Monbazillac Castle
Monbazillac Castle is centrally located in the wine-growing region near the village of Monbazillac , seven kilometers south of Bergerac in the Dordogne department of the French Périgord .
The Monbazillac Castle, begun around 1550 by Francois d'Aydie and his wife Francoise de Salignac and finally completed by Charles d'Aydie and Jeanne de Bourdeille, has been owned by the Monbazillac winegrowers' cooperative since 1960 and is located in the middle with its four hectare park the vineyards. It survived largely unscathed both the wars of religion and the time of the Fronde . The moat, the massive towers and the leading around the entire castle ramparts with machicolations and loopholes give the building its medieval character. However, the large windows and the representative staircase in the Renaissance style point to the turn of the epoch during the period of origin.
In the Grande Salle of the castle there is a monumental Renaissance fireplace as well as furnishings and tapestries from the 17th century. The bedroom of the Viscountess de Monbazillac, furnished in Louis Treize style, is on the first floor . In several museums housed in the castle, illustrative material is exhibited: furniture from the Périgord, seals and old maps, medals, drawings by a caricaturist from the Belle Époque, and a historical representation of Protestantism in Bergerac (Monbazillac, like Bergerac, actively supported the Reformation ).
In the vaulted cellar there is a wine museum with tools for making wine and a collection of bottles from the 18th and 19th centuries. The vineyard, which supplies the most famous wine in the region, has a size of around 3000 hectares and was laid out by monks in the 11th century. In the 17th century the winery benefited from the rapidly increasing exports to Holland. As far as the fact that the tiny town of Monbazillac and its wine was already very well known in the Middle Ages, most travel guides try to find an anecdote from the papal court in Avignon . An embassy from the then important Bergerac presented a petition to the Pope . When the Holy Father couldn't do anything with the name of the town, a confidante told him that Bergerac was with Monbazillac. This name was immediately known to the Pope as a wine connoisseur.
literature
- Jean-Luc Aubarbier, Michel Binet: Beloved Perigord. Ouest-France, Rennes 1990, ISBN 2-7373-0299-4 , p. 124.
- Susanne Böttcher (Ed.): Périgord, Dordogne, Limousin (= Michelin. The Green Guide ). Travel House Media, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-8342-8995-7 , p. 225.
- Thorsten Droste : Périgord and the Atlantic coast. Art and nature in the Dordogne valley and on the Côte d'Argent from Bordeaux to Biarritz. 10th edition. DuMont, Cologne 1991, ISBN 3-7701-1197-4 , p. 248.
- Alo Miller, Nikolaus Miller: Dordogne. Perigord, Quercy (= Dumont travel paperback ). Dumont Reiseverlag, Ostfildern 2005, ISBN 3-7701-6318-4 , p. 208.
- Martin Thomas, Thorsten Droste, Julia Hennings: Périgord. CJ Bucher, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-7658-1028-2 , p. 145.
Web links
- Monbazillac Castle as a 3D model in SketchUp's 3D warehouse
Coordinates: 44 ° 47 ′ 41 ″ N , 0 ° 29 ′ 35 ″ E