Category Archives: Bordeaux

The inaugural Bread & Wine weekend

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Twitt

montage

The inaugural Bread and Wine weekends took place this autumn and were a considered a complete success. As predicted it took chef Steve Carss no time at all to find his demonstration patter and within 30 minutes of arriving at the chateau we had guests making their own bread.

Our first group was a full house of twelve guests, consisting of the fabulous @Markboltonphoto and his assorted entourage of Bristol mates, alongside our lovely returning American clients Grace and Larry, who had been on a previous wine course at Rigaud.

Proceedings kicked off with a couple of glasses of fizz in the lounge before course leader, Peter Tucker, brought the group through to the kitchen where we had twelve work stations complete with brand new mixing bowls, water, flour, yeast and Rigaud branded aprons laid out and ready to go. It was one of those very proud moments for the chateau team.

Steve introduced his ‘slap & tickle’ method of needing dough whilst Peter answered their questions such as “what is Yeast?” It didn’t take long before the badly behaved boy guests were slapping backsides with flour covered hands but we did eventually get to the stage where the chefs were happy and we could all retire to bar for a quick tasting of white wines from South West France. If nothing else this week gave us an excuse to drink non-Bordeaux wines.

The Friday was a crisp but sunny and rather ‘lifestyle magazine’ perfect for lunch in the vegetable garden with home made pizzas cooked in the newly installed bread oven.

Chateau Villemaurine in St. Emilion was the venue for the afternoon tour and tasting before returning to Rigaud and meeting up with Paddy O’Flynn, (www.TheWineBuff.com) with his mate Pierre, who quite by chance happened to be the owner/winemaker of Chateau Petit Fombrauge, one of the wines chosen for the exceptional gourmet dinner that night.

Guests drank into the wee small hours so it was a slower start to proceedings on the Saturday when chef introduced the mystical concept of “the mother”, a living, breathing and reproducing yeast that needs feeding every day. Two starters were used, one which is thirty years old and provided by our baker, Phillipe and one that Steve had been working on for just a month based on figs and grapes from the gardens. If you want to know about this you’ll have to book on to the next course.

The afternoon involved a trip to Sauterne where it was ‘Portes Ouvertes’ (open doors). This is the dream ticket of French tasting tours – the opportunity to rock up, take a quick look at the chai, taste the produce and move on to the next place. We took in four chateaux in total including 1er Grand Cru Classé   Chateau Guiraud. Many purchases were made and shared over dinner, along with some delicious Hospices de Beaune Burgundy wines.

We’re planning to repeat the weekend again, perhaps in April, depending upon uptake. Get in touch if you fancy a relaxed weekend which includes a spot of bread making, a walk in the vegetable garden, maybe a massage, a trip to a couple of chateaux some really delicious food and perhaps a little too much wine, if indeed that is possible?!

Focus on our house white – Chateau Bauduc

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Twitt

We’ve been serving Chateau Bauduc Sauvignon Blanc at Rigaud for several years now and in 2012 it will be our standard house white for party bookings and weddings. We’re in good company with this choice – the same wine has been a house white at Gordon Ramsay (for the past ten years), at Rick Stein’s various restaurants and at the Hotel du Vin establishments.

I love the post on the Bauduc blog in which wine writer Jancis Robinson rates the Bauduc 2009 which retails in the UK at £8.95 more highly than the slightly more expensive Chateau Mouton Rothschild blanc 2009, selling at £70 and only half a point behind the wildly extravagant Chateau Haut Brion blanc 2009 for which you will pay in the region of £750. This makes a Chateau Rigaud wedding look like rather good value when you consider how much of the Bauduc blanc is consumed by guests as part of our package!

Oz Clark also had complimentary comments

“The whites ought to fly off the shelf because they are absolutely the right wine for 2011: the zeitgeist of white wine drinking – the Bauduc Whites hit it bang in the middle”

Oz Clarke, March 2011

If you’re getting married at Rigaud, or you’re attending a wedding or a party here and you get a taste for the Bauduc white then you’ll be delighted to hear that you can buy online, direct from the chateau and expect delivery within three to five days. It would be like having a bit of Rigaud delivered to the door, albeit in fact a bit of Bauduc. But I think you get the drift. www.bauduc.com

The Great Night Market Controversy

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Twitt

The Marché Nocturne season is now in full swing and the Rigaud team supported our local village last night, cue mass hangover this morning. It’s a phenomenon that’s really caught on in the past couple of years, hence the hedgerows are filled with posters advertising the dates and villages for the next few weeks.

The idea is a little like a French take on a pop up restaurant. Village squares are filled with communal trestle tables and the people gather to picnic together, sitting under strings of coloured lights to the strains of an accordion player. Villagers gather together a meal from a range of local suppliers, drink copious quantities of wines, and usually follow it all up with dancing. Great night out for all concerned, N’est pas?

On offer last night were Arcachon oysters, melons grown down by the river, some really delicious escargot cooked in butter, parsley and garlic, a charcuterie producer with some great terrines and pates in jars (we chose the goose), Mr. Banier, the butcher from Castillon with his sarment BBQ, the goat cheese producer from Pessac and of course the local baker since no French meal would be complete without a French stick.

You don’t really need to take your own gear but we like to do things properly so we arrive with our own china, wine glasses, steak knives and even a large antique china platter. Chef, Steve, knocked up a few canapés which went down well with the oysters and the rosé and Mr. Banier happily filled with a very rare steak and chips for eight of us.

The whole thing is utterly charming and incredible value since it’s possible to eat well for 10 euros, buy your wines at cellar door prices and enjoy the spectacular sights of local councillors strutting their stuff on the dance floor.

The controversy in my mind is how this sits with the local restaurant owners. The restaurateurs pay rates and taxes on their premises and keep them open throughout the year in the hope that they will make the bulk of their money over the summer evenings when we’re all tempted to eat out on a more regular basis. Suddenly they are now competing with the night markets for clientele that would previously have been theirs.

To make things worse, they’re competing against their own suppliers, the very businesses that they, the restaurants, support all year long. The butcher, the cheese maker, the baker are all taking free stands on a weekend evening to sell directly to the people who would otherwise have taken a table in a restaurant that night. It doesn’t seem quite right to me.

The night markets are definitely delivering what their audience want – the atmosphere is fabulous and now we’re in the height of the season it’s possible to attend a different night market within twenty minutes of the chateau, from Thursday to Sunday every week. But I do worry for the local restaurants. It must be quite disheartening to find yourself undercut by your cheese supplier and facing empty tables over the summer weekends.

i-escape to the vines on a Rigaud Wine Weekend

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Twitt

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

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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….