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Wine blending during the Vinification Experience Day at Château Beau Rivage


We spent last weekend in Bordeaux at Château Beau Rivage for a couple of Vinification Experience Days.  The aim of this hands-on wine course is to learn more about the vinification and ageing stages in winemaking.  Considering the amount of rain that had fallen during the preceding days, luckily it was planned to spend most of the time inside!

Original Wine Lover Gift Experience. Blend your own wines in Bordeaux

The day started in the fermentation hall.  Here, Christine, the winemaker and owner at Château Beau Rivage, explained to us how the grapes are received during the harvest, how the grape juice is transformed into wine during the first fermentation, and why the second malo-lactic fermentation is important to soften the taste of the wine.

Wine Making Experience Gift. Visit the winery and blend your own wine.

We then moved into the barrel room.  Christine's family have been coopers for several generations, and so Christine talked passionately about the influence that the barrels plays on the wine, and the large choice that the winemakers have in the choice of their barrels.

Visit the wine barrels in the cellar. Behind the scenes winery tour in Bordeaux

But the Wine Experience Days aren't just for listening and discussing.  We had organised several practical workshops to help us learn more about wine and winemaking.

Lots of wine tasting happens during the Vinification Experience Day, so to help us find the words to describe what it is we are tasting, the first workshop concentrated on the nose.  With the help of little glass flasks, we had to try and name the aromas found in wine that are brought by the fruit and the barrel.  It's often harder than you would think to correctly put a name to a smell!

Wine Gift for wine enthusiasts. Identifying the aromas found in wine.

For the first series of tasting, we tasted three wines that are still ageing.  Each wine was the same grape variety, picked on the same day, the only difference being the type of barrel it has been ageing in.  The difference is unbelievable - you would think that they were three completely different wines.  This exercise clearly shows the impact of oak on the wine.  The first barrel was made using Eastern Eurpoean oak, the second with American oak, and the third with French oak.

Wine Tasting Experience Gift in Bordeaux, France.

During lunch we savoured some South West French specialities, accompanied with different wines and vintages produced at the winery, including the "Château Beau Rivage" Bordeaux Supérieur, the wine chosen for the Gourmet Odyssey clients, and the winery's "Clos la Bohème" Haut-Médoc wine.

south west France delicacies during the winemakers meal

The afternoon was taken up with blending.  To start, we first tasted four grape varieties separately to better understand what each brings to the wine.  The fruitiness of the Merlot, more spice from the Malbec, the length of the Cabernet Sauvignon, and the acidity of the Petit Verdot.

Make your own wine gift. Blend your own wine.

In small groups, we each then mixed our own blends to see firsthand how the taste of the wine differs depending on the grape varieties and percentages used.

To finish the day, Christine gave us a taste of a blend that she had put together, which showed us that 20 years of experience in blending wines does indeed count for something!

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Tasting the 2010 and 2011 wines during the Vinfication Experience Day


The life of a winemaker can be tough at times, especially in winter when the weather is as freezing as it is at the moment!  And sometimes, even for the Gourmet Odyssey clients, you need to brave the elements, as we did last weekend in Bordeaux in sub zero temperatures and with 8cm of snow covering the vineyard on Sunday!  Fortunately, during the Vinification Experience Days, we spend most of the time inside, so we made ourselves at home around the roaring fire in the kitchen!

Snow covered Bordeaux vineyard

Wrapped up from head to toe, we started the day in the vineyard so that everyone could (re)visit their adopted vines.

At this time of the year, the principal activity in the vineyard is pruning.  Christine and David from Château Beau Rivage explained why pruning is so important and showed us how to do so.  When you see the number of vines to prune, and realise that each is pruned manually, you have a much better understanding of the huge and manually intensive task that it is for the winery.

Christine explains pruning the vines in Bordeaux during the Wine Experience day in Bordeaux
 

Next stop, the fermentation hall and barrel room where the wine is fermented and aged, to learn more about the vinification and wine making stages.

Learning about the fermentation process in the barrel room
 

We then headed to the warmth of the kitchen to delve into the heart of the day's topic with a wine tasting lesson and some exercises to put our sense of smell to work.  We passed around some small jars containing the main aromas to be found in red Bordeaux wines, and we had to identify which aroma each flask contained.  It's not as easy as it at first appears!

Training the nose to identify the aromas forund in wine
 

Our tasting senses awakened, it was then time to start the wine tasting.  First up, three different wines were chosen to better understand the effect that wood has on the wine.  Each wine was 100% merlot from 2010, but each had been aged separately in a different type of barrel.  The first had matured in an old French oak barrel, the second in new French oak, and the third in new American oak.  The result, three wines with completely different aromas, structure and taste.  The marked difference between the three is really quite astonishing!

We then continued the wine tasting during the meal with some of the winery's finished wines to compare different vintages and blends.
In the afternoon, we concentrated on the different grape varietals grown in the vineyard to better understand what characteristics each brings to a blended wine.  Chrsitine had prepared samples of Malbec, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot from the 2011 harvest.  We tasted each one by one, and discussed their differences.

 

Wine tasting by grape varietal, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec and Petit Verdot
In small groups, we then mixed our own blends to learn how the different grape varietals and their percentages change the wine.
Blending our own wine
 

We finished the day by tasting the blend that Château Beau Rivage had presented at the Millésime Bio organic wine fair the week before.

It's impossible to learn everything in a day, and as Christine remarked, she studied oenology for 4 years, but we each left with a better appreciation of the choices that the winemaker faces to create very different wines depending on the grape varietals, percentages and barrels used.

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