Me: “So it’s pronounced ‘Cité du Vin’?” (mangling the pronunciation)

Friend: “The ‘in’ is said like you’re smiling”

Me: “I’m not sure that I want to smile when I’m speaking French.”

And that, my friends, is why I prefer blogging. At least when I write out the names of the museum, you can read it in the correct pronunciation and no one has to hear me attempt to pronounce things correctly.

So anyway, while we were in Bordeaux, we decided to visit two wine museums and I thought it would be fun to put both of them in a post!

Cité du Vin: Huge & Impressive, looks like a decanter

The bigger and more famous museum is Cité du Vin and you really can’t miss this one! The permanent exhibit is just the second floor, which I thought would be fairly quick to go through, but nope, I was wrong. There’s just so much to see here and there’s really something for everyone. Within the permanent exhibition, we saw:

• An introduction to wines
• Wines from around the world
• The history of wine (my favourite! I love history!)
• Engaging the senses: you can smell notes that wines might have and test yourself on the colours

It is quite a lot to go through. I was just through the history section when I realised we had been there for one and a half hours and we were still far from done.

What I really liked about this museum was how interactive it is. The interactivity starts from the audio guide, which is triggered by certain touchpoints. If text is needed, the guide triggers the correct language for the text as well. And in the section on engaging the senses, you can really smell the different notes present in wine, from some unpleasant ones like leather to some really nice ones like berries and mint. There are also displays where you can practice pairing wine with food and testing yourself to see if you can identify the different colours of wine.

Oh, and for those of you who like manga – this museum had 1 exhibit on comics and manga, and that reminded me that there’s a manga focused on wine! It’s called Drops of God and if I remember correctly, would provide a good introduction to wines and how they taste.

When you’re done with the exhibition, go on up to the 8th floor to claim a free glass of wine! There’s a great view of the city from there and I liked that we got to pick the wines that we wanted. All in all, we spent about 3.5 hours here and agreed that we could easily have spent another hour or two more if we didn’t have something on in the afternoon.

Wine & Trade Museum: Small but focused on Bordeaux

The Wine & Trade Museum is much smaller than the Cité du Vin (just the size of two wine cellars), but I think it’s worth a visit if you’re interested in learning more about Bordeaux wines. The museum is broken into two sections: one on wine and trade (no surprise) and one on the more technical aspect of wines, such as the barrels for ageing, the invention of sulphur in wine, and the labels.

And although most of the exhibits are in French, the museum shop has a free file with detailed English explanations of the exhibits. I found this to be really helpful and managed to understand pretty much everything with it.

This museum also offers wine tasting for guests! The wine tasting is basically an introduction to Bordeaux wines and we tasted a red wine, a white wine, and tried some chocolate covered raisins that had been soaked in a sweet white wine.

Which should you go to?

I would say that both museums are worth going to! The Cité du Vin gives a very comprehensive overview of wine itself, but it can be large and there’s so much information that you can miss things. If you just want to know more about Bordeaux wines, it makes sense to go to the Wine and Trade Museum, where you will learn specifically about the region and its wine history.

In terms of timing, leave at least half the day for Cité du Vin and about one hour for the Wine and Trade Museum (you may have to wait for the wine tasting, so check the timings before you start! The actual museum itself doesn’t take that much time). But no matter which one you go to, I’m sure you’ll have fun tasting wine.