Le Wine Buff in France, Bordeaux Day 1

Finally.  It’s quite similar to that feeling of gloriously painful anticipation that you once experienced before every birthday as a child…I was finally going to Bordeaux as part of Le Wine Buff program for Enjoy Bordeaux!  I have been a ‘Buff since late last year when the pilot program first kicked off.  The Bordeaux Wine Council (CIVB) sponsored the trip and we’ve been working for and with them and CreativeFeed to help educate the public on the thousands of affordable, high quality and downright tasty Bordeaux wines that are imported to the US. These wines are the majority from Bordeaux and don’t cost the same amount as the many techno gadgets I brought along with me on the trip.  So there I was…in Bordeaux and yet I had never even been to Europe!

I was also able to finally meet the rest of the crew in person.
Indeed, other than a brief encounter with my fellow Bay Area Buff Rebecca Chapa, I had yet to meet any of these vinopanions IRL until now.  I had also wrangled in the men who comprise Mutineer Magazine to embed themselves in our vinous midst, so now we’d have shoots for both our documentary and photo ops for articles in the finest beverage magazine on earth…sweet.

I landed off my Air France flight with the Mutineers in tow and we made it to our homebase, the Hôtel de Normandie dead center in the middle of the city of Bordeaux.  We arrived with nary a minute to spare before taking a guided tour of the ancient city (it’s only a couple of thousand years old…give or take a decade…).  Breathtaking was a word that was used once or twice and the depth of knowledge of our tour guide was just as impressive. Brigitte’s enlightening tour was provided as a courtesy of the Office de Tourisme de Bordeaux. Walking around an ancient city was bound to stir up an appetite and well, a thirst!  Here we were surrounded by fantastic appellations or A.O.C. of vineyards and I had yet to have tasted a drop of that tasty fluid known as wine.

Fortunately, the CIVB predicted this predicament and we landed for what was to be the first of a long string of epic dinners, at a restaurant just a few blocks from the hotel, Chez Jean.  Yum.  More walking around after dark provided some great photo ops as you can see in some of the pics below.

All of the wines from this trip will/are tagged with “LWB2010BDX” and my photos and HD videos can be found by day (Day 1 for instance) and are also all tagged with “LWB2010BDX” on my Flickr.  Enjoy Bordeaux also has a set of fantastic photos at their own Flickr.  All of our tweets used the hashtag #LeWineBuff.  I will continue to upload the wines as I write these recaps and then compile all of the links in one final post for this series about Le Wine Buff in Bordeaux.

So what was the final tally?

12 Chateaux, 8 A.O.C., 9 restaurants, 2 hotels, ~110 wines, ~9GB of photos and videos, 11 pages (10pt MS Word font) of notes typed on my iPhone and 22 hours of sleep, whew.

Cheers!

Touring the city of Bordeaux, near the Opera