How to buy wine in Bordeaux

Tasting wine in Bordeaux isn't quite like tasting wine in Barossa. In Australia, they know you want to taste the wine, so when you go to visit them, they give you a bunch of wines to taste. But on our visites to many chateaux in Bordeaux, the experience seems to be that you spend an hour being shown around the wine making process, and then you have an opportunity to taste one, two, or three wines. This might help convince opportunistic tourists not to go everywhere and taste everything - but then how do you learn what you like?

There is the Maison du Vin in each commune. They offer various courses, but not (in my experience) educational tastings. You can buy a whole bottle of most wines...

You can try tasting some wines with meals in restaurants. But (at the restaurants/price-brackets we chose) there wasn't a huge variety, and you can't get all the wines by the glass.

The only real option seems to be to go to a bottleshop or in the vernacular, a Cave. The salesmen will offer you a couple of things to taste, and then start pressuring you to buy. If you have a clear idea wof what you want to try, then you may have more luck. We found ourselves buying a couple of bottles just to get out of one place.

The best wine buying experience we had was at the Avant Garde cave in Margaux. Yes, it helped that the owner was an Australian - Wayne McCarthy. They had one wine open for tasting when we went in - it was nice, and we decided we'd buy that one. But Wayne suggested we should choose a dozen to send back to England. In practise, after we specified our budget (approx €15/bottle), he chose a dozen that he said were good value for money and a good variety. The postage to the UK wasn't too expensive (€29) and the wines arrived in good order in their wooden case.

Tonight we opened the first bottle, a 2004 Chateau Poujeaux from Moulis. It's fantastic - decent body, depth, & length! Apart perhaps from the Premier Cru Classe ones that were over €200/bottle, this one (at €20.50) is probably better than all the ones I tasted on the trip. Who knows what influences - the weather, the cooking, relaxing at home - might make the difference. But I'm convinced that Wayne really did help us get great wine at a bargain price.

It's a bit prohibitive to do it from Australia, but if you're in England say, and you wanted a case of delicious Bordeaux wine, I'd suggest emailing Wayne for some ideas and a quote.

For the record, the dozen that we bought were:

• Ch. Tour Haut-Caussan 2001 (Médoc)
• Ch. Penin "Les Cailloux"2005 (Bordeaux)
• Ch. Citran 2004 (Haut-Médoc)
• Ch. Haut-Bergeron 2002 (Sauternes)
• Ch. Charmail 2004 (Haut-Médoc)
• Ch. Poujeaux 2004 (Moulis) - tonight's delight
• Ch. Deyrem Valentin 2002 (Margaux)
• Ch. Des Graviers 2004 (Margaux)
• Ch. Moutte Blanc 2002 (Bordeaux)
• Clos de Bigos 2005 (Margaux)
• Ch. Potensac 2004 (Médoc)
• Ch. La Galiane 2003 (Margaux) - the one we tasted in the Cave.

Cheers!