Médoc Wine Route: Margaux, Mouton Rothschild and Fort Médoc

Required Activities

• Book months ahead and tour the cellars at Château Margaux on a weekday, under the neo-Palladian portico Louis Combes built in the early 19th century — the estate takes no visitors at weekends, through August or during the harvest, and the tasting room is for the trade only, so come for the buildings and the barrel hall rather than for a glass

• Tour Château Mouton Rothschild at Pauillac — the vines, the Grand Chai and the cellars — and go round the Museum of Wine in Art, three thousand years of objects made for wine, from bronzes and ivories to tapestries; check before you book whether the Label Room, which holds the artist labels, has reopened from renovation

• Walk Fort Médoc at Cussac, ordered by Louis XIV in 1689 and built from 1691 under Vauban's direction, and work out the lock it formed on the estuary: from the Gironde gatehouse you can see the island that holds Fort Paté in midstream and the citadel of Blaye on the far bank, the three works that between them could cover a river three kilometres wide when no single gun could

• Climb one of the twin staircases to the Gironde gatehouse at Fort Médoc, built 1691 to 1694, and find the graffiti the garrison cut into the stone — this was a customs post as much as a battery, and every ship going up to Bordeaux was taxed from here

• Find the powder magazine in the south-east bastion of Fort Médoc, the one building still as Vauban's engineers left it — a barrel vault under earth, walls close to a metre thick and air vents cut through the masonry — and compare it with the chapel and the bakery beside it, which had to be rebuilt from their foundations