Living large and getting large in France

Clever title, I know. I should to this for a living... but It's all downhill from here...

So we're in Bordeaux as Karen wrote, and we went on a wine harvest tour. We chose the tour because it was hosted by Les Medocaines, which is a group of 4 female vintners who chose to came together to do something no man had ever done before:
show strangers how their wine was made.

It doesn't sound that amazing, but apparently it was very secretive in the past, but these women decided to host tours of their chateaux so that people could get a better idea of what the process of winemaking is about.

Anyways, it was like a French Joy Luck club, so being the vagina-monologue loving women we are, we had to support.

We learned how to taste the grapes:
1. squeeze it and rub the juice between your fingers to determine the sweetness of the fruit (is it sticky enough?)
2. eat the seed, which should be crunchy and taste like hazelnuts
3. eat the fruit

The best vintages of the bordeaux region are 2000 and 2005, and 2 wines that we loved were:
Chateau Valentin: Premiere Cotes de Blaye, 2005
Chateau Gros Caillou: Saint Emilion Grand Crut, 2004

For dinner today, we had rillons de canard, bordeaux red wine, baguette, marmonitte cheese, and eclairs for dessert.

Stretchy pants, here we coooome

-MC