The Somme, Normandy then Paris

This trip, in its inception, was to be the Heritage Tour, to visit the places where our great-grandparents came from. The Irish antecedents on both sides could feel aggrieved that we haven’t visited there this time, but we will be covering that side for both Carpenters and Nelsons on another trip. We just couldn’t fit everything in this time.   

The trip from Reims across to the Somme was to pick up on the family links to WWI. Ann’s great uncle Bert Winfield (aka a prominent member of the Welsh team that beat the All Blacks at Cardiff Arms Park in 1905), fought with the Cardiff City Regiment of the Welsh Battalion. On the Nelson side, Dad’s Uncle George was injured and lost some mobility in WWI, but I’m unsure when or where and will have to research that at a later date. Bert Winfield was invalided home before the battle for Mametz Wood, which devastated the battalion, started on July 7 1916. Two other Welsh Rugby Internationals lost their lives in the battle.

This action was part of the Battle of the Somme which started on July 1 and also involved NZ battalions. It was sobering to see that this engagement, which cost over 12,000 NZ lives, compared to Gallipoli which killed about 2,700 Kiwis, doesn’t really hit the radar in the same way as Gallipoli in NZ. We visited the Welsh memorial at Mametz Wood, and  also visited the NZ memorial at Longuevil which is not far away.

 

 

We called in to one of the many little cemeteries that are dotted over the cultivated fields, and row after row carried the date 1 July 1916, a stark record of the cost of that first day of battle. (20,000 British soldiers alone died on that day.) There is obviously significant work happening in these cemeteries in preparation for the WWI centenary commemorations – they all look immaculate. We found a grave for an Armitage from Huddersfield, which we have a picture of and will follow up later.

 

We had visited the Great War Museum at Peronne prior to the battlefield visits, so had a very sobering sort of day. The memorial at Longuevil describes how the NZ battalions attacked up slopes well covered by German machine guns but they did, in fact, win the day. You can stand at the monument and look over the fields now planted in sugar beet crops, and imagine what happened. At Mametz Wood the description at the monument is also quite illuminating. It tells how the very new Welsh battalions attacked “down this slope and across open ground” into the wood, an area held by battle-hardened German troops. The Welsh paid a heavy price. We walked into the wood and the wreaths, pictures and stories attached to trees left recently by family and friends of the fallen pay testimony to the personal pilgrimages to the area.

 

While we were staying in Cardiff with Nick and Elizabeth, Nick, Bert’s grandson had shown us letters written from the front by Bert, so these gained a whole new context in seeing the area. Ann’s grandfather was a stretcher bearer and was, for a time, based at Albert, near Mametz and Longuevil so we visited there and had a coffee before continuing our travels across to Dieppe. We also saw the statue of Mary and the infant Jesus, on top of the Basilica of Notre Dame de Brebieres in Albert, which was knocked over by a shell in 1915, and dangled precariously until shelling destroyed the tower in 1918. Nicknamed the Leaning Virgin she was an iconic sight to the soldiers passing through to the frontlines, some three miles away. We left the area, with its many cemeteries and cratered areas feeling quite moved about such a tragic event, which stays in the memory despite its happening a hundred years ago

Next stop Dieppe, no real connections here just a convenient place to put our heads down for a night, we didn’t bother to unpack.

Wandered into town for Sole Meuniere for dinner which was very good. We started with some Normandy oysters, and they were very tasty too. We drove along the Rue de Mer next day to Fecamp, stopping to look at the odd church and beach, braving gale force winds to do so.

 

 

Arrived in Fecamp where we will have a few days before heading to Paris. Fecamp is a lovely coastal harbour town. Our hotel, the Grand Pavois, is on the left in this photo, overlooking the harbour. A great spot.

Fecamp is also home to, and the birthplace of Benedictine, a liqueur some of you will be familiar with. They apparently make 350 million bottles a year, all in this little town. We did the tour of their beautiful museum with an impressive collection of art, and of keys and locks from the 15 and 16^th centuries! Then toured the distillery and had a sampling, but didn’t complicate our packing for home with additional purchases. The recipe was invented by Dom Bernado Vincelli around 1510 at Fecamp Abbey. The Abbey was plundered during the Revolution and records were lost. Alexandra Le Grand, discovered the recipe in some texts his family had been asked to care for. So he perfected the Dom Bernado Vincelli recipe, got approval to call it Benedictine and then built the facilities for manufacture, which are still in place today.

We also visited Etretat, another coastal town, but with huge cliffs and structures hewn by the elements, a la Great Ocean Rd in Victoria Australia. Impressive structures from cliffs about 200m high. We walked for the views which were great but the weather was still a bit cool and windy. This  was also a favourite place for Monet, who apparently was once so engrossed in his painting he got swept out to sea by the rising tide.

 

For our other day here we visited some of the D-Day beaches, calling in to the American war cemetery visitor centre which has a very good museum. There is still plenty of evidence of the battles, and some of the German’s Atlantic wall gun emplacements, with plenty of evidence of bombed ground, and the  remnants of Winston Harbour at Arromanches. This was one of two built to help land the 2.5 million men and tonnes of equipment. Some  of the beach obstacles put in place to make life difficult for an invasion fleet also still survive.

 

No forebears were involved in this action as far as we know, but a very good display and commemoration in the visitors centre, with many personal stories humanising the conflict, and the vast American cemetery overlooking the beach at Omaha, certainly emphasised the cost of the D Day landings.

For a break from war, we visited the Bayeaux tapestry. This was high on Ann’s hitlist and it certainly met, in fact exceeded, expectations. You walk in to the darkened room where it is displayed in a long oval walkway. 68m long, 500 mm high, with 57 scenes embroidered in wool on linen recounting the background the events and the consequences of William the Conqueror’s invasion of England. A very Norman perspective no doubt; Edward was duplicitous, and deserved to be speared by a Norman, as shown by the spear apparently descending from heaven. Fantastic extent of detail in each of the scenes. The tapestry was made in the late 12C, and that it has survived to this day is amazing in itself, for instance, at the time of the French Revolution it travelled to Paris wrapped around a load of wood! Rather like the recipe for Benedictine, I guess, which had an equally fortuitous survival to be rediscovered in 1863.

We departed our very good base at Fecamp in drizzly rain for an hour and a half drive down into Normandy and the Pays D’Auge. We wanted to check out how they make some of the smelly cheeses we’ve been eating. We visited Le Village Fromagier, a cheese factory owned by E. Graindorge in a little town called Livarot.

 

They have a very good self-guided tour set up, lots of displays and video, all English subtitled, traipsing through their plant in glassed viewing galleries we were able to  watch the whole process. They make camembert, and related soft cheeses. It's a highly mechanised manufacturing plant for all the cheese making, brine washing parts, but then it turns seriously manual. Cheeses are all individually picked up and weighed and sorted and then racked for aging. One cheese (the Livarot) is then hand wrapped with five strands of a reed grown in a pond next to the factory. The  stripes give it the nickname The Colonel. All this stuff is protected by an Appellation D’Origine Protegee arrangement 

 

They have a big emphasis on the quality of their milk from the local Normandy breed of cows. The company has operated since 1910, and the degustation proved to us they make some lovely cheese styles. They make both pasteurised and unpasteurised styles, and all are very good. Unfortunately the lack of travelling refrigeration and an imminent flight meant we didn’t buy.

In the surrounding flat land all over Normandy, and beyond, the sugar beet harvest and ploughing the endless fields continued every day of our stay. The beets are initially dumped in huge piles, then transported later. But Normandy is also famous for its apple products: cider and Calvados. You'll be impressed that we resisted degustations on these products, but we did note heaps of small apple orchards. Apparently the fruit must fall first, then it is gathered and the process begins.

Our car had been giving us a bit of grief with very noisy front brakes, another dagger for Avis when I get a chance to find their complaints procedure; you can do everything on their customer service site but provide service feedback. So the car restricted us a bit, and no, you can’t just take it to a local  Avis depot…….they are generally just a small room at a Gare manned by someone who really doesn’t care. Been there.

We set off for our next overnighter at Evreux to put us within striking distance of Giverny and then Paris. We were  in Giverny, at 84 Rue Claude Monet at 9.30 am to try and avoid the crowds and queues. We did that successfully and had a very leisurely time, ambling through the house, gardens and the iconic lily ponds. Colours in autumn were good, but you could imagine in spring the garden would be just fantastic. We still enjoyed the autumn colours on a misty grey day.

 

On to Paris, more tollways, with much heavier traffic heading out of the great city, so we had a pretty leisurely delivery to the city boundary. There are a lot of tunnels on the approach to the city, so all of a sudden you are in the city proper, on a road with half a dozen lanes and the Arc De Triomphe on the skyline in the distance, and before you know it, you are in the roundabout itself, no lines, cars everywhere, horns, buses, mad. We survived.

Photo taken on Monday, a quieter day!



We needed to fuel up before I dropped the rental, adding a small complicating factor. The drop off was in the heart of the city at Hotel De Ville, just over the road from Notre Dame. Find a servo indeed!! The little pump icons on TomTom came and went with no sign of a gazole pump on the streets.  TomTom was providing good advice like “cross the roundabout, take the 6^th exit" and cars were heading seemingly in all directions. As we travelled down the Champs Elysees I spotted a small “Total” logo on an underground car park sign.

So down into the earth we ducked. Lo and behold there was the little servo. Problem solved. Back out into the traffic, "turn right" says TomTom, unfortunately I had immediate right and 20m ahead right as options. I took the wrong one and suddenly we were heading into the Place de la Concorde and snookered properly. So I followed a bus into a mega bus park area and found a street that looked like it would take me back to the Champs Elysees. All the cars in it were parked facing me, unsure what that means, but we got through and had another shot at the “turn right” instruction. Nailed  it this time, but the big black Toyota behind objected to my giving way to pedestrians on a crossing. Calm and serenity reigned and we survived. It was a great relief to get rid of the car. Diary note…..avoid driving in Paris unless it is a medical emergency and you absolutely have to.

So we’ve walked the streets, dined again at Fish La Boissonnerie where we ate last time we were here with Wayne and Vikki. There are some really good food stalls around the St Germain area and it would be lovely to be staying long enough to try a few of the cheeses and the smelly meats. One cheese place had a Comte wheel that must have been close to a metre in diameter.

Sunday we did a walking trip to the Marche d’Aligre where we bought some breakfast and lunch fruit and cheese. The market has the usual covered section and the outside fruit area, and bric-a-brac and so on. The cheese shops had a fantastic range.

 

Then we walked further to Pere Lachaise cemetery, which is very famous (the most visited cemetery in the world), and very large; Paris’ largest open space in fact. We found a few of the noted graves, Edith Piaf, Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde and Chopin.

In one corner there are many memorials to French victims of Nazi Germany; many sent by the French Vichy Government into internment. They died in their tens of thousands in Dachau, Auschwitz and many other concentration camps; all are remembered and commemorated in monuments. We found the memorial for Natzweiler, the camp we visited in Alsace; by no means the most graphic in its depiction of the victims.

The walk continued home to the hotel for a light lunch of pear, blue cheese and some of the pain that Parisians have to queue for on weekends. On the walk we checked out eating places for the next couple of nights. We decided to pass on Paris’s most popular falafel and other Lebanese and Jewish food after wading through an absolute gridlock of long queues of people waiting to be served.  I suppose it was Sunday so there may be a few extras around. So we will be there  Monday night. We walked about 10 km for the morning, so there is a bit of exercising going on.

The afternoon was taken up with another walk around the Ile St Louis (next to Ile De La Cite and Notre- Dame) enjoying the sights and watching the boating activity. Hundreds of sightseers on bateaux enjoying the afternoon sun.

Our last day was a bit of let’s see as much of Madeline’s Paris (the book by Ludwig Bemmelmans) as possible in one day and buy a new handbag as well. It was a real good check out of navigation skills on the metro using a one day Mobilis card that means you can hop on and off at will for a day. Started the shopping bit at Boulevard Haussman in places like Gallery Lafayette and Printemps, but there is a limited market in our house for purchasing 2000 Euro ear rings, and other astronomically priced stuff.

There are those who do, and the Chanel and YSL departments had queues of Asian buyers waiting patiently to be admitted into the inner sanctum of these stores. The central atrium at Galleries Lafayette was stunning. We did have success in finding Ann's handbag, but had to return later in the day to buy the selected, very nice little black number. The store didn’t open until 1 00pm!!

For the rest of the day we strolled and walked and rode the Metro. First to the Champs Elysees and the Arc de Triomphe, and posed the victorious, "we conquered the traffic here"!

 

Then into the Tuileries Gardens with hundreds of people enjoying the sun, and we visited the carousel.

 

Out into Place de la Concorde where a gypsy lady tried me on with the “Monsieur, I just found this lovely gold ring” scam, but that didn’t work for her this time. We got the required pictures and retuned to Blvd Haussman to buy the black handbag.

Back then onto the Metro headed via the Eiffel Tower to Place St Michel for our most expensive coffee yet - 9.2 Euros. A stroll then to photograph Pont Neuf, and Notre Dame, beautiful in the late summer sun, and a short metro ride up to the Gardens of Luxembourg. There were more hundreds, perhaps thousands of people enjoying the warm late afternoon in the gardens. All the gardens have a huge supply of green metal chairs for use as and where you want, and the central pond has an armada of toy sailing boats to hire for a bit of fun with the kids.

 

Last time we were here we stayed close to Boulevard St Michel, so we took the opportunity of walking back along it to our hotel across the other side of the Seine in the Marais, and enjoyed a beer and a Kir peche on the way. There was “something happening” as Fred would say somewhere in the city. There were large vanloads of Gendarmerie wearing body armour parked waiting on Ile de la Cite. Haven’t seen TV so unsure who is protesting against what, but they didn’t go racing off anywhere so whoever the protestors were they must have been either late or well behaved.

The final taste sensation meal was in the Jewish quarter and was a mix of falafel, kofta, tabbouleh, and other dippy type stuff. All very tasty and certainly doesn’t break the bank. I was a little startled at the glass of chilled vin rouge, but it did warm up before I had the courage to drink it. Just one more day before we fly from Charles De Gaulle Tuesday night at 9 15, but that will be all about the last minute things and a repack to accommodate the stuff we’ve gathered. Why did I buy that!

 

Paris, au revoir.

 

 

 

La Route des Vins and to Reims - the champagne capital

After our relaxed week on the canal we took the train via Strasbourg, and arrived at La Gare Colmar followed by a short walk to our accommodation at Martin Jund winery right in the heart of the old quarter.

After a week on the boat it was chores for the first part of the afternoon! Then we set off to find where we were going to ward off starvation this evening. We settled on Le Jardin du Caveau St Joan. The food was very good, the wine a very good sec Alsace Riesling, and the setting very much Alsatian.

The town was busy with tourists all afternoon, it's a very pretty place augmented with plenty of brand retail to cater for bored and wanting to shop tourists. 

 

Sunday morning we did the Rick Steve/Steve tour of the old town. It is very picturesque and the buildings are amazing, and very well preserved/restored.

Lots of money has gone into restoration of some of these old town centres and the houses, though hundreds of years old, are still in use. The EC provides a subsidy of about 15% of the cost of renovation, so there must have been many billions of Euros disappear into that area. We selected the night’s eating place while we walked, Le Comptoir de Georges, a butchery/brasserie with a balcony over the canal in La Petite Venise. The canal system was all things to all people when the town was young, the tanners flushed their skin treatments chemicals into it, the laundry was done in it, people fished, and the fisherman delivered produce to market on flat bottomed skiffs. So it must have been an interesting piece of water.

We spent an hour or so viewing the Isenheim Altarpiece now on display in the old Dominican Church while its usual  musee home gets an upgrade. Used the audio guide, as the English interpretive signage is a bit on the light side. It is a stunning piece of work done by sculptor Nicolas de Haguenau, and painter Mathis Gothart Nithart known as Grunewald between 1512 and 1516. It's a series of paintings on hinges that pivot like shutters  so has several 'leaves'. The first "picture" is the centre carving.

 

We later visited its regular home, the Unterlinden Musee, apparently the most visited museum in Europe, however the only signage in English was the one at the entry which outlined the organisation objectives (you know excellence, make you a happy visitor etc). We gave them a total fail on all objectives, with zero signage in Anglais or any language other than Francais. There was lots of interesting stuff on display however without a bit of interpretive stuff to accompany it, you can only stand and marvel. We would have preferred a tad more than that.

Dinner at the Le Comptoir was at the excellent end of the scale and the venue was lovely. We did the romantic walk back through the old quarter, with the buildings lit by pastel coloured lights.

Monday am we headed to pick up the car from Avis. We walked in rain 20 minutes to the designated pickup place on the Route de Strasbourg. No Avis! Apparently the branch closed a couple of months ago and Avis had been too slack to tell us of a change. So we walked off in the other direction to find  the office downtown at La Gare. Still raining. We had walked a couple of hundred metres when a car tooted and pulled in behind us. It was a young Frenchwoman who had been in the service station while we were trying to sort out the missing Avis. She drove us to La Gare. Unfortunately we didn’t get her contact details, she really was a bit of a Godsend! Avis was unapologetic, but did find our reservation. The car looks like it’s been through at least a couple of laps of a stock car demolition derby, dents and scratches on almost every panel. I felt like painting a big “As supplied by Avis” on the sides for our two weeks of touring around France. At the moment Avis are on notice! We’ll see what their response is. TomTom got some good exercise getting out of town; we had about seven “Route Barree” signs so had to deviate each time, much to her consternation.

We eventually prevailed and headed for Kayserberg to go to a market (very average) and see its historic 16th century fortified bridge, with a chapel at its centre. This bridge was spared after negotiation with the 'barbarian enemies of the Republic' in WWII, who were going to blow it up to stop the American tanks. Kayserberg is on a strategic route over the Vosges to Nancy. The townspeople persuaded the Germans to allow them to dig an anti-tank trench instead and the bridge was saved. How anyone could think of destroying this stuff is incomprehensible without the 'all’s fair in love and war' justification to fall back on.

Did see a stork there too, on top of the monument to the fallen in WWI and II. Particularly moving was the tribute to the men from the village who had been pressed into the German army after they were conquered. 130,000 Alsatian men were forced to fight, mostly on the Russian Front.

It was then on to Eguisheim, with a fascinating walk around the ramparts of the town – wealthy houses on the side with the view and their barns on the opposite side of the lane, but now converted to houses. It is called “the prettiest village “in France and it probably deserves the title, a lovely village in the middle of vast areas of grapes. The pictures can carry this one.

 

 Alsace grows all seven white varieties, and the wine is cheap, from 6-9 Euro for standard and perhaps 15 Euro for Grand Cru. We did a sampling at Maison Martin Jund and sampled about six Rieslings, a Pinot Gris and a Pinot Blanc. Always good to do these things with one of the people involved in the process. The family farms about 18 ha in 6 different locations and produces mainly whites. They do a Pinot Noir, but like most here it’s very light and is treated like a Rose and served chilled. There are a couple of bottles of a Grand Cru Riesling to bring home.

Our next stay was in another pretty Route des Vins village, a B&B in Ribeauville, La Maison des Roses.

This offered a couple of days of walking from view to view from castle ruins, and then a longer walk through the vines and several of the very picturesque medieval age villages. There are ruins of three castles on the hill above Ribeauville, built between 1050 to 1300.The history is fascinating and the views superb.

 

The walk through the vines was done with the occasional other walker, but as we walked through the middle of the day, some villages were totally deserted…..it’s that lunchtime  thing again.

 

That night we dined on Alsatian specialities (Poulet au Riesling with spaetzle, and Fleischnacka – check out the recipes online) at Au Cheval Blanc, a restaurant close by.

The next night we had a wine tasting scheduled so planned something a bit less elaborate, like pizza, or Tarte Flambee, as they call it here – a very crisp base with the usual suspects on the top.

We did the wine-tasting at Cave du Ribeauville. This is the local cooperative, with 10 of the local villages supplying through it, and the winegrowers often behind the bar to guide tastings. It was very good, tasted mainly Riesling, but also dallied with Cremant D’Alsace, Muscat (very dry), and Gewürztraminer. So we found out why some small patches of grapes we noticed as we walked haven’t been harvested (bad botrytis) and that the season had not been great with not enough sun and rain at the wrong time. Our tasting guide made some bio (organic) wines and some regular, and said the bio is harder to do and he makes less from it because of that. So not a long term commitment to the genre. We bought just a couple, one Grand Cru to bring home for the cellar, and one for the road. Prices are very cheap for some very nice wines.

Our fellow guests in Ribeauville, whom we breakfasted with, were an Italian couple from Ascoli Piceno east of Rome which we have put on the visiting list for another time. We then set out on the next stage of our travels through the Route des Vins in drizzle. Tomtom had a rare mistake, sent us driving off towards St Marie aux Mines, and then after about 5 minutes told us to turn around. Haven’t been able to check yet whether she was right or wrong. Anyway we did get to Chateau du Haut Koenigsbourg in the misty hills just north of us. The castle is elevated at 755m, with the plains below at about 200m above sea level. It’s about 800 years old, and was restored by the Kaiser Wilhelm II between 1900 and 1908. We were really in the clouds, so no view at all  except in a postcard but it is a grand restoration and was well worth a look.

Next stop KL Natzweiler-Struthof, the concentration camp set up by the Nazis in France in WWII. As Germany had annexed Alsace-Lorraine, they’d probably argue that it was actually in Germany. It was raining and the camp is in high mountains so very cold, so we certainly could understand the hardships endured by the over 8000 inhabitants of the camp. The presentations are very graphic and you do walk away feeling very sad for those who suffered in such a ghastly way at the hands of their neighbours. The “memorial" aspect of the displays ensures “they will never forget, nor will those who died be forgotten.” As the Allied forces approached, those in the camp were force-marched to Dachau, over 6000 of them.

We drove on out of the mist and rain into a grey day, heading for Traenheim and a wine-tasting with Frederich Mochel. We had not arranged our visit and were admonished gently for that, however they treated us very well, summonsing the English speaking son, Guillaume, to talk us through the wines.  So the tasting was well supported by the local stuff that it’s nice to know. No further planting of new areas can be done here, the plantings are all at 230-260 m elevation on two 5 ha blocks for this vineyard. He is one of the few who retains hand picking for his classic varieties; most others have gone to machine harvesting. For Grand Cru and specialties all picking still has to be by hand. So he can’t plant any new areas and the cheapest he could buy additional land would be 100,000 Euro per ha, and there are very few sellers. We purchased a 2009 and a 2012 Grand Cru Riesling and a classic quaffer for the road. When he gave me the bill, with a complimentary “waiter’s friend” corkscrew, he said, “I have not charged for the classic, this is our gift for you” So a lovely visit, following on from Ross and Michelle’s call there in 2009.

On to Obernai for a stopover before departing for northern France. Last samplings of Alsace food at dinner and this time just a “picher” of house Riesling to accompany. Both meals were a lot of food, but good! For the record Obernai has another small wall and moat set up for the old town and our hotel, Le Gouverneur was built into the inside wall, in 1566. 

We departed next day for Reims via Fleury and Verdun. We went first to the wrong Fleury, but eventually got to the right place and saw the battlefields, left as they were, cratered by artillery bombardments. We then visited the French cemetery and a couple of other monuments. The main memorial display is undergoing a renovation for the commemoration of the centenary of the battle so was unfortunately closed. The Verdun battle cost more than 80,000 French lives, but over 300,000 were killed in this area in the course of the war. Again it was quite sobering to see and try to comprehend the hell that happened here. The cemetery has 16,000 marked French graves and the Ossuary memorial contains the remains of 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers.

 

TomTom had a good day, enjoying a mix of motorway, toll roads, and very rural roads. I’m sure we bought a part of the A4 during our 400 km or so of travels for the day. It was good to get to Reims where we will be for three nights, so we’ll open the suitcases this time! Les Telliers is very handy to everything we want to do in the city; parking is a small garage over the road, which is very secure but is difficult to navigate into due to the parking habits of the locals. Our host gave us plenty of eating place recommendations so we are all set.

Saturday was a look at the historic cathedral, plenty of Jean of Arc there but not in very photogenic spots. The wars have been pretty cruel to this cathedral which towers over its whole surrounding area, with an incendiary shell setting it alight, and later artillery fire blasting holes in the nave.

But thanks to the generosity of the Rockefellers it was restored to its former Gothic glory. (Now its biggest enemy is the elements! Note the scaffolding.)

Then a spot of shopping and a walk to Maison Pommery for our Champagne tour. This started in the vineyards and took us all the way through the process and the caves to finish with a glass (just two) to sample. Very interesting tour. Another AOC, but one with many options, some houses buy in the grapes and don’t own vineyards, some have vineyards and contract in additional grapes, but like all these things very strict controls are in place. For Champagne, a grape yield no more than 12 tonne/ha for the Chardonnay, Pinot Noit or Pinot Meuniere. The blend is determined by the season. Blanc de Blanc (100% Chardonnay) for summer, Blanc de Noir (100% Pinot Noir and Pinot Meuniere) for winter and a Rose for spring. This Rose may have added red wine (for Pommery) or have some fermentation on the skins for others in the AOC.

Pommery has 250 ha of vines but buys in further grapes. Production is about 5 000 000 bottles pa. A hectare yields about 10,000 bottles, and the buy in price for grapes is about 6 Euro per kg, but the price goes down as compliance with the AOC requirements about soils, slopes, aspect etc goes down. As it does from Grand Cru to Premiere Cru to traditionale. It’s all hand picking here, and they dabble in the bio/organic/sustainable areas. They use a “sexual confusion” technology based on pheromones to control insect pests. The pheromones must be just strong enough for the butterflies.

A very grand place, developed by the very entrepreneurial Mrs Louise Pommery after her husband bought the original winery then died two years later. It has been operating for over 150 years. The tour was two and a half hours, so the day was about done after that. Dinner was one of our host's recommendations and very good fare at the art deco Brasserie du Boulingrin, a short walk away.

 

Extracted the car from the garage this morning and headed to Hautviller, which Rick Steve recommends as the Champagne village to go to if you are only going to one. Getting out of town was a bit fraught, the Reims marathon was on and there were lots of barricades to frustrate TomTom’s selected routes. At one point two burly policemen stepped off the pavement and flagged us down. My immediate reaction was, “How on earth do they know we’ve just been going through red lights and the wrong way down streets (traffic was very light). However he chatted away for a few moments and I intervened in Anglais, so we clarified where we were able to head. He gave us a wry “Good Luck” and in fact we avoided any barricades from then on.

We were heading to Hautviller to do a walk in the vineyards and the local forest. We had great views out over Epernay, which we remember fondly from our October 2 visit and the grape-planted hills around it. We visited the local abbey, where one Dom Perignon was the chief  cellarmaster and we all know what he invented and what occasioned him to run through the abbey one day shouting “I’m drinking stars!” His grave is in the abbey. We sat in a little village called Bellevue having lunch, yes, with the great view over the valley.

 

We did try on the way home to see bonsai and twisted trees in the Verzy forest. However it was a bad case of “non sign-posting” , and after a couple of km walk in the forest we threw in the towel. God loves a trier though.

Then it was home to get ready to depart earlyish tomorrow for another long travelling day. Farewell to the grapes, but maybe some Fruits de Mer on the Normandy Coast?