La Cité du Vin Bordeaux at Ten: 390,000 Visitors in 2025 and a Wine Museum Losing Ground
La Cité du Vin opened on the Garonne in June 2016 and turns ten this year. The building by XTU, the practice of Anouk Legendre and Nicolas Desmazières, is meant to look like wine swirling in a glass. Locals call it other things. It cost about €81 million before tax, and since opening it has passed 3.5 million visitors.
The anniversary comes with a soft number. Attendance in 2025 was 390,000, down 6% on the year before. About 55% of visitors came from abroad.
From across the Bassin à flot, behind a row of parked bicycles, the building looks like a decanter someone left on its side. The panels shift between gold and silver as the light changes. It sits in the Bacalan district, the old docks north of the centre, which Bordeaux has been rebuilding around it.
Why the dip?
Nobody gives one reason. Wine tourism is moving out to the vineyards, where visitors taste with producers instead of learning about them in a museum. Bordeaux wine itself is in a hard spell, with falling demand and vineyards being pulled up. And a ten-year-old museum needs new reasons for repeat visits. The anniversary programme is the Cité's attempt at one.
It's still worth an afternoon if you know little about wine. The permanent tour is interactive, covers the whole world rather than just Bordeaux, and ends with a glass on the eighth-floor Belvédère with a view down the river. Tickets run in the low twenties for adults. Check the official site, as prices and tasting options change.
Then go to the vines
The better wine day is forty minutes east. Saint-Émilion and the seven communes around it were listed by UNESCO in 1999 as a cultural landscape, the first vineyard landscape on the list. About a million people a year visit the town, with its monolithic church cut into the limestone and its steep lanes between wine shops. Many châteaux in the area open for tastings, some by appointment only.
Do the Cité in the morning, take a regional train to Saint-Émilion, and be in the vineyards by mid-afternoon. That's Bordeaux's wine story in the right order: the theory, then the slopes.