Wine Bar Lunches in Bordeaux

I’m recently back from another French river cruise. Regular readers may recall my posts about dining on and off cruises on the Loire, the Rhône, and the Seine. The latest one was on the Garonne, in southwest France, which flows into the Gironde estuary and on to the Atlantic Ocean. Same cruise company, Crosieurope, and a slightly bigger ship, MS Cyrano de Bergerac.
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This time I won’t be writing about shipboard dining, which wasn’t noteworthy, unfortunately. Instead, I’ll focus on two days Tom and I spent on our own in Bordeaux, after the cruise. We were staying in the historic St. Pierre district, rich in opportunities for strolling, sightseeing, eating, and wine drinking. This post will be about our lunches there.

Now, we don’t like to eat big lunches; and at home we almost never drink wine with lunch. When traveling, it can be hard to find small midday meals that are as interesting and pleasurable as we hope for as vacationers. That’s the beauty of wine bars, where we can enjoy tapas-style small food items, with wines that we don’t get at home. And Bordeaux is unquestionably world-class wine country.

We took our first day’s lunch at the wine bar of the city’s official Maison du Vin de Bordeaux. Its spacious, quiet, comfortable Bar à Vin offered 30 wines by the glass from all the Bordeaux appellations, and half a dozen assortments of cheeses, meats, and foie gras. Prices were very reasonable: each food plate €10, wines €5 to €10 a glass. Everything on the menu looked wonderful. And in fact, it all was.

We started with two glasses of a 2018 Les Hautes de Smith red Pessac-Léognan (There’s more about all the wines on Tom’s blog) and a plate of charcuterie: pork terrine, cured ham, smoked duck breast, and a dry sausage.
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Next we chose a wine comparison: one glass of a Médoc, 2011 Château La Cardonne, and one of an Haut Médoc, 2012 Château Larose Perganson. With them we had a plate of duck foie gras served with flakes of a special sea salt infused with Merlot wine.
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Even the breads served along with the small dishes were exceptional, especially the lightly raisined brown breads in the picture above. This was a small but perfectly satisfying lunch, leaving us contented and capable of looking forward with enthusiasm to dinner.

On our second day, remembering the many attractive choices we didn’t make for the previous lunch, we went right back to the Bar à Vin. We started with two glasses of a white Pessac-Leognan: 2019 Château Olivier, accompanied by rillettes of trout. It was surprising to see the rillettes arrive in our own little sealed, labeled jar, but the menu said it was a local product.
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Next, it was was back to red wine: two glasses of 2018 Chateau Tour du Termes St. Estèphe, along with the eponymous Bar à Vin assortment of edibles. The plate had three kinds of cheese – Cantal, Saint Nectaire, and Tomme de Savoie – and two cured meats. One was a Swiss air-dried beef, and the other an Italian salted and dried pork coppa.  Each was a paradigm of its kind.
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With all that, we needed one more glass of wine. A 2018 Pavillon du Haut Rocher Saint-Emilion concluded another thoroughly satisfying lunch.

.My next post will be about the equally fine dinners we enjoyed on those two days in Bordeaux.