Further south ... red wine country

Real trouble keeping up with the blog … technology has been getting in the way and things keep happening!  To have any chance of catching up we'll have to skip over our meander down through the Vendee and Charente, and jump straight to Blaye.

In 2007 we'd made our second, more determined attempt to get to Bordeaux and find out what all the fuss was about.  By a happy accident we stayed in the Villa Saint Simon in Blaye – where we had a fantastic welcome from the oenophile South African proprietor, Les Kellen.  He introduced us to his favourite local chateaux, the sort of places that make the wine that the region is famous for, at a reasonable price (and which seems to all be swallowed up by the domestic French market, leaving the dross and the £40 clarets for the Brits, who naturally turn to the Hunter Valley instead).

Blaye is a small town dominated by a spectacular seventeenth century fort, built by the famous (in France anyway) military architect Vauban on the orders of King Louis the Fourteenth.  It was intended to keep the British out, but these days everyone is welcome to squeeze in through a series of granite gateways and stay on the municipal campsite right inside the battlements.

Big, beautiful, blue, but not too big, not quite

We arrived on 20th, and once we'd checked in and found ourselves a plot with a fabulous view over the Gironde estuary we walked back into Blaye to say 'Hi' to Les.  A quick visit became a long evening of drinking wine and catching up with his many projects; wine tours, wine dealing, a new art gallery in the street behind Villa Saint Simon, a share in a vineyard and a derelict kiwi fruit farm which he plans to turn into an eco-resort.

On 22nd we moved to the kiwi farm for a couple of days of solitude next to the lake amongst the overgrown kiwi fruit vines, enjoying the company of the friendly resident geese and the coypu family and reading a MBA thesis on the eco-village project.

On 24th we headed off again to have a look at the Dordogne, making our way to Perigeaux, Brive Le Galliarde and Rocamadour. 

This post does our travels no justice, but is dedicated to everyone to whom we gave promises to tell them what we were doing! To bring it right up to date, it's 28th September and we're having a delicious lunch in the WiFi equipped La Table du Marais restaurant overlooking the lake in Groléjac (Scooby is sleeping underneath the table - when we ask if we can bring him into a restaurant we are usually met with a surprised expression and 'Bien sur, pas de probleme!').