Le Pays Beaunois
Walking amidst
les Grands Crus de Bourgogne
Our very first walk in France was in Burgundy. It was in
1986 and we were on an ambitious round-the-world trip with
a brief stopover in France to experience Paris and to get a
taste of walking in the countryside. We were hopelessly ill
equipped with heavy packs and the wrong shoes. Dijon was
the starting point, with our first night in Gevrey Chambertin,
then Nuits St George and finally Beaune. At that time these
hallowed names were virtually unknown to us. But the food
and wine were superb and played a large part in our desire
to return again ... and again...
Discovering Burgundy
It was 15 years before we returned to Burgundy in 2001,
this time for a longer visit. Staying in the little town of
Bligny-sur-Ouche, about 15 km from Beaune, offered the
opportunity to further explore the fabulous Côte d'Or and the
surrounding country. Equipped with glossy literature and
maps from the tourist information office in Beaune we
interspersed four days of walking with visits to the wineries,
abbeys, chateaux and villages of the area. There was good
eating in Bligny's three restaurants, a lively market on
Saturdays and a local boulangerie, boucher and
supermarché to provide for daily needs.
The Gite at Bligny
The gîte rural in Bligny had been the family home of an elderly
lady who now lived in Beaune and she had summoned her entire
extended family and some local friends to greet us on arrival.
She was assiduous in giving us instructions about how to
manage the house, which dated from round 1650 though had
been much done throughout the centuries. The most convincing
evidence of its age was a curious configuration of heavy hand
hewn wooden beams supporting the ceilings.
The kitchen contained a weird collection of cups, plates and
cooking utensils, all of them probably rejects from the more
modern establishment in Beaune. After some intuitive
adaptations they became very usable. Tall people needed to be
constantly vigilant as some of the doorways were designed for a
now extinct race of undernourished and very short people.
Madame had furnished the house with an extraordinary range of
antique furniture, tapestries and artificial flowers and palm trees.
As in all these houses, the lighting was very dim and the
temperature very chilly. However, there was a huge cellar, full of
wood for winter (or in this case early autumn) fires and a range of
ineffective heaters for which you paid by the second.
There was also a pretty garden and from the bedroom window,
upstairs under the wooden beams, we looked across other
gardens and rooftops to the church and its bell tower.
Walks in the Vineyards
There were some local walks up in the hills
surrounding the town and taking in the local
attractions. But the big drawcards for walking were the
forested hills and the vineyard country of the Côte de
Beaune and the Hautes-Côtes de Beaune . Here were
well marked trails, sometimes co-inciding with the GR
7 and its offshoot the GR 76, arranged as circuits that
could be expanded or contracted according to how
energetic you felt on the day.
These walks would start in villages with names from
the wine encyclopaedias. Villages like Meursault,
Puligny-Montrachet, Pommard or Volnay. After
crossing through the vineyards, the tracks would then
run up into the little ranges of hills that straddle the
precious land.
From the ridges, you look down on a mosaic of vineyards
- line upon line of vines, squeezed tighter and tighter till a
line might have only one or two vines in it - but never a
metre wasted. Each individual holding may only be one
or two fields, say 5-6 hectares. Overall there are 4500
individual wine holdings in Burgundy. To maximise the
opportunities for sharing the profits of the liquid gold, new
vineyards are gradually encroaching further and further up
into the hills. You wonder where it will stop.
It was harvest time when we were there and the business of the
vendage was in full swing. It's all done by hand, pickers gradually
making their way along the lines and emptying their baskets into
carts which an army of tractors would then pull off to the crushing
points in the villages. There were tractors everywhere and little white
vans shuttling from field to field, transporting the pickers to the
picking point. Busy, busy, busy.
The wine of Bourgogne
Wine has been synonymous with the name Bourgogne for so long that
no one really knows how the vines got there. Perhaps from the early
Greek settlements in the Mediterranean region, perhaps with the
Romans, but there is certainly no doubt that from the times when the
monks of Saulieu, Cluny and the like started to cultivate the vineyards
and make wine, these wines came to be among the most revered in the
world. With limited land and the establishment of exclusive AOC laws
this is now guaranteed and Bourgogne is not only among the best wine
in the world but also the most expensive.
In five production regions, 25,000 ha of grapevines are cultivated and
180 million bottles of wine are produced each year. Much of the vintage
is grown on small holdings, averaging 5-6 ha in size and there are
around 4500 growers. Quite a lot of them take advantage of the twenty
or so cooperatives which exist in the major villages to make and market
the wines on behalf of their members. Other growers make and sell
their own wines, generally that of the highest quality.
Tasting, or dégustation, is possible though you can't expect to try the
very best of the wine and in some establishment tasting is managed with
an eye to how many bottles you are likely to buy. You don't just drink
this wine either, you become part of a tradition and observe certain
rituals.
You will know when you have ordered an acceptable wine in a restaurant as it
will be decanted and a larger and higher quality of glasses will be used. For
pure gastronomical snobbery it is not unusual to see people insisting that their
wine be decanted when a waiter evidently did not think it worthy of the honour.
Up in the hills there were other
attractions. On one walk we followed a
Roman road which had probably been
the main road between the Roman
settlements of Autun and Dijon. In the
surrounding fields was an imposing
Roman column.
On another walk, the hillsides were
rugged and wild and highly favoured
by rock climbers. An army exercise
was underway in the forest,
something that hadn't been obvious
until movement in the treetops led us
to look up and discover that the trees
were full of young soldiers in
camophlage gear waiting for an
unsuspecting enemy. We didn't wait
around for the action.
At the end of the day
Then it is down into the vineyards again, a little dégustation perhaps, a visit to
one of the village caves to pick up a couple of bottles and home to Bligny to
make a meal of the days findings. This might include some of the specialties
of the region - eggs meurette, coq au vin with a salad of walnuts collected from
underneath the trees around the vineyards, an oozing Epoisses cheese from
the local market and of course one of the wines tasted and purchased direct
from the cave where it was made.
A mosaic of vineyards in le Côte d'Or
The gite at Bligny
Walking in the vineyards
Bringing in the day's picking
A Roman road, now a walking track
A Roman column in the fields
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