Chateau Pedesclaux

The first stop of the day was Chateau Pedesclaux. We took a tour of their winery and learned about the process of making wine. It was very informative. The girl who worked at the winery spoke better English than our tour guide (I forgot to mention that the entire tour was bi-lingual. I felt sorry for the tour guide because on the bus rides the entire day she was constantly speaking in French and then translating to English. She never had a chance to rest and there was too much to say to put it all in both languages. It was helpful for me hearing spoken French and then the English translation.)
Chateau Pedesclaux makes Grand Cru Classé Bordeaux wines which sounds very impressive right? Actually the Grand Cru Classé is broken into 5 categories (1st-5th). The Premier (First) Grand Cru Classé wines from the Médoc are the famous ones like Chateau Latour, Chateau Haut-Brion, Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, Chateau Lafite-Rothschild and Chateau Margaux. These bottles all sell for hundred to thousands of dollars depending on the vintage. Chateau Pedesclaux was a 5th Grand Cru Classé winery (the tour guide didn't readily volunteer that information either) That by itself doesn't mean much as the classifications were made in 1855 and were pretty arbitrary back then. However this particular winery sucked. We only tasted one wine which was their 1994 vintage. They were obviously trying to get rid of it. It was terrible. They had a binder full of tasting notes and reviews from magazines in the tasting room and it had stuff in both French and English. Whoever complied it couldn't read English because the reviews from wine spectator and other magazines in English were not good at all. One said the wine had a foul odor, another said it tasted like the grapes had been left on the vines too long and allowed to turn into raisins. It was pretty funny.