This Chateau Life

Wedding planning weekends – the big feed February 19, 2010

Five brides gathered at Rigaud over the weekend for a wedding planning weekend with the Rigaud team. We love these weekends since they give us the opportunity to get to know the couple and in some cases their close family and to work out what they really want from their chateau wedding.

On Saturday we visited head chef Laurent, at what he romantically refers to as his “laboratoire”. You or I might describe it as his industrial catering unit but hey, this is France. There, in the heart of the kitchen the brides sampled everything they will be served during their wedding day and they were able to choose specific course options they will go for.

First up were oysters, crevettes, ceviche and tartare of scallop with wild salmon, swiftly followed by foie gras toasts with cèps and more with figs. Superb jambon “Patta Negra” with red pepper tapenade came next and for me the star of the canapé parade was the pan fried scallops with leeks and saffron jus.

Starters were limited to asparagus with smoked salmon or the guacamole with crab which looks fabulous in a tall Martini glass. Laurent explained that he is always happy to do a delicious seasonal salad to start, with perhaps asparagus and quail egg in the spring? There’s room to improvise. For mains they had the regional signature dish of confit de canard with dauphinois potatoes. It never fails to please. Then the cheese course was Brebis with Morello cherry jam.

Before dessert the brides were given a spun caramel demonstration which will stand them in good stead for married domestic bliss, then came the “Declinaison Autour du Chocolat” an assembly of chocolate delights. The secondary dessert was a quick profiterole which would form the Piece Monte wedding cake that we can offer in place of a dessert on the wedding day.

We rolled them back out of the laboratoire into cars for the trip home where the real wine tasting began. They didn’t really do justice to Frank’s fabulous buffet that evening which we’re still finishing for lunch.

But THESE are “Wedding Flowers”! February 4, 2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ff13zZ0h0k

This made me laugh out loud…. It’s so true! I managed to avoid this sort of nonsense at Rigaud last year by setting off to the flower market myself for several of our brides who ended up with flowers at wholesale prices for their mum’s to arrange.

Today we found an even better solution to the challenge in the shape of a fabulous lady called Jenny Moss. Jenny lives locally but before moving to France she had an award winning Interflora franchise in the UK. Jenny is joining the team here at Rigaud as our “in house” florist and will help our brides work up their mood boards in the planning stages before turning their ideas into reality on the big day.

So our brides will have stunning flowers, a personal consultant who’s not trying to sell to them and great prices. Win, win, win…

Homespun Christmas Chateau December 25, 2009

Inspired by the ridiculousness of Kirsty Allsop’s Home Made Christmas (brilliantly described by one critic as “Marie Antoinette TV”) the Rigaud team have strained every artistic muscle to deliver a thoroughly home made gift for our very lucky Christmas guests.

Amazon delivery boxes were recycled into hand finished packaging with unique spot paintings on each one. Inside the guests will find chocolate fudge, toffee brittle and some divine Florentines, along with some truly appalling Christmas cracker jokes.

This was a Rigaud Workers Co-Operative effort with additional forced child labour. Creative Direction from Anna, paint effects by Lizzie, jokes researched and selected by Thomas, packaging construction from the Badger, confectionary by Frank and ribbons and distribution by Annemarie.

Twenty five of these little packages will sit on the ends of the beds, welcoming guests to their Christmas chateau. How lucky are they!

i-escape to the vines on a Rigaud Wine Weekend December 21, 2009

Founder of discerning boutique travel website i-escape (www.i-escape.co.uk) Nikki Tinto and husband Aidan, were with us again this autumn, forming their own Wine Weekend house party with friends that they have introduced to Rigaud. This was their third paying visit, they have already joined two of our family house parties with baby Poppy. We really should make more of their endorsement. Nikki and Aidan are THE authority upon independent boutique travel and they choose to spend a fair amount of their own holiday euros at Rigaud.

The i-escape Wine Weekend was a deliberately relaxed style of wine tour. In St Emilion we visited Grand Cru Classé Chateau Beau Séjour Bécot along with Chateau Fontrazade where the lovely Madame proprietor showed us her wines and her horses. Another highlight was lunch at La Puce, something of a St Emilion establishment, where they serve five or six courses of whatever is available that day, alongside vine workers, wine merchants and Gendarmes. It’s usually an intimidating real French experience but as a group of ten we held our ground.

The following day we headed south, driving for half an hour across the stunning rolling hills of the Entre Deux Mers vineyards, to Sauternes. We were received at the classified estate of Chateau Guiraud where they were mid harvest. We learned all about how Bordelais protectionism brought about the region’s delicious dessert wine and tasted the rotten grapes which produce it. The tasting here was nothing short of magnificent although dangerous – we ended up buying a half case to add to the Rigaud cellar. The Wine Weekend was a fabulous success as always and we’re planning several more for 2010.

The Sun came out for our high profile media wedding September 9, 2009

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t anxious about last weekend. It wasn’t the larger numbers attending or the higher than average spend that concerned me as much as the combined media weight represented in Rigaud’s ‘rustique’ wedding barn and the potential fallout should things be less than perfect. When you have the editor of the largest selling newspaper in the UK joined by an array associated high flying colleagues you want to be sure it’s right, don’t you.

Life experience had taught me that this would inevitably be the wedding when a freak storm of monsoon proportions would flood the grounds, taking out the power along with a couple of trees and that the “luck” of rain on your wedding day would be lost on our savvy bride.

Well it didn’t happen. It was all shockingly perfect with just the right amount of sun, the right shade of flowers and even my occasionally tetchy French caterers were on best behaviour. It was another very lovely, glamorous wedding at Chateau Rigaud of which we are very proud.

In fact if truth be known, the only ones to let themselves down were the slightly naughty Rigaud team who, after threading 650 white chrysanthemums onto fishing wire, bunching 120 lavender sprigs, tying ribbons around 120 Roccoco chocolate bars (without eating a single one), placing out 150 paper bag lanterns and 100 candle tree lanterns, stapling 60 confetti cones and hanging 30 wicker hearts, did at around about midnight get stuck into a couple of bottles of vodka and were still to be seen on the dance floor at around 4am when all the media babes had no doubt filed their stories for the night.

Sunday was an entirely different matter….

We are gathered here today…. August 28, 2009

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Celebrity photographer puts Rigaud in the Bridal Soup

When the bride’s brother is a wedding photographer to the rich and famous www.BrettHarknessphotography.com it puts a degree of pressure on the venue. Brett has shot weddings in the most prestigious venues and his Texan wife Kristie knows a thing or two about how a wedding should be run. We had to get it right or we’d know about it.

It’s an even bigger compliment that the wedding has now made it to the pages of super blogsite, Bridal Soup www.bridalsoup.com

Check out the full story and some incredible images at http://www.bridalsoup.com/?cat=108

West London Lifestyle brings cutting edge vegetarian food to Rigaud July 3, 2009

Vegetarians are not well catered for in France. The French have no time for the sensitivities of non meat eaters so you can imagine that using our regular caterers who specialise in Fois Gras for a Vegan bride was a disturbing concept. When Russell and Paivi came to our wedding planning weekend in November last year the tasting session with Laurent, our regular wedding “traiteur”, went just about as badly as it could have done. While the rest of our couples tucked into fabulous prawns, oysters, Serrano ham three ways with foie gras and duck confit, Paivi was offered an endive leaf with a mandarin segment, followed by some sad out of season asparagus and the grand finale was a slab of gratin dauphinois. Yes, it was made with cream. No, Laurent was not embarrassed. He just shrugged and offered to take it off her plate, leaving just the spinach.

It was obvious that using a French team to produce a Vegan wedding feast for a couple who wanted “a celebration of Vegetarian food with some Vegan options”, was just not going to work.

We thought about it a bit and then struck upon the idea that we could bring a Vegetarian friendly London team down to Bordeaux to show us how to do it. And that is what happened last weekend when a very cool piece west London lifestyle arrived here in the Bordeaux. Michael Daniels and his team from The Gate in Hammersmith flew in on Thursday and our Rigaud chef team took them to the local markets and producers. We found all the herbs they needed in the Rigaud vegetable garden and after a long twelve hours of cooking they produced a vegetarian feast that would have convinced any committed carnivore.

The sad thing was that Laurent was not here to see what they did. We would have learned a thing or two.

The coolest looking Wedding table plan June 28, 2009

Full marks to Liberty for requesting this blackboard inspired table plan. Looks great doesn’t it.

Liberty and Oliver’s Wedding Part I June 14, 2009

The Badger described it as “easy on the eye” and kept on and on about the legs but it was more than the ladies who looked utterly stunning at the Rigaud wedding this weekend. I think the keyword was simplicity. Liberty was certain about her colour from the start, which she described as “electric purple”. The colour was subtly repeated in the ribbons wrapping their very witty invite (photo booth poses) and in the favour wrapping, the flowers, the bridesmaids dresses, the grooms men’s ties and even the lanterns later in the evening.

There was panic when the carefully ordered electric purple gladioli arrived and were most definitely white with purple edges. They weren’t going to cut it on their own in the barn which definitely needs some colour, so, what to do? The answer was a mercy dash on Thursday morning to the Bordeaux flower market where they had a stock of gorgeous purple Lisianthus. We placed generous bunches in tall straight vases, alternated them with vases of Gladioli and voila, the flowers were all sorted out. The purple paper wrapped favours contained Space Invader sweeties.

It was all just lovely.