Wine Not? - Saint-Émilion

Once again, I'm writing about my adventures late. I'm just a very timely person, I suppose.

Last week, the Centre de Californie organized a group excursion to a little village called Saint-Émilion. Not knowing anything about the town, I asked my French mom if she was familiar with the place, and she just nodded her head and said, "Wine." Accurate because that's pretty much all we did last Friday, hence the title of this blog post. Let me recap for you.

Taking pictures on the bus because um, we've never been on one.

It didn't take too long to get to Saint-Émilion from Bordeaux centre-ville. Google Maps says it's only a 40-minute drive. We had to pass through the countryside, and as I looked out the window, I just saw plants on plants on plants. It's definitely a stark contrast to the concrete jungle that I'm used to, so when we finally got to Saint-Émilion, I was ready to bask in the glory of this little village.

Basking.

Like really? Views like this exist? #thathairisamess

Largest monolithic church in Europe + me.

This French woman gave us a tour of the tiny village, more specifically this church. She told us this story of some monk who stayed inside this cramped room of the church for seventeen years. Yeah, I wouldn't be able to do that. Ha. We were down there for 15 minutes, and my phone had no signal so I died. I would be miserable if it lasted for 17 years. There was also this magical chair in the room, and apparently, if you sit on it, you would miraculously get pregnant. I'm not about the preggers life though so I stayed standing, but our brave friend Maddie decided to pop a squat on it. We'll see how she is in 9 months.

But then came the part pretty much everyone came to Saint-Émilion for: THE WINE. We had to get back on the bus for 15 more minutes, but soon enough, we finally arrived at Chateau de Roques! It's one of the smaller chateaus in the area, which was pretty baffling to me because I thought this was already a pretty big chateau.

Joelle and Nicole, our fabulous guides from the Centre de Californie, led us into this dark room with dim lighting and introduced us to our tour guide, and the first thing I (and practically everyone else) noticed was that he was really cute. You could literally hear people giggling like middle school girls throughout the room as he was introducing himself. "Hi, my name is Gregoire, and I'm the owner's son..." The fact that he's going to inherit this castle when he gets older... yup, definitely made him more attractive. He did his best to explain how they make their wine in English, but it was pretty adorable when he had to ask Joelle how to say something.

Gregoire's mansion.

And just in case you're all curious, Monsieur Gregoire looks like this.

Creepy photo courtesy of Adena Ramos.

Gregoire taught us how to properly sample the wine. First, you have to smell the wine. Then, you swirl it around in your glass, not so violently that it spills but just enough. After that, you need to smell it again before you finally take a sip.

Sometime between my 2nd and 3rd glass.

We all had the opportunity to buy some of Chateau de Roques' finest wine, but we're all broke college students who weren't down to pay over €20 per bottle when we could just go to Simply Supermarket and buy them for less than €2 each.

As our wine-tasting was coming to an end, we (as in all the girls) realized that they wanted to take a picture with our sexy French tour guide, but we were all too shy to ask him. In the end, we had our friend Eric, a guy, ask. We were all pretty excited to pose with Monsieur Gregoire.

Sorority squat and all.

It was a loooong day, but hey, can't really complain about free wine. Probably the best part of all this is being able to share with some amazing people. I've only known most of these people for two and a half weeks, but I'm happy that everyone's chill.

Above average wine + more-than-mediocre people = good times.