Entre Les Murs

Loire Valley Weekend

The three of us spent Saturday and Sunday driving down the Loire.
Saturday morning we got a good start on the highway East out of town.  First stop was the Chateau at Chambord, one of the most ostentatious single-family dwellings in the history of real estate.  Also famous for its winding staircase designed by da Vinci.  And now infamous in family lore for the hordes of little insects encountered between it and the parking lot.


Janet had made a couple of wine-tasting appointments in Vouvray, and the first was at 2 p.m.  This gave us time for a quick lunch in a diner (in France, this means the kind of meal that you treat your mother to on Mother's Day), before our meeting at Domaine Huet.  This winery is part of the increasingly common organic farming movement, and perhaps a little towards the extreme end of the scale.  According to their brochure they plant and harvest according to the positions of the sun, moon and signs of the zodiac.  They use special preparations like horn dung, "made from dung placed in a cow's horn which is buried in the ground over winter where it fills up with vitalizing energy..." Flakey it may sound, but you can't argue with results.  We came away with half a dozen bottles.

To kill time before our next appointment we visited a local co-op and tasted one of their wines.  This wine had none of the diversity of scents and flavours we'd just experienced.  It was instructive in that it helped us appreciate some of the subtleties which were conspicuous by their absence.  At the next winery, Domaine Champalou, we happily abandoned this digression into table wine and again packed half a case in the trunk of the car.


We'd booked a little boutique hotel in Amboise for the night.  The American proprietor was an entertaining character.  She was, in a not uncommon ex-pat manner, hyper-American: cynical, outspoken, an authority on any topic, eager to tell you how much everything cost, but nonetheless generous and helpful.

Amboise was itself a lovely medieval town with its own chateau and sites; however the afternoon's tastings demanded payment in the form of a nap so we saw very little of it.


The following day Janet had arranged one tasting in the morning.  Whereas the wineries in Vouvray had a little tasting room set up, Pierre-Jacques Druet in Bourgueil gave us the full tour.  We saw his vinification operation, and then followed him in his car to his caves, which were genuine caves, centuries old, burrowed into the chalk cliffs that line the river valley.  There he pulled out seven or eight bottles, and surrounded by moss-covered barrels (that looked older than any of us, but were in fact only about a year and a half) we swirled and sniffed, dumping the leftovers on the dirt floor.  Like the vintners we've encountered elsewhere he had a real love for his craft and it took very little encouragement to draw him out on any aspect.


We found a wonderful place for lunch, the very stereotype of a French country restaurant: it was on a hill overlooking the valley, had goats in the yard and amazing food.  Called the Moulin Bleu, it was in fact in the shadow of an antique windmill.


We stopped at one more chateau on the way home.  They're really quite thick on the ground, so that there's one within a stone's throw just about whenever you feel like stopping.  We were too late to tour the inside of Chateau d'Azay-le-Rideau but were able to stroll around its park.

More pictures of the trip are here.

posted 12.6.07