Cote de Beaune

We are up to Monday, May 21st.  We are, after all, in Burgundy, and Peter has planned an all day wine tasting, organized by a British couple (there seem to be a lot of ex-pat Brits in this part of France) working as Burgundy Discovery Wine Tasting Tours.  We are joined by a young couple - from Kansas, of all places (where Peter went to school) and an Aussie wine nut.  It is pouring rain, but we - and the Land Rover - are unstoppable! 

Aside from the wine tasting itself, the facts are amazing to me.  It is a very small area  (The next step in blogging is getting a portable scanner so I can scan in maps and other good stuff; for the moment, you will have to check your own maps.).  Burgundy is a very small area, really, from Macon in the south through Chalon sur Saone in the center to Dijon in the north.  In that small area, there are 4,000 growers, but all together they produce only 4% of the Frensh wine production.  Those numbers were real shockers to me.  Even more of a shocker was that 60% of the wine production in Burgundy is white wine! 

As you can tell from the numbers, the vineyards are small - the first and smallest was 2 hectares of vines, the next was 8 hectares - and often in the families for generations.  We learned about the grapes, how to read the labels, and the wine making process itself.  There was a lot ot talk about "terroir", that is the land itself, and how slight differences in the soil, or where the vines are placed on the slopes - make such differences in the tastes of the wine.  (I would probably bore you with more of this if I could, but there was way, way too much of it).

It was really, really eye-opening.  We went to three different vineyards, different in size and scope, and tried about 16 different wines.  I would be lying if I said I could smell the apricots and taste the pepper in the back of my throat - my taste buds are not nearly that refined - but I did learn how to taste, and I do have a better idea of what I like.  Expect more wine drinking in my future!

We had two vineyards in the morning, followed by lunch in a former coach relay house called, appropriately enouch, Relais de la Diligence, and a third vineyard in the afternoon.  (lunch was, of course, gourmet, starting with cheese, followed by poached eggs in wine sauce with onions, followed by a leg of duck, and ending with a desert which I can no longer recall, and, of course, accompanied by a 2010 Bougeron Alicante Merceault). 

In spite of all the tasting (note - no tasting by the drivers!) we were sober, if lively, at the end.  However, no one was in the mood with wine for dinner!