Day One of my life as a oenophile

Wines can be grouped into six main families: red, dry white, rose, sparkling wine, fortified wine and sweet wine. I learned this – and only this – from a sign in the Cite du Vin, a really famous wine museum in Bordeaux. My personal InfoBox/headset thing shut down after a minute or two – maybe it knew I just didn’t care – and so I strolled through the museum, gaining no real information.

I did see a fun exhibit – aimed at the children – where you put your nose near a glass jar and, squeezing a little bulbous thing, generate a little puff of odor. We split our museum time between here and the bathroom.

Why tour the wine museum at all? Same reason I sometimes drag us into an art gallery – exterior architecture. Here’s the Cite du Vin wine museum:

Before we move on to our other site of the day, I have two random pictures I want to share, apropos of nothing. The first is a bathroom at the train station, trying its hardest to be all-inclusive:

The second is one of a series of pictures that emblazon the cigarette packets here in France. There’s still a lot of smoking here – 34.6% vs. about 14% in the US. It’s noticeable. The packaging below was required starting in 2017.

Our other site of the day was Les Bassins de Lumieres. This is a light art exhibit built into an abandoned submarine base just outside the historical center of Bordeaux. It only opened in mid-2020 and bills itself as the largest digital art center in the world. Here’s what the outside looks like and I am sure my traveling group was having some doubts.

But everyone loved this place. They have made use of the entire submarine base – there are pools of water flowing under the catwalks and ultra-high ceilings – and they project art everywhere. In the pictures below, where you see darkness, it’s all water. The first picture is what you see when you first walk in – hopefully that picture gives you a sense of scale of the bunker. Bassins de Lumieres is magic!

My foray into tour guiding ends here until later this month as we join our 13-day Road Scholar tour this evening. I’ll talk to you all soon and leave you with a picture of what we see when we walk out the door of our Bordeaux hotel.