By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises

Victor Hugo said, “Take Versailles, add Antwerp, and you have Bordeaux.”

That’s a pretty good lineage, especially when you mix in Bordeaux wine, Bordelaise sauce, and a handsome mix of architecture and culture.

Even better, we are here overnight. Party on!

LES GRAND VOILIERS

It was a gray and gloomy Friday in glorious Bordeaux, but not to mind: we arrived in the heart of the Bordeaux-Fête-le-Vin, the wine festival of wine country in a wine-obsessed country. Wine tastings, gourmet food carts, fireworks, and a collection of about 20 Grand Voiliers, Tall Ships.

All photos by Corey Sandler 2018, all rights reserved.

I spend the day exploring with my camera, concentrating on a pair of beauties: first the Kruzenshtern, the second-largest tall ship afloat. It was built in 1926 by the Germans a s a cargo vessel and was taken by the Soviet Union in war reparations in 1946.

She is a four-masted barque of 114 meters length (or 374 feet) now operated by the Russian Navy from a base in Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave carved out of a piece of Baltic coastline. The ship has a black hull with a broad white stripe down its length that is broken by black rectangles; from a distance they look like gun ports, but they are just for show. Which says something about something.

And the second object of my attention was INS Tarangi, the pearl of the Indian Navy. She is a more modern vessel, built in 1997 as a sail training vessel. Square-rigged on the fore and main masts and fore-and-aft rigged on the mizzen mast.

Her name means “waves” in Hindi, and she is almost constantly in service in training or races around the world. She left India in April and will be in Norway in July, where those of us on Silver Wind just may have the opportunity to see her again. I hope so.

SLEEPING BEAUTY

Bordeaux’s nicknames include “La perle d’Aquitaine” (The Pearl of Aquitaine), and “La Belle Endormie” (Sleeping Beauty).

That second name referred to the pollution-blackened walls of the old town center; the walls have now been cleaned and the pearl shines most everywhere.

All photos by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.

I will leave the fine points of oenology to the wine experts and our sommeliers aboard ship. Not that I don’t enjoy an occasional glass of wine. But it’s not my specialty.

I’ll just say that this region produces what some say are the best cabernet sauvignon and merlot grapes and wine, as well as some other varieties.

Grapes were introduced to the region by the Romans, probably in the 1^st century. They liked what they got, and it has been a constant ever since.

Bordeaux now has about 116,160 hectares (287,000 acres) of vineyards. There are about 10,000 wine-producing chateaux, and 13,000 grape growers and amongst them they produce about 960 million bottles per year.

Bordeaux produces large quantities of vin ordinaire or table wine, as well as some of the most expensive wines in the world.

The fancy stuff mostly come from the region’s five premier cru  (first growth) red wines (four from Médoc and one, Château Haut-Brion, from Graves.

We shall conduct tastings and report back, if we can read our notes in the morning.

All photos and text Copyright 2018 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.

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By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises

Victor Hugo said this:

“Take Versailles, add Antwerp, and you have Bordeaux”.

That’s a pretty good lineage.

Add to it Bordeaux wine, Bordelaise sauce, and a handsome mix of architecture and culture.

The city is built on a bend of the river Garonne.

A growing sector of industry in the area is high-tech.

The French Ministry of Defence has invested something like 2 billion Euros in the Laser Mégajoule project in Bordeaux. The project is intended for basic research on laser and plasma technologies.

High-tech companies include Dassault, EADS Sogerma, Snecma, Thales, SNPE, and others.

Dassault Falcon private jets are built there, as well as military aircraft, the Airbus A380 cockpit, the boosters of the Ariane 5 rocket, and the M51 SLBM missile.

But many visitors have come to worship at the font of Bordeaux wine.

I will leave the fine points of oenology to the wine experts and our sommeliers aboard ship.

I’ll just say that this region produces what some say are the best cabernet sauvignon and merlot grapes and wine, as well as some other varieties.

Grapes were introduced to the region by the Romans, probably in the 1st century.

They liked what they got, and it has been a constant ever since.

Bordeaux now has about 116,160 hectares (287,000 acres) of vineyards.

There are about 10,000 wine-producing chateaux, and 13,000 grape growers and amongst them they produce about 960 million bottles per year.

This area has been occupied for tens of thousands of years, which pleases the tourist bureau greatly.

La Grotte de Pair-non-Pair, just north of Bordeaux above the Dordogne river before it joins the Gironde, was discovered in 1881 in a vineyard in the Côtes de Bourg.

The cave has some of the world’s oldest known cave drawings: horses, ibexes, deer, and mammoths.

Remains found in the cave may be Neanderthal—at least 30,000 years old and perhaps much older—and an 18,000-year-old Cro-Magnon.

The presence of remains across such a wide range of time?

I’m guessing the cave was actually a popular wine bar.

Here are some photos from our visit.  The first image shows German U-boat pens which still stand very close to downtown Bordeaux: they were constructed so robustly that they have withstood plans and wishes to remove them for 75 years.

We went next into the heart of Chateau country in Bordeaux,  visiting the town of Saint-Emilion and then the small family winemaker Chateau de Tailhas in Pomerol.

Text and images copyright 2015 by Corey Sandler. All rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution image, please contact me.