Bordeaux, France (Day 2)

 It's warm with off and on showers today.  Our morning tour was a bit of a drive around Bordeaux and then another winery tasting.  The city was quiet when we left around 9:00 am which was nice.  

Can't figure out if they once had a large window and closed half to put in a door, or had a large door and made it smaller.  Either way, it looks different.

This time we went to a Chateau south of the city.  Our guide says that Chateau means a winery owned by a family.  I always thought it meant a large house.  Maybe it means both.  She also said that no winery in France is allowed to irrigate, not just locally, which makes more sense.  The whole area has been in a drought for a couple of months, and it has been unusually warm.  Just in the last few days, there has been some rain and already the grapes are showing it.  Today's winery, Chateau de Portets, will be picking their white grapes in the next week and their red grapes a couple of weeks later, which is earlier than usual.  They pick the white by hand but the red by machine, but no explanation why the difference.

The winery is on a beautiful spot right on the river.  There was a port here back in the 18th century and the tower is left over from that time.  Reportedly Napolean and Josephine stopped here when their boat had trouble and enjoyed the wine and a bit of lunch.

Beautiful grounds

They age some of their wines in cement tanks that were built in the 1950's.  They've repainted them and added temperature controls.

We tasted their white and red, but didn't care enough to buy anything even though their prices were quite reasonable - $10 and $15 per bottle.  They also had a wine jelly which I did buy as I think it will go wonderfully on cheese and crackers.

After lunch at Compass Rose, we headed out for a walkabout.  I had wanted to get a corkscrew that said Bordeaux on it, but never found a souvenir shop, which was quite a change.  Restaurants were a dime a dozen, however.  Then it started raining again and we needed to use the facilities, so we made our way back to the ship, dodging bikes and scooters again.

We invited Sarah to join us for Trivia as she lost her regular group at the last turnaround port.  The others were on tours this afternoon, so today it was just Sarah, Michael and me.  We got 10 right but still missed out on the points.  If only I had written diamond as the hardest rock instead of granite ...   I didn't think diamond was a rock.  Ah well, I'll never hear the end of it.

Dinner was Patrick & Lois, Sarah, Carl and us.  Carl gave us a scare as he was about 20 minutes late.  Michael and Patrick went to see what was happening since he didn't answer his phone, but it turns out his watch had "crapped out" and he just didn't get to the phone in time.  Once he arrived we had a wonderful time and ended up closing the place.

Captain Luksa announced that we would have to miss tomorrow's scheduled port of Biarritz due to bad weather again.  It was to be a tender port but the seas and wind will be too high, so it will be a sea day.  We sail at 10:30 pm and it's expected to be a bit rough once we get out of the river and into the open ocean again around 4:00 am until early evening tomorrow.  In an odd way, I'm sort of looking forward to it.  These completely calm days make me forget we're on a ship.