Biking Burgundy

After our quick stop in Marseille early on in our adventure, we are back in France! Before heading to the big city we spent a couple of nights in wine country. Specifically in Beaune in the Bourgogne region of the country.

June 25 - Sunday in a Small Town

Our train route on Sunday took us from Konstanz to Zurich to Dijon and finally to Beaune. We walked through town from one side to the other to check into our Airbnb, about twenty minutes in total. Our place is a small apartment above the hosts main house (it was nice to have a place to ourselves again!). After a day of travel our main thought was, where can we get food, a task made more difficult due to the fact that it was Sunday. In the U.S. there are plenty of stores that close on Sundays and holidays but we've seen entire towns shut down here in Europe because it was Sunday. Luckily our host listed a few good places he knew of open on Sundays so we went to a great brasserie for dinner and planned the next day of touring wine country.

June 26 - Biking the Vineyards

Burgundy is a very beautiful region known for pinot noir and chardonnay. Our host told us about a bike trail that runs from Beaune through a few other small towns and through the surrounding vineyards. We found a bike rental shop literally half a block away from our Airbnb, grabbed some snacks, and headed down the wine trail. Very quickly we were among the grape vines and experiencing the amazing views of the vast fields dedicated to making wine.

Beautiful day for biking!

Finding a place to try wine proved to be a little difficult. It's hard to tell when a cellar is open even though they are all over the place. We were around early afternoon on a Monday while many of the wine makers are out in the fields and we may have had better luck on a weekend or the evening, but eventually we found an open cellar in the town of Volnay. We entered the chilly cellar to just the owner and his friend enjoying some wine and luckily the owner spoke enough English for us to learn about his wine and his winery. We tasted three local wines and the owner showed us around the cellar. We saw where he kept his current store and where last year's vintage was in barrels which will be bottled this September. Around the walls of the barrel room we noticed some very old bottles of wine. His family has been vintners for generations and the oldest bottles we saw were from 1865! The owner was quick to say those are definitely not drinkable anymore but they do enjoy some good, more recent vintages at family gatherings.

2016 vintage, waiting to be bottled

1865 vintage: Decoration only, not for drinking

We purchased a bottle of 2015 Volney pinot noir and bid him adieu. We biked some more before breaking for lunch and then headed back to Beaune. It was another hot day so we rested back at our Airbnb and enjoyed our new wine before it started to rain a bit. Not only do we have a great place to stay but our host is selling some of his personal wine collection and we'll be able to head to Paris already equipped with wine.

At dinner we met another American couple from Texas who commented we were the first Americans they had run into in Beaune. On the contrary, we noticed a lot of English speakers, mostly British but definitely some Americans, in Beaune. The tourists didn't feel overpowering, however, and Beaune and the surrounding towns proved to be a fantastic experience and a great look at French wine communities. Tomorrow we leave the countryside for the city of lights. See you in Paris!