Château Valandraud
It was still fairly early in the morning, yet I could already sense the heat of the coming day, outside the comfort of my air-conditioned hire car, as I made my way along the road up to St Emilion. My journey along the smooth, snaking, tarmac surface took me past some familiar famous (and some not-so-famous) châteaux – Gaffelière, Moulin-St-Georges, Ausone and others – before the town finally appeared in front of me. The time of my appointment to meet Jean-Luc Thunevin of Château Valandraud was drawing near, and so at the earliest opportunity I parked up at the side of the road, and before the heat reached skin-crisping levels, struck out on foot for my destination, hoping that I wouldn’t be late.
The astute, Bordeaux-knowledgeable reader will have already detected a glaring inconsistency in my introduction. If you have driven around the peripheries of the St Emilion appellation you will already know that Château Valandraud lies on the very outskirts, near the hamlet of Saint Etienne de Lisse. It sits just 1.5 kilometres from the absolute boundary of the appellation, beyond which lie the vineyards of Castillon, a full 6.5 kilometres from the town of St Emilion itself. So what was I doing strolling (or rather marching – mustn’t be late!) through the streets of St Emilion itself?
