It's a charming town, with tile roofs, cobblestone streets, narrow passages, several cafes, and lots and lots of wine shops.
The Saint-Emilion appelation is known for its Merlot wines. Kevin and I enjoy drinking wine but don't really consider ourselves very knowledgeable. For that reason, most of the time we stick to pretty inexpensive wines since we're not sure if we could tell the difference. But at a wine bar in St. Emilion, they offered wines by the glass at varying price points. We decided to put our palettes to the test. First we ordered an 8-euro glass of a 1994 wine, to see if older wines tasted better than the ones we usually drink. In this case, not really. Then Kevin went all in and ordered the most expensive glass on the menu - the bottle sells for 130 euro but the glass was a modest 26. When we ordered, the server gave us a small smile of approval and said "its VERY good".
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| The infamous bottle |
Kevin was ready to take the Pepsi (er...St. Emilion) challenge.
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| Can YOU tell the difference? |
And the result is that we both could definitely tell there was a difference between the two wines. BUT...the more expensive wine didn't taste any better (to us, at least). So at least now we know, and can continue to happily buy our cheapo wines without worrying that we are missing out on something spectacular.
We opted not to buy from the "Prestige Menu". 1300 euro a bottle for a bottle of 2001 Lafite Rothschild...hmmm, that seems expensive. (By the way, with everything from the hotel continental breakfasts, to the tolls and gas on the highway, to the 20 euro umbrella that we bought when it really began to pour..."that seems expensive" is quickly becoming our catchphrase for this trip.) We did end up buying and enjoying a fantastic wine to bring home for dinner that night -- Emilio. A real steal at about 4 euro a bottle!
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| Check out the rest of the wine list. Yep, that seems expensive! |
We do have a wine tour scheduled for this region in a week or so, and will have a chance to come back to the town to walk around some more. Hopefully it will be sunny then, but even with all the rain we found this to be one of the prettiest towns we've seen in France.
We love St. Emilion wine! We had our first bottle at The Wall restaurant on St. Bart's. Later, a local owner of a wine store spent 2 hours with us teaching us about French wines. He then compiled a case of red wines, some to drink now...others to drink a few years down the road. It was a great experience!
ReplyDeleteHow nice to have someone walk you through all the wines. There is definitely some very good wine here! We like the Merlot blends best so far.
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