Bonjour to Eric, our bike guide for our 40 klm bike trek today, another beautiful day greets us. 6 ebikes and 16 regular bikes are pulled off the rack, Jan jumps shotgun and we are off after seats and gears are adjusted. This is no Tour de France, we are touring the outskirts of Dijon so there will not be any need to move out of the second sprocket on the front of the bike, nice, this will be a good day or riding for all.
We start by rolling through freshly tilled farmland connected by little villages, we stop at a 13th century church. Doors are open so we have a little look around. We continue rolling through the beautiful countryside before stopping at Château du Close de Vougeot. Here is where we learn then next layer of wine and its evolution. Monks were key to the production of vineyards and the entire process. They read and interpreted the process as it was documented from a time long ago and built this wine farm in the 12th century and began laying the foundation work for producing excellent wines. There are four huge wine presses and vats and barrels that are bigger than I have ever seen. During the time of prohibition (of course we are fast forwarding through centuries here), the locals here said, “fine, if nobody wants to drink our wine, fine, we will”, and they created their own society. This society now stretches across many countries around the world and to this day does an annual blind wine tasting here, where the winner has the honour of placing the Château seal on their bottle. This was a great Château visit, google if for more info and to watch the video. They have a very serious oath which you should check out, something like, “I promise to finish an entire glass of wine and not waste a drop etc”.
So from here it was time to visit to the wine caves for a stroll and, yes, more wine tasting. We sampled one, cremeux (sparking white, made in the traditional champagne method), one white and two reds. Nice. The tour of the caves was interesting in that all the bottles are now no good, hundreds if not thousands of bottles. Dating back to the 50’s, they recently sampled a variety of these bottles and the sampled ones where like vinegar if not worse. Eric, our guide said that perhaps there may still be a good bottle or two amongst these all but we will never know.
We enjoyed an optional lunch down the road from the caves before returning to our bikes. Lunch was an appetizer buffet, followed by a main, cheese or dessert. Yes, wine and as much as you would like to drink included. We had to monitor ourselves a bit as we still had over 10 klm to cycle. We continued riding along the back country roads past vineyard after vineyard. We stopped at one Clos du Tart, Grand Cru, some almost 8 hectares recently purchased for 250 million Euros (included the winery). Crazy.
We rolled single file into Dijon with the rush hour traffic, no nothing like at home, and our home for one last night, our beloved, Daniele. Beer, shower and a game of betang (boules, or bocce) entertained us before last speeches and our wrap up dinner. Which, once again was fantastic.
A few pics of our day, hope you enjoy...
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