It may shock you to hear that I didn’t really plan our sightseeing on the way to and from Provence. I don’t know why it would, unless this is the first post of mine that you’ve read, but people can surprise you, so…in case you hadn’t guessed, I had no clue what we were going to see.
“Cluny,” Nick declared after I’d rattled off twenty or so Michelin-starred possibilities, and I’d heard of that, so we hopped into the car and headed for Cluny. “As close as you can get to Paradise on Earth,” he told me, but I think he was quoting something else, so…um…don’t sue me.
Anyway. It was.
Seriously: you walk into the grounds behind the abbey and just feel like contemplating the mysteries of life and the universe in such lovely, tranquil surroundings for the rest of your life. Which is to say that we felt that way: apparently the good men of the French Revolution didn’t see eye-to-eye with us. They tore the cathedral down stone by stone, leaving us to weave through the foundations, watch a 3-D movie of how it had once looked, and then stroll through some reconstructed sections (the project is ambitious and ongoing) featuring something like 1/20th original fragments.
It looked a bit like this:
From there we turned east (a minor navigational miscalculation on my part that led to us arriving in Provence shortly before 9pm, which was not the plan), because our guidebook listed an intriguing little town called Cerdon.
It’s a tiny little village nestled in lush Burgundian mountains, and its one claim to fame is a “sparkling rosé wine” manufactured there. Well…I like rosé champagne, and Nick likes rosé champagne, so I plugged “Cerdon” into the GPS and off we went.
First I just have to say: those winding mountain roads are freaking scary, and French drivers don’t make them any better. Near Cerdon we reached at least a dozen curves where Nick had to slow down and honk the horn before proceeding around, and the flimsy aluminum rails over the steepest parts of the turns did nothing to reassure us that we wouldn’t be a pair of sad little blurbs in the local paper by tomorrow.
Anyway, we get there, and it’s…not like we thought. We followed the first “Cave — Dégustation et Vente” sign that we saw, even when it led us into the back of some guy’s house (“Second Yard” the sign pointing at the single driveway insisted). The guy in question was even out in said yard, working a garden patch, and we got a little jumpy at the sight of the closed door of this alleged winery, especially when the guy started ambling toward us with a sharp-looking implement held loosely at the ready.
We made tracks out of there, although I could have sworn that, at the last second, I saw something about a “doorbell” on a smaller sign on the door itself. “Probably sets off some pager and Gardener Guy comes running over to open the place,” Nick joked, and we cackled a little hysterically.
To save our lives, we couldn’t find an open door in the town itself. There were tons of “Cave”’s–even some that claimed to be open–but they all asked you to ring the doorbell, and it just feels…icky.
Finally, we did.
“Allo?” a creaky old voice asked.
“Um…is the…winery open?” I asked nervously, in spite of the huge sign inches from my nose that clearly said “Winery Open.”
“Sure!” he shouted. “I’ll be right down!”
Hm.
So the guy lets us into what is clearly his garage, and I start to get it: there’s not enough foot traffic in this town to justify having an open store and sitting in it all day. So they shut them up until someone comes along, trundle out of their living rooms or whatever, make their pitch, and then go back to watching the day’s match.
No wonder Gardener Guy looked pissed when we drove off.
Anyway, he pours his vintage, and right away, this is clearly nothing like rosé champagne. For one thing, it’s so pink it’s almost violet. Plus it’s sweet, very heavily carbonated, and barely there in terms of alcohol content. It’s like beer made from grapes, maybe, and our vintner admitted that the stuff is virtually never exported commercially beyond the village limits, but it’s lovely and summery, and we left with twelve bottles to drink or share, which sounds like the start a lovely hot season to me.