Wine from Southwest France

Bordeaux is truly a unique area of countryside located in the Southwest of France just beside the Atlantic Ocean. It's home to some of the most diverse soils which create a multitude of different wine flavor profiles. There are somewhere around 8,000 different wineries in Bordeaux - each producing several different wines. Just to put it into perspective, if each of those wineries only produced two different wines, and you wanted to taste them all, you would need to taste a different wine each day for the next 40 years!

Sounds complicated? I thought it was too when I started learning - but it's not. Let's keep it simple...

Here I am in the vineyard just before harvest. These are cabernet sauvignon grapes that will be blended with one or more of the other varieties that we grow here. That's what makes our wines so interesting  - the blends! Every wine producer chooses which grapes they want to use as well as the percentage of each. This means you have literally thousands of blends to choose from - probably going to need more than 40 years...

Bordeaux only uses a few different red grape varieties to make their wines. Most of them you've probably already heard of.

• Merlot
• Cabernet Sauvignon
• Malbec
• Cabernet Franc
• Petit Verdot

There are few others but those are the main varieties. So let's just keep it simple. And although red wines are the first thing to come to mind when you think of Bordeaux, we make white wines as well. There are three main varieties.

• Sauvignon Blanc
• Semillon
• Muscadelle