We travelled a long way yesterday, and the Bordeaux region looks nothing like Guérande. The forests and gray stone houses of Brittany have been replaced with vineyards and yellow limestone buildings. It’s beautiful here too, and luckily our B&B turned out to be very nice. We’re staying with a family that has two little girls for Anna to play with, and they have a pool, a trampoline, and a big grass-covered yard. It’s not quite warm enough to use the pool, but the trampoline is a big hit. I think it helps that the language barrier between the girls isn’t much of an issue there… jumping & giggling is pretty universal.
This morning we went to check out a local winemaker, Chateau Villemaurine. Like many of the wineries around here, it’s built on top of the limestone plateau that Saint-Émílion sits in the middle of. The limestone has been heavily mined (for blocks to make all the buildings out of) so there’s now a network of tunnels that’s hundreds of miles long. Villemaurine sits over one of the entrances to the underground quarry, and they’ll take you down there to see a bit of it and watch a pretty cool light & sound show that they built down there to tell the story of the 8th century monk who gave Saint-Émílion its name. They don’t mine limestone anymore because they started having too many cave-ins, but they do have motion detectors in the tunnels at property lines so they know if someone wanders into their part of the quarry from a neighboring property.