A day in the vineyards of Saint-Émilion

Limelight Arts Travel staff

Less than 50 kilometres from the bustling riverside city of Bordeaux lies Saint-Émilion, both a small village and a celebrated wine district bearing the same name. A medieval waystation on the pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela, it’s been a centre for wine production for at least 2,000 years, and its prestigious wine estates and stone villages sit in a landscape of great physical beauty.

There has been a town on the site of Saint-Émilion village since Roman times, with evidence of wine-growing from the second century CE but the tradition is probably longer than this. The peaceful landscape’s praises were sung in the past by no less than Ausonius, a Roman scholar who also dedicated a fourth-century poem to the region’s wines, and the excavated remains of nearby Roman villas show that he wasn’t alone in enjoying a pleasant life here.

The village and vineyards of Saint-Émilion, in Aquitaine

The saint, Santiago & Sauvignon

The fortunes of the small fortified village of Ascumbas, founded by the Romans on the site of today’s Saint-Émilion, changed forever in the eighth century. This was when Emilianus, a poor Breton who’d dedicated himself to helping those even less fortunate, decided to embark on a pilgrimage to the final resting place of St James at Compostela. Following one of the branches of the Camino de Santiago south through France, he was struck by the landscape around Ascumbas.

Deciding that the region offered rich possibilities for the life of a hermit, Emilianus settled here, but he didn’t give up his acts of service even while living in splendid isolation. The miracles he continually worked, and the fondness of Ascumbas’s inhabitants for him, saw the eventual renaming of the town to Saint-Émilion in his honour, after he died on Epiphany Day in 767.

The cult of this local saint, together with the village’s location on one of the branches of the Way of St James, led to a growth in the local population. Monks, dedicated to Emilianus’s same mission of service, founded permanent communities in and around the village, and provided for the practical needs of pilgrims making their way back and forth to Santiago de Compostela. To sustain themselves and their charitable activities, they began to produce wines as the Romans had done, and their wines increasingly attracted the attention of the great and the good.

The Camino francés, or French Way to Santiago de Compostela, passes by Saint-Émilion before reaching Bordeaux (photo: Viva El Celta, Wikimedia Commons)

The terroir of Saint-Émilion and the surrounding district is exceptionally rich. Its soils contain a mix of limestones, sandstone and gravel, with concentrations that differ throughout a small area, allowing for extraordinary nuances in production. The region’s sloping hills form a natural amphitheatre and are oriented towards the path of the sun, allowing for a gentle ripening of the grapes, and the microclimate is temperate and protected.

The result is perfect conditions for Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon varieties, and a combination of barrel ageing and maturing in the bottle have, for centuries, produced an aromatic wine with mineral notes, a velvety texture and well-structured tannins. Over 970 registered growers produce wine under four modern appellations, and the entire wine region is known, poetically, as “the hill of a thousand estates”.

Sunrise in a Saint-Émilion vineyard: the terroir here is so rich that the landscape is a veritable quilt of small wine estates

The English and the French

One of the more fascinating aspects of Saint-Émilion’s wine heritage is the way in which its development was favoured for centuries by the English. In 1152, at the time of the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Henry of Anjou, the area of Saint-Émilion fell within the lands of the Duchy of Aquitaine. Two years later, Henry acceded to the throne of England as Henry II Plantagenet. Saint-Émilion would remain part of the English realm until the resolution of the devastating Hundred Years’ War.

English monarchs did not neglect the village – in fact, to the contrary. They constructed the medieval city walls that still encircle it, and in the twelfth century John Lackland, King of England and Duke of Aquitaine, took so much interest that he established the Jurisdiction (Jurade) of Saint-Émilion in 1199. This was a brotherhood that regulated the quality of the district’s wines, awarding official recognition (an appellation) only to those that made the grade. Local officials were given the king’s own powers to make these decisions, in return for a generous supply of wine to the English Crown.

In 1289, Edward I expanded the Jurade to encompass even more territory, and the brotherhood survived intact until 1789 and the Revolution. Revived in 1948, it still guarantees the quality of Saint-Émilion wines, organising local festivals to celebrate the harvest and achieving UNESCO World Heritage status in 1999. The Jurade’s headquarters are in the ruined thirteenth-century Château du Roi, its tower dominating the surrounding landscape.

The Tour du Roi or King’s Tower, the ruined donjon of Saint-Émilion’s castle

History and culture in Saint-Émilion

While the obvious highlight of visiting the village of Saint-Émilion is to sample a local red at one of the district’s many prestigious wine estates, the cult of Emilianus and the town’s proximity to the Camino de Santiago mean that there are also other treasures to appreciate.

One of the most extraordinary is a vast monolithic church, excavated from the limestone hill of the village from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Its columns and pillars, stairs and balustrades, even the portal and its carvings of the Resurrection and Last Judgement – all still form part of the very rock of the hill. At over 38 metres long and 12 metres high, it is Europe’s largest underground church.

Sunlight brings out the warm tones of Saint-Émilion’s monolithic church, entirely hewn from the village’s bedrock

The hale and hearty might like to climb the 196 steps of the church’s 53-metre belltower, for superlative views of the surrounding countryside – although caveat emptor for those who take a tour of Emilianus’s own grotto: it contains a so-called ‘fertility chair’ or stone throne. It apparently works reliable miracles for the women who choose to sit on it. Of less risk is the spring inside the saint’s grotto, which still gushes clear water.

Underground Saint-Émilion is fascinating in general – there is an entire network of catacombs and cellars, tunnels and tombs, carved out of the bedrock by the monks and faithful followers of Emilianus. The only way to visit these sites is by guided tour, so this is highly recommended.

Nuns followed in the footsteps of Emilianus too, and in the seventeenth century a group of Ursulines took up residence in the town. They brought with them a celebrated recipe for macarons, and these have now become indelibly associated with Saint-Émilion. It would be poor form to leave the village without also sampling this local delicacy.

Evocative traces of Saint-Émilion’s religious heritage are to be found at the Cloître des Cordeliers, the ruined cloister of a Franciscan monastery. (This order’s habit included a rope belt with three knots, thus the nickname of Cordeliers.) Originally located outside the city walls, the Franciscan monastery was damaged during the Hundred Years’ War and the brothers moved to a new, more protected location in the fourteenth century. During the Revolution the buildings suffered, however, and by 1791 they were sold off as a ruin.

The cloister has since been beautifully restored, but other parts of the monastery have also been brought back to new life in the modern era. The deep cellars carved out at a depth of 17 metres by the Franciscans, who of course also produced wine, were used in the late nineteenth century by Monsieur Meynot. He studied Champagne production, going on to develop a Crémant de Bordeaux sparkling wine from Saint-Émilion grapes that is still very popular.

The village of Saint-Émilion, with its low stone houses and rock-cut medieval churches, and the rolling vine-covered hills that surround it, offer a gentle but rewarding program for travellers: beautiful countryside, storied traditions, fascinating historical sites and a celebrated wine-making industry. Pair such a visit with a lunch in any of the district’s highly-regarded restaurants, and you have the ideal day in a French village.

Why leave Saint-Émilion without sampling a glass or two? Here a Crémant de Bordeaux in the Cloître des Cordeliers