BEAUNE – France (Sat 12 Sept)

We started the day today with a French breakfast of croissant and coffee. The lady of the house seems to do a lot of running around despite her ‘indeterminable age’. It is hard to guess exactly how old she is, she seems to be in her mid 70s, and yet she seems to run this house pretty much on her own. She checks people in and out, running up and down stairs, maintaining the rooms, serving breakfast and chatting to everyone in their own tongue, and keeping tabs on everyone and everything. We just wish that we still have her energy at her age.

We wanted to spend the day mooching around this town today and we chose the right day to do it, today is Market Day. And this market is pretty impressive selling every imaginable form of fruit, vegetables, meat products, breads, cheeses, etc. There are also the usual tacky souvenirs, clothes and obscure items, just to keep things interesting. What surprises us is how does a stall selling American Indian knick knacks happen to be here, and we have seen that quite a few times whilst over here.

From the market we went to church, well to be precise we went and had a look at St Catherine’s jaw bone in the Cathedral. After that little interlude it was time to jazz it up a bit, after all they are having a jazz festival here this weekend. But we have found that a ‘jazz festival’ here isn’t the same as what we expect at home with lots of free gigs and concerts. A jazz festival here means nights of organized events where you pay through the nose for an evening of getting dressed up, a couple of wines at the door (bring your own sandwiches) and a couple of gigs thrown in (different gigs on different nights). We were told that there would be no free events, but as luck would have it, we found one. So we spent a couple of hours in the sun enjoying some jazz before heading off for a taste of wine.

This city has a reputation for the wine caves that run underneath the city. What you find out very quickly after arriving here is that this place makes, tastes, sells, and breaths wine. And we were about to find out more about this. We went to ‘Patriarche Pere et Fils’ the wine maker and owner of the largest underground wine cellar in the city. It is actually more like a 15,000 m2 system of catacombs (a total lineal length of 5km) housing millions of bottles of wine being aged to perfection in cool, dark, cob-web lined cellars. Some of these wines are behind locked bars and were put down in 1994 and have been set aside to be ready for tasting in the year 2094. Makes you wonder what happens then … “Mmmmm … it’s not quite ready, give it another 100 years”. This is wine that is being made for generations to come. As you enter you are given a ‘tastvin’ (a flat silvery tasting cup), for you to taste the 3 white wines and 13 red wines, that come at the end of the tour, in the depths of the cellar of course.

The history of these cellars are quite interesting. It was originally the ‘Ladies of the Visitation Convent’ in 1632, who ‘acquired’ quite a few hectares of land and vines. These lands were acquired through men going to war and leaving the land in the trust of the church, or they were given to the church as atonement for their sins. And the resident nuns put these vines to good use and developed a rather good cellar to match. But then came the revolution (as is the French way) in 1789 when religious freedom was revoked, churches closed, and heads rolled (literally), as a way of reducing the power and influence of the church. The monastery was confiscated and sold off to the highest bidder, who happened to be a bit of a wine buff himself. The rest, as they say, ‘is history’.

Heading home we were treated to the sight of a most eccentric gentleman, driving slowly through the cobbled streets in a silver Rolls Royce, complete with ribbons (aka wedding car), hopping out at regular intervals and putting on a flamboyant show of kissing old ladies and telling them how beautiful they were. And no one turned a hair. It was like that sort of thing happens every day … perhaps it does.