In September of 1999, my ex-husband and I traveled to Beaune, France and stayed for a day or two. “Beaune is the wine capital of Burgundy in the Côte d’Or department in eastern France. It is located between Lyon and Dijon. Beaune is one of the key wine centers in France, and the center of Burgundy wine production and business. The annual wine auction of the Hospices de Beaune or the Hôtel-Dieu de Beaune is the primary wine auction in France. (Wikipedia: Beaune)
One of the most memorable aspects of Beaune for me were the wine caves under the city streets. There was one wine producer that allowed people to pay admission to go underground and walk through the extensive caves and pour your own wine from bottles scattered throughout the caves. There were perhaps 20 barrels set up throughout the caves, with candles for lighting and an open bottle for you to sample. The caves were dark and there were real bottles of wine stored in some of the dusty, dark, cobweb-filled storage chambers. The self-guided tour took about an hour and at the end you walked up a flight of stone steps and entered the store where you could buy wine or have it shipped to your home. They shipped wine all over the world.
The rest of the town was charming and made me wish that we could have spent days sitting at cafes and watching daily life play out. I remember going into the town Information Center for tourists and falling in love with a poster showing all the different kinds of French cheeses. We hadn’t allocated enough time to do a winery tour. We also only took trains and buses or rode with friends – we never drove ourselves in our visits to the UK and Europe – so that limited our ability to get outside of any town we visited.
Because we didn’t allow ourselves very much time on this visit, we came back in December of 2001. As was our wont, we first landed in London and spent some time with our friends in Redhill, Surrey outside of London. We also visited Cambridge for a day or two before heading off to France.
We made our way from England to Beaune and stayed in a small, boutique hotel for several nights before we headed off to spend Christmas with our friends’ family in Angers. It was a bitterly cold December, with arctic air coming down into the UK and Europe. Nevertheless, the visit to Beaune was magical. The town was decorated for the holidays, the pace was slow, everything was quiet.
We signed up for a tour of local vineyards which was wonderful, in spite of it being winter and bitterly cold. We were driven in a small van around the countryside and visited some small local producers. This was where I first learned that the same parcel of land could produce very different quality of wine in different rows, even when planted with the same varietal. Families or wineries would own a row or two of vines and the care they took of the vines and the way they harvested could produce markedly different wines. Add in the skills of the winemaker and you had to be careful what you bought. Locals knew all the subtle signs but most outsiders would not know. It makes sense when you learn about it but most people would look at a hillside of vines and just expect that the product would be either consistently good or consistently mediocre.
I have not been back to Beaune since that trip in December 2001. Today, on a bitterly cold day here in Saskatchewan, I remember the way that town felt and I can almost imagine walking through the quiet streets, all bundled up, and stopping for a dinner and a bottle of local wine at one of the small restaurants still open for the locals.
Lifetime musings 