Touring Bordeaux - Pauillac, Chateau Lynch-Bages

This is the seventeenth post in the Around the World Birthday Extravaganza Series. Please scroll to the bottom to see all the other posts in this series.

My first memory of Chateau Lynch-Bages is quite special. It was back in 2012. I knew virtually nothing about French wines at the time.

2012 was the year Bryan and I took our first trip to Australia and New Zealand. Bryan had given his parents airline miles to fly anywhere in the world first class as a retirement gift. They chose the region Down Under, but requested that we travel there as a whole family.

I’ll never forget that dreamy first class international flight on Cathay Pacific. Not only did I see Northern Lights dancing for 45 minutes from an airplane window while flying over the arctic circle (that alone was already breathtakingly phenomenal), the staff wined and dined us the entire flight.

I drank plenty of Krug champagne, and I fell in love with Chateau Lynch-Bages Bordeaux wine.
It had been years since I had tasted this memorable 5th growth Bordeaux, but now I would finally have another chance.

Our second full day in Bordeaux, we hopped into a car and drove about an hour north to yet another a wine growing region. After a morning tasting at Cos D’Estournel, we stopped by the town of Pauillac to find a quick lunch and grab a cup of coffee.

Perhaps because it was off-season, but the streets were woefully dead and we had a hard time finding places to eat or get coffee. Ironically, we saw a lot of “coiffeur” (barbershop), which looks just close enough to the word “coffee” that our hopes kept rising and falling back down.

After much wandering around, we finally found a delightful South American restaurant where we enjoyed steamed mussels, fried potatoes, and some refreshing salads. It wasn’t French food, but it was tasty and we actually had a great lunch.

After lunch, we headed over to the tiny town of Bages for our next winery visit: Lynch-Bages.
One of the coolest part of the Lynch-Bages tour is that you get to see their old wine-making “museum”. It’s a rare chance to see first hand traditional, old-school winemaking equipment. Most wineries have long gotten rid of all their historic equipment, so it’s really cool to see the real thing and to imagine what winemaking must have been like back in the day.

They are very proud of their one bottle, a 1975 vintage, that traveled to space and back in 1985 on the first French-American space mission via Discovery. The bottle now sits sealed inside a glass chamber along with a photo of Patrick Baudry, the astronaut who brought it to space.

After getting a tour of the fermentation and barrel aging rooms, we headed to the tasting room to try five different wines. It was fun to taste them all, but we all agreed that the flagship Bordeaux (the last one) was the best.

This was our last night in Bordeaux. Our friends’ parents were watching their toddler daughter for the day, giving us an opportunity to have a fancy dinner (what they call “long dinner” to their daughter) at a two-Michelin starred restaurant right in Bages.