This is one of France’s top tourist spots, perhaps like Noosa is for Australia. It is famous for its (only red) wines and we could hardly believe that vines were planted in this area by the Romans as early as the second century. Hard to describe how pretty this place was. Even in the rain.

The soil is ideal as it is quite shallow (at 20-30 cm in the chateau we visited) and on top of limestone which has been removed to make lots of tunnels and cellars. It is estimated that there are over 200km of tunnels under Saint-Émilion. Most of the limestone was used to construct the local buildings and even for many of the buildings in nearby villages and towns including Bordeaux.

We did a clever thing, and took the first tourist train of the day – clever because there we only 7 of us on that tour (the next one had at least 30) and I could never have driven the tiny roads we travelled on. You can see I was pretty happy about our decision as it had just started to rain.

Part of the tour took us to one of the vineyards – Chateau Rochebelle . Here we saw where they stored the wine during its production in underground tunnels / caves.

This is one of the best wineries in the area, a badge they can get when certain conditions are met, similar to Michelin Hats for restaurants we were told. This winery can now label its wines as Grand Cru Classé. Each vintage is stored in brand new oak barrels that cost €700 each ( holding about 300 bottles worth) and they cellar the wine for up to 30 years. This chateau only sells wine on site and we learnt the correct way to taste the wine – I found that particularly challenging with my braces. Prices for a bottle of wine started at €30 (for 2008) and up to as high as €100 (for 1975). Some vintages were sold out. We found it hard to believe that this chateau was only 3 hectares in size. Needless to say we just sipped on the “free” sample of the Grand Cru Classé 2012 vintage.

While we waited for the train to pick us up and to drop the next load of tourists off, I was reading about where to next. Once we returned to town we explored the place on foot until our next tour at 2pm, after some lunch of course. This is a photo of Michael enjoying a glass of a local Grand Cru Classé with a hamburger of all things. Is that a food faux par? I think the wine cost more than his meal!

Walking through this village is pretty tricky as there are four of these streets known as tertres. This is a made up word specific for this town to describe these steep cobblestone pedestrian ways.

The centre of town is built around this church and its cloister. The Tourism Office is part of this cloister.

Our final tour took us into the largest monolithic underground church in the world (38mx20mx11m high). Carved out of rock it was very impressive.

We learnt why the town is named Saint-Émilion. In the 8th Century, a monk named Émilion lived in a cave in the town for 17 years. During this time, he had a number of followers and they were buried in catacombs that they dug in the centre of this town. We got to walk through these on the way to the underground church and also viewed these well preserved murals which date back to 13thC.

What I found very interesting is that he was never canonised as a saint. Our guide told us he is called a Saint “by tradition”. Now, that probably explains an earlier question I had about Saint Front and now Saint Foy. The answer is I am not French!

In order to walk off lunch we bought a ticket to allow us to walk 196 steps up the bell tower so we could get some great views of this city- many of its sites have been listed by UNESCO, including this tower.

This certainly was well worth a visit, and thanks again to Melinda for recommending this as a must. We head back to Bergerac tomorrow to return our car and get ready to head for England.