July 12, 2008

After we rose and shone we moved the boat back into town to fill the water tanks at the local marina. We dumped Zak on shore with the camera to take some action shots of the boat and met him back where we had moored. Back on board we loaded up and headed up the canal a very short distance to the Quai de l’Yonne à Bailly, home of Les Caves Bailly Lapierre.

Espaliered roses.

Les Caves Bailly Lapierre are a massive old limestone quarry where they produce Crémant de Bourgougne, a renowned sparking wine. Huge underground caverns had been carved out of the limestone rock over the centuries to build some of the biggest monuments and edifices in France including much of Paris. Because of its location, its natural moisture and its constant temperature of 12 ° C, in 1972 it was converted into a wine cave (pronounced cav remember!). The fermentation process takes 16 to 18 months and the inverted bottles must be constantly turned as the sediment settles into the necks Then the necks are frozen, the sediment removed and the bottles corked.

The visit here included a tasting, free wine glasses and a guided tour. Unfortunately it was all in French so Leslie was the only one quick enough to catch most of it. She translated as much as she could but I am sure we missed a lot. At some point, local artists had come and carved whimsical statues into the limestone. No idea why but they were pretty cool.

C in her happy place.

Machines for automatically turning the millions of bottles fermenting underground.

After we left the quarry we turned up hill and headed for what I was anticipating would be the pièce de résistance for the trip. My reading had turned up a small winery in the nearby town of St Bris that had some magnificent cellars. So up,up up the hill we went and at last emerged in vast fields of baby wine (vineyards) for as far as the eye could see. We had reached heaven.

 

We walked about 3.5 km before we descended into town and started wandering aimlessly looking for the winery. I had an address but that did us little good. I did remember it being somewhere near the church so we wandered around that for a bit. Below is the Google Street View shot of the entrance. I think we walked by it a couple of times before someone read the small sign by the entrance.

There was no one there but someone (or was it a sign?( told us the proprietor had just popped out to the boulangeire so we waited in the courtyard. Over in the corner was an old outhouse that had a hole in the ground and two foot prints to tell you where to squat. Very cultural! But alas no one was willing to go for the full cultural immersion.

Eventually a young man showed up and talked wine to us for a bit. Then he said in perfectly lovely English “Do you want to see my wine?” Oddly enough we all said yes. So he led us off to the side and down the dark stairs into his literal cellars. Apparently the family had bought up most of the cellars of the church and surrounding homes and used them to store their wines. He showed us a broad stone trough which was where the monks used to dump the grapes and then mash them with their feet. The cellars were filled with nooks and crannies full of dusty, web-covered bottles of old, old wine.

Our guide, who was one of the household scions, told us that one of his jobs was to go into the fields and decide when the grapes were ready to pick. We learned Burgundy wines are all about terroir; if you got the good field, you got the good wine. We learned that all the best wine barely leaves the village. France gets the second best wine and the lowly thirds are used for export. We learned more about wine in this little visit then we have in any of our trips to France; it was glorious. The winery, which is Domaine Bersan had a particular label called Bersan et Fils (Bersan and Son). We were currently talking to the Son part of the equation. For some particularly brain-dead reason I kept saying to Bersan et Filles (Bersan and Girl) and then asking him if he was the Girl? Until that is Leslie told me to shut up. So I did. Always a good plan in my case. 🙂

We had a lovely tasting and then emerged once again into the sunlight to visit his shop. We bought several bottles of wine (I think it was 4) and chatted about our boat trip. He was surprised to hear we had walked from the canal and offered us a ride back to the boat. I had just opened my mouth to agree when both L and C piped up and said no thanks. Sure it was late in the day, we had 4 bottles of wine to carry, C’s ankle was still sprained and we had 3 and a half kilometers of hilly territory to cover, but why would we want a ride? I still haven’t forgiven them.

Hours later when we arrived back at the boat, footsore and weary, basically crawling the last few inches, we collapsed bonelessly to the deck and tried in vain to recover after our arduous trial. then C made dinner and gave me wine to try and make it up to me. It mostly worked.