed his French girlfriend here when she finished her studies in Kansas City. He was very helpful and gave us some good suggestions about local places to eat and things to see. We stocked up on breakfast food at the nearby Carrefour minimart and had dinner at a really good Japanese restaurant around the corner.
The next morning we walked around the town near our apartment. We found a large park with a giant statue and fountain, celebrating the merchants who tried to rise up but were slaughtered in the French Revolution. While we waited for our wine tour to start, we had lunch in a very nice cafe next to the tourist office where I finally got my risotto with salmon and no onions!
Coincidentally this was a Saturday and France is currently having big Yellow Vest protests every Saturday. From Wikipedia: “A populist, grassroots revolutionary political movement for economic justice, motivated by rising fuel prices, a high cost of living; it claims that a disproportionate burden of the government’s tax reforms were falling on the working and middle classes, especially in rural and peri-urban areas. The protesters have called for lower fuel taxes, a reintroduction of the solidarity tax on wealth, a minimum-wage increase, the implementation of Citizens’ initiative referendums, as well as the resignations of President Emmanuel Macron and the Second Philippe government.” There was a massive convoy of over 20 police vans and a water cannon tank which drove into the city center and parked in the square right in front of the tourist office, blocking off roads and pedestrian walkways. I saw riot police in full armor, machine guns and riot shields. The police have caused over a thousand injuries and several deaths and it seems like they should scale back the show of force and let the people peacefully protest.
Our guide for the wine tour rounded us up and we loaded into a nice Mercedes van. Our group of 8 had an American couple from Houston, 2 from England, 2 from Glasgow and me and Jim. Jim picked the half day tour of the Medoc region and we headed northwest out of the city, past a massive ugly nasty dirty concrete building that was actually a U-Boat pen from WWII. The allies tried to bomb it and it ended up with barely a scratch. They’re trying to figure out what they can do with this building, 60 years later still no idea.
Our first stop was Château Marquis de Terme. It’s in the Margaux appellation, which by policy is a no-irrigation area. The vines have to find their own water which can drive the roots down 20 feet or more through the sandy, rocky soil. It’s terrible land, which is very good for growing grapes as it forces the vines to make a small amount of fruit with highly concentrated flavours. Another vineyard you may have heard of from the region is Château Lafite Rothschild! Marquis de Terme specializes in Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Petit Verdot grapes, a big change from the rosé region we toured in southern France. The wines are rated 3.9-4.1/5 in a wine app I installed called Vivino. It lets you take a picture of the label, then pulls up all of the information about the vineyard, that particular wine and vintage plus ratings and comments of users of the app. Jim really liked their rosé produced in another location, and we both liked the two reds produced on-site.
Our second and final stop was to Château Dauzac, first listed as Grand Cru Classé in 1855, but evidence of winemaking goes back to 1545 by of course some monks. It’s a sprawling estate also in the Margaux appellation with another 4 hectares in the nearby Haut-Médoc appellation. It specializes in Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot and makes +/- 280,000 bottles per year depending on the weather. The wines are also rated 3.9-4.1/5 in the wine app. In a huge coincidence, our guide for the visit was a young woman from Thailand! Her Thai mother married a Frenchman and they moved back to the area. It was her first day giving the tour by herself and she was a little nervous. I think she was relieved when we spoke a little Thai with her during the tasting. We tasted 3 wines, I liked one but the other two were just out of the oak barrels and needed about 10 years of aging to be their best. The whole tour was good, but not great value for â¬70 for a half-day trip and two tastings.
Our tour guide brought us back into town and we went back to the Sherlock Holmes pub for an afternoon drink. For dinner, our tour guide had recommended a place with raclette, where a heating element is placed over a giant wheel of cheese and you scrape off the melted cheese and eat it with bread. Finding a place to eat dinner is tricky because Saturday night most restaurants are fully booked up, and sadly the raclette place was full. We went down the road to a restaurant called “Le M” and although they initially said they were full, they fitted us in. Big thanks! The dinner style was Prix Fixe, where everyone gets the same multi-course meal. Le M’s meal was 5 courses, starting with cold mint pea soup, a poached egg topped with fish eggs and almond slices, baked fish with risotto, duck breast or fish in lemon sauce and vegetables, and finishing with strawberries on a biscuit with cream. And bread with every course. In typical French style, it took nearly 3 hours from start to finish and was reasonably priced at â¬48 plus drinks.
The next day was rainy and we didn’t have a firm plan in place. We walked out to the big tram interchange to take it south to the train station to prepare for tomorrow’s trip. We each bought an all-day tram ticket for â¬4.70. We figured out which one to take, it pulls up, empties its passengers out and we step inside. The conductor is waving his hands, “finish.” I look at him and ask how to get to the train station, he points somewhere over to the left. We get out and try to figure things out. Thinking it was one retired train on a Sunday we do the same procedure with the next tram that arrives, along with a dozen other waiting people. The conductor waves us out of the train, “finished.” We see a bus nearby with the Gare St. Jean sign on it so we jump on, it’s crowded and wet. WTF is going on?
At the huge train station, we find the ticket desk and a helpful man. He says we have to pay â¬20 for our reservation to our next stop in Arles. If we booked it earlier (don’t know how much earlier) it would be â¬10. This policy is *not* explained in the Eurail web site. I expressed my dissatisfaction to pay an extra fee for every leg we take. He said without our Eurail pass, the next-day 5.5 hour slow 2nd class inter-city train would cost â¬247. Um, screw that. Rather than paying â¬247 I would take a bus or even rent a car and get there directly for much less. As the rain started to pour down we took shelter in a very nice bar / brunch restaurant with a bartender who looked just like Scarlett Johansen. Jim and I discussed the train fee situation and I said I’m disappointed that the train industry has decided to screw its customers the same way that the airline industry has. And we have to pay, because they get to make the rules. It’s the same as if I bought a car, but then every time I tried to start it, I had to stick â¬20 in a slot in the dashboard that went to the car company. Jim seems to be in favour of this kind of capitalism.
We decide to try another tram to get back up to the big interchange in the park. We get on one and it pulls out, but going out of the city in the other direction. We get off at the next stop, get on a tram for one stop to get back to the train station, then find a bus to take us back up to the interchange. From there we successfully find a tram to take us north along the river to the City of Wine, or as the locals say, La Cité du Vin.
The wine museum building is shaped like a wine decanter and we go inside as the drizzle picks up. For such a small facility, there are 4 different kinds of tickets. We go with the one the woman suggests for â¬24, which gets us to floors 1, 2 and 8. Floors 1 and 2 are exhibits of various kinds about glassmaking and all aspects of wine with many different kinds of multimedia displays. One overhead display showed a Windows PC failing to boot with a permissions problem on a batch file rather than playing its video – I always find these amusing. There are also wine classes (if you pay extra I suppose) and a big auditorium that was just closed without explanation. On Floor 2 you get a set of headphones and an audio guide device. The technology chosen for the audio device is, instead of typing in a well-displayed number to get the corresponding audio track (shades of the Guggenheim in Bilbao), you have to touch the tip of the audio device to a tiny spot within a tiny circle. It triggers the audio using an NFC connection, like tap-and-pay credit cards. That would be fine I guess, except on a Sunday around 1pm when there are 40 people trying to push their way in and tap on the little circle that you can hardly find. After 5 minutes of this, I gave up. I was already in a mood from the train ticket and the tram fiasco and I was ready to go and find someone in charge and explain how to actually provide good service to your paying customers. When finished with floor 2 we tried to find an elevator to go up to floor 8. Nope. You have to go down to floor 0 (the ground floor) to then take an elevator up to floor 8. They are so lucky I didn’t find anyone to take out my frustrations on. It’s just one of those days when you think the Universe is having a good laugh at your expense. We made it to floor 8 and I got my glass of wine, a 1/4 glass dollop of a local Bordeaux red of some kind. I drank it while looking down at the submarine pen and channel out to the ocean. I was thinking that the Germans could have come up with a much better way to handle this madness. We had thought, “A wine museum in Bordeaux, we can’t miss that!” but it was largely disappointing and expensive. Don’t worry if you don’t include it in your plans.
We could see the “Les Halles” building below, a kind of European food court inside a large building so we walked quickly over in the increasingly heavy rain. I got something I’ve never seen before – the “ingredient holder” was a kind of waffle with a single deep well and high sides that you easily could drop a full stick of butter into. Inside they put the ingredients – I went with the one with hummus on the bottom, followed by pickled vegetables and chunks of watermelon. With no forks or knives, I was forced to eat it with my hands. Ugh.
As we went to leave, it was heaving down rain so we waited a while until they started kicking everyone out for the daily 4-6pm closing time. I was OK with my hooded raincoat but Jim was unhappy about ruining his leather jacket. We got on the tram, rode back to the interchange, then walked back to the apartment in the lessening rain.
I got onto booking.com and searched in Arles, found a great old stone hotel with a room with two full beds for â¬180 for 2 nights, or â¬90 each. It’s right in the corner of the old city, about a 25 minute walk from the train station so we’ll take a taxi I guess.
Next up, Arles, France – home to lots of Roman stuff and one of Vincent Van Gogh’s favourite places.
