Visit to Chateau Sabazan vineyard

Lovely visit to a vineyard with friends. It is part of the Plaimont collective. This chateau grows and produces the wine onsite - which then allows the wine to have ‘Chateau’ in the name. About an hours drive from us.

Nice old buildings with stone walls (and Doug)

This is our guide getting some wine out of an oak barrel for us to taste. It has been in there 6 months and will mature for another 6 months before bottling.

This is the Chateau itself. Plaimont bought it some years ago, but it has a mad 95 year old lady who refuses to move out because she says they never paid her the money (it sounds like she didn’t get much money because it had to go to paying off all her debts). 

These vats are used to ferment the wine from the grape juice and also in various blending procedures.

As we as the wine straight from the oak barrel we tasted several different ages of wine. It was amazing how much it changed as it aged. It started off with quite sharp fruity flavours with the oak being quite a harsh woody taste and then mellowed and got more complex with age. Very interesting.

This years grapes are not quite ripe yet. We also heard about how they manage the vines, lots of work to make sure that they have the best flavour possible and the right sweetness.

We had a nice packed lunch with some more of the wine. Thankfully Liz was driving!