Are you seeking a vineyard, or a winery?
You can see lots of vineyards just driving around; after all, from 10 feet away they all look the same.
If a winery, the "best known" are around Pauillac.

I'm not so sure that "just anyone" can visit Rothschild. My DH, who's big into wines, said you basically have to know somebody. Many of the wineries in that area, or at least the top ones, are like that. When we visited the area, we mostly visited caves and drove around, admiring the vines (and thinking about how valuable each square foot of vines are)!

Chateau Mouton Rothschild
Pauillac
France
Tel: +33-5-5673 2129
Fax: +33-5-5673 2128
website: www.bpdr.com
-> contacts -> email -> visit

Reservation required.

Opening Hours: The guided tour costs 5 Euros and starts at Club Mouton, the visitors centre, situated opposite Chateau Mouton Rothschild. It is also the final point of the tour, when visitors have the opportunity for an optional wine tasting at an additional charge. Opening Hours: Mon-Thu 9.30 – 11am, 2 - 4pm, Fri 9.30 – 11am, 2 - 3pm, weekends and public holidays and from 1st April to 31st October visits at 9.30 and 11am as well as 2 and 3.30pm.

Anyone can visit most premiere cru classe chateaux, provided you reserve in advance, by phone (English spoken). Don't expect any tasting, and they don't sell direct to public. The more you know about wines and viniculture, the more you get out of a visit, which is professionally conducted.
If your idea is to buy some wines, the best place to head for is the maison du vin in invidual communes, where you get a good choice of local wines at the same price as they sell in their own cellars.

Chateau Mouton Rothschild has suspended visits indefinitely because of major renovation and restoration of its properties.
Lafite, Margaux and Latour all have free tours, by appointment. As numbers are limited, book several months in advance. The chateau is usually closed in August, and during harvest (Sep - Oct).
If tasting is offered, you only get to taste samples still in barrels (en vrac), not any vintage bottles.

I visited Ch Lafite Rothschild over 10 years ago. If you did not recognize it from label pictures you would not find it. A simple little road going up to a rather shabby barn. We had a reservation..just us. We were then greeted and shown around from one of the "table" members. He also toured the US with appointments to re-cork valuable wine collections.

Everything very low-key. You cannot buy wine. It is long sold before ready. An interesting expeerience.

You can make reservations:
http://www.lafite.com/eng/Bordeaux-Estates/Chateau-Lafite-Rothschild

Thank you for all of the great advice. We have a group of adults that does want a tasting, so perhaps a more local place is the thing for us. I am also bringing kids, so I was hoping that seeing the process would be educational...maybe I'm asking too much. I do not necessarily want to come home with cases of wine. We know plenty of importers here. Sounds like I will have to drop some names to get into these places???

Dropping names isn't likely to get you far. It's a pretty closed society. The best thing to do is to contact the Maison du Vin in Bordeaux, which is connected to the wonderful tourist office there and find out which châteaux are available for tours. Many are just not.

If you want to just taste, there are dégustations all around, including at wine stores in Bordeaux, St-Emilion, etc.

For Font-de-Gaume reservations call or fax:
+33-553068600, Fax: +33-553352618

Firstly, in spite of Alec's information, I would call or email Chateau Mouton. They still have the opportunity to visit the winery on their website. Maybe the website is outdated, maybe not. It costs you not more than a minute to send an email.

Secondly, it is correct that most large chateaux are closed to the public which is understandable since they do not do business by selling one or two bottles to a tourist.

However, there are several hundred small family-owned producers where you can get an individual, personalized tour. We once visited a cru bourgeois winery, Chateau Tour du Haut-Moulin in Cussac (just north of Bordeaux), and enjoyed a wonderful tour. Our hotel's concierge made the reservation for us.

Chateau Tour du Haut-Moulin
22 av du Fort Médoc
33460 CUSSAC FORT MÉDOC
Mail : contact@chateau-tour-du-haut-moulin.com
tel: .05 56 58 91 10
fax :.05 57 88 83 13


It might be a good idea to ask your hotel about a tour & tasting. Usually the hotels collaborate with wineries in their region.

Another option, if you have good connections with importers in your home country, and if those importers actually import the wine of the chateau that you wish to visit, is for them to make the booking for you. This is how we arranged our visits/tours of Mouton R. a few years ago.

We went to Paulliac (where my dad served in WW1) for a day, went to the sort-of-chamber-of-wine-commerce on the south end of town, asked about a tour, and they directed us to a chateau just outside the town. Don't remember the name. Good tour. Their wine sold at the end of the tour for 100 euro/bottle. On the wine tour we sampled the one-year-old wine, then the "good stuff".

I wasn't impressed with the wine, but then I'm quite content with Aldi's Malbec. Assuming you're more ......let's say, more of an oenophile than I, you might like it.

>>>I wasn't impressed with the wine<<<

A red Bordeaux wine needs at least 10 years to mature. A young red Bordeaux, even when it comes from a grand chateau, is just bland and full of tannines. The complex fruit and mineral aromas need time to develop.

This is the reason why tastings do not make much sense (unless you are offered old vintages, but this is a bad sign because the winery had not been able to sell their wines). Only experts can judge how a wine which has just been bottled will develop over time. And often, even Hugh Johnson and Robert Parker had been wrong because they underestimated maturation.

Believe it or not, but the very grand chateaux from good vintages become really good after 50 or 60 years in the bottle!

The general rule is:

- The better the quality, the longer the time for maturation.
- The better the vintage, the longer the time for maturation.
- The higher the percentage of cabernet sauvignon, the longer the time for maturation (this is the reason why Médocs need more time than St. Emilions with their high percentage of merlot).

I can verify that Chateau Mouton Rothschild is closed for renovations per our correspondence with them. I still am really hoping to get to see the process of wine making. Making that happen is turning out to be quite a challenge.

Chateau Tour du Haut-Moulin gave us an excellent tour about winemaking. We could even peep into the fermentation tanks. Afterwards there was a tasting. I think it was the winemakers daughter who gave us the tour.

Read Robert Parker's Bordeaux book about Chateau Tour du Haut-Moulin - he rates them pretty high and mentions that their winemaking is rather special, since they run the fermentation process at the very temperature limit in order to produce aromatic, fruity wines.

When we were there, the tour was individually arranged and free. Afterwards, we bought a couple of boxes - one of the best buys in my life (9Euros per bottle - retail price is 19Euro).

Echnaton:
FINALLY!!!! an explanation that makes sense!!!
Thank you excessively for the info.
I greatly appreciate the tastes of French food, and was beginning to think I must have only 2 or 3 wine-appreciating taste buds. Why didn't I like a 100 euro wine? Now I know.
Thanks again. Yes, it was high in tannin, and somewhat bland.

Tomboy:

We once bought a rather simple 6-Euro Bordeaux wine (a Cote de Castillon which is a minor location at the edge of St. Emilion). We consumed it as an unassuming table wine together with BBQ and other rustic food. And we forgot a couple of bottles in the cellar.

After ten years, we rediscovered this wine and it had completely changed in character. It had developed wonderful notes of raspberry, together with the smokey flavour of flintstone. Lesson learned: You have to be extremely patient with Bordeaux wines. And even simple wines can develop beautifully.

Same is true for wines from Bourgogne. Wait, wait, wait.

(BTW, we once bought a pretty expensive 100% Cabernet Sauvignon from Australia which was also rich in tannines. I let it mature in the cellar for 5 years and - the wine was putried.)

Thank you for all of the excellent advice. I am still searching for a winery to visit (many kind replies, but no yeses yet). I will try the suggestion for Chateau Tour du Haut-Moulin next.

I did receive a very timely e-mail reply from the grotte font de gaume, however; and was able to procure tickets for that.

I wrote to them in French-which I am also doing for the winery visit requests (I am not sure that it makes any difference), but the staff does speak English as well because my husband who is not a French-speaker was able to fax our payment information to them in English.

Hi there! I am in Bordeaux at the moment. There are many, many wineries offerig tours and tastings as well as caves, as mentioned above. It was drizzling this morning, so we visited La Winery. It was a lot of fun. We had a blind tasting of 6 wines and we rated them according to our tastes, plus answering a few questions about our food preferences. They did a "wine profile" and suggested wines according to tastes. However, this is not an agressive selling place. They have wines from all over starting at very modest prices (4 euro) to over 1,000 euros. They have a very nice restaurant on the premises. You can purchase a bottle of wine and have it with your meal at no corkage fee. The waiter even gave us a free glass of dessert wine! They had tables with crayons for the kids and they hold special events and concerts there as well.
http://www.winery.fr/

You might want to look at St Emilion as well. The tourism office will give you a detailed map of all the wineries which are open and which have tastings. We went to many and never paid a tasting fee. They had many small wineries which were absolutely charming and the wine is very inexpensive.

Hey Linda - say hello to my daughter - she is also living in BDX across from Le Jardin Public (rough life, yeah, I know).

We were in Bordeaux last month and ended up just taking a tour thru the tourist office by bus. We went up to Blaye and Bourg visiting two chateaux on the same trip. - about an hour away. About 30 euro per person I belive for bus, tour, etc. We enjoyed the tours but wished there was more time for tasting. We tasted about three at the first chateaux and about six at the second, Chateau Tayac. It was a lovely ride through the area and all around good trip. And we found the guides spoke English well and were very ntersesting.

PS: Please allow extra luggage space for all you will want to bring back. My dear DH thought he was so clever - he brought home a magnum and four other bottles and was quite pleased with himself packing it safely. Unfortunately I broke my suitcase by trying to pack in all his stuff!

PS: One of the best bargains of BDX was the regular city Bus #1 to the airport. Only 1 euro 40 and it got there in about 30 minutes. We waited for the "Airport BUs" but it never did show up.

Hi there again! Rick and I contacted Chateau Haut-Brion before we left and they informed us that they were closed, but offered us a visit (free) to Chateau Mission Haut-Brion across the street. We did that today- we had a private tour!! It was beautiful and steeped in history. Our guide spoke perfect Englis and we had a taste of both vintages from 2004 at the end. LOVED IT! We also toured Chateau Pape Clement (our B&B arranged it) with 5 other English speakers. It was 9.5 euros each and we had tastes of 3 vintages. It was nice as well.