Just in time for Dan and my third Oktoberfest, here is my take on the greatest beerfest in all of the world! We will be there the second week and are also attending the Cannstatter Volksfest in Stuttgart! Prost!
Le Restaurant Bar Andre is most certainly the most famous restaurant in La Rochelle, France (if you are unfamiliar with La Rochelle, read about it here). Restaurant Andre is located right in the heart of La Rochelle, in its Vieux Port just below La Rochelle’s iconic towers. Restaurant Andre has been open since 1947 and now occupies a web of dining rooms, each with a slightly different sea theme. Restaurant Andre is an excellent place to try some of La Rochelle’s fresh seafood and a place to check off your La Rochelle bucket list!
La Rochelle’s famous towers!
La Cité du Vin opened on June 1, 2016 and I visited a few short weeks thereafter after drooling over Bordeaux’s “wine amusement park” on Condé Nast Traveler! Not quite an amusement park in the traditional sense, La Cité du Vin is a wine museum dedicated to the history of wine and the wine cultures of the world. And it was plain amazing!! Per la Cité du Vin’s own website, the wine museum’s mission is to “promote and share the cultural, universal and living heritage that is wine with the broadest possible audience,” with a focus on emotions, sensations and imagination, and the museum certain did a good job of that! We allotted about 3 hours for the museum and lunch and could have spent so much longer (and everything wasn’t even open yet since the museum had just opened)! Plan accordingly!
Dan and I visited the city of Bordeaux and its surrounding wine regions in June 2016. For those unfamiliar with Bordeaux wine, there are no actual vineyards in the city of Bordeaux (it is a regular city with a large university). The famous “Bordeaux wine” comes from a number of small regions surrounding Bordeaux. Wines take their name from the specific small region in which their grapes are grown, and the flavor of grapes that make up the wine derives from the “terroir” of each specific area (roughly translated as a combination of the soil content, temperature, rain fall, sunlight, etc. of the individual region). See the map of the many wine regions and sub-regions surrounding Bordeaux:
La Rochelle is a beautiful French seaside town located on the mid-Atlantic coast in the Charente-Maritime province of France, and I just got back from spending a long weekend there! La Rochelle is known to be popular with French vacationers, particularly Parisians. However, it is not very well-known in the US, and I probably would never have visited La Rochelle except my college (yay University of Richmond!) had a study abroad program there (I opted for Paris) – and I have a “map of France” t-shirt from Anthropologie that features La Rochelle… In addition to being featured on an Anthropologie shirt, La Rochelle is quite historical, as it has been around since antiquity, and is the port from which French settlers left for the new world (i.e. Quebec!).
