August 28, 2013
Soulliac to Pauillac: Into wine country, touring the Medoc
While we were waiting for the ferry yesterday we spotted scallop shells on the back of two bikes. They must be pilgrims on the way to Santiago de Compostella. Indeed they were they were Thea and Willem Vink two dedicated pilgrims who had left their home in Holland three weeks previously on their way to Santiago. What a lovely couple, they are equipped of course with fantastic looking Dutch touring bikes. It was a pleasure to have dinner with them last night. Our routes separated today and I doubt if we will see them in Santiago as they are very much stronger cyclists than us.
Today we left the Velodysee and the Atlantic Coast. Both of us feel that we have seen enough of beaches and forest tracks for the moment. The route we had mapped out with the extremely helpful young woman in the Information turned out to be perfect and certainly not too long as Ken had feared. We spent almost the entire time on the D3 which had only a little traffic and perfect surfaces. It led us the whole way from church spire to church spire through little villages. At first the low lying land had a mixture of farming. Tidal inlets from the Girronne Estuary reach up here and it made me think of the documentary I had seen recently on the History Chanel. It involved an attack in WW2 when canoeists were let out at the mouth of the estuary, their mission to paddle up the estuary and attach limpit mines to German War Ships. They paddled at night and hid in these muddy estuaries by day. Of course the mortality was enormous. How very different for us riding our bikes on an easy surface with the thought of a bed waiting for us at the other end.
After around 15 to 20 km the first vineyards began to appear, these looked good but were not absolutely immaculate and there were still blackberries on the side of the road. However from St Christoly-Medoc onwards we were into the really serious stuff. The viticulturist in Ken was having a great time. As Francois had told us many of the rows in this area are very close together with spacings of about 1m and about 1m between the plants in the rows. The trellising is very low compared with ours and there are usually only three wires. The fruiting wire is very low which made me feel very sorry for the pickers of those grapes that are hand picked. This configuration of course means it is almost impossible to use anything but straddle tractors and some of these go over 3 rows. We saw spraying, cultivation between the rows and trimming. These tractors look inherently very unstable as they have such a high centre of gravity. Merlot is the predominant grape in this area and at the moment they are about three quarters of the way through veraison which means that picking wont be for at least another month. There were quite a lot of new plantings and these were being cared for very carefully. Not a net in sight, amazing when I think what we have to to to save our grapes from birds.
It is fun to ride along and see the signs announcing the famous Chateaux, Mouton Rothschild, Lafit Rothschild, Blanquet etc. They looked fantastic. We reached Pauillac early and found the hotel with relative ease. Following the woman’s instructions as to where to park the bikes and where our room was was another matter altogether. The Office de Tourisme was close by and I have a new method for finding accommodation for the next night I find someone kind in the tourist information who is prepared to ring up the next tourist information and sort us out. They also gave us a tasting of a very nice wine from the Medoc, half Cab Sav and half Merlot, very smooth with not a trace of ‘greens’
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Today's ride: 62 km (39 miles)
Total: 1,767 km (1,097 miles)
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