Blogs from Cognac, Poitou-Charentes, France, Europe

Reputation calls on all within earshot of an utterance of that word ‘Cognac’ to genuflect or at least bow. If I were to offer cognac as an after dinner slurp, then I might be bunging it on a bit, or maybe there is a heavy question coming. After all, I have never tasted the stuff. Well not before now. We might know the big names in cognac like Hennessy and Remy Martin from watching the likes of Roger Moore and Sean Connery. A few days back, we pulled up in the town of Cognac, expecting something like the ambience of Epernay in the Champagne country. Cognac did present a prominence, albeit muted. There was a feeling of ‘having arrived’ when we drove into the town. But it all fell a bit flat. Epernay has stately homes, ... read more

Time to move on, almost directly south, over the Vezere and then the Dordogne river and down to the Ger in beautiful pastoral Gascony. Bob and Clarissa Tomtom had planned a route last night which went in a pretty straight line and took us along roads we had not used before. We were quite surprised by this as we thought we had probably seen all the stretches of the Dordogne that there are to see but we took a road south from Campagne, a rather attractive town on the Vezere, to Siorac-en-Perigord on the Dordogne, and decided we had not been this way before. I am about to correct that, we have been to Siorac before. In June 2003 we stayed in a gite in Mouzens just over the river, with Nigel and Lynne and ... read more

Thursday 15th – Cognac – France always seems a country of big skies. Everywhere you look whether it’s at night or during the day the sky seems to go on forever. Today we decided to spend the day at Cognac which was an interesting town with a big history of Cognac production. Sions tip free parking on the Hennessey Quai by the river. The river area felt much more interesting than the one at Saintes. We had made the decision to visit a cognac distillery and chose Hennessey. We picked the English tour in the afternoon and were taken across the river in a barge to the warehouses on the other side of the river. The visit included seeing the barrels being made, the distilling process and the ageing of the cognac. Not a drink either ... read more

All right, so my last entry I believe I left off giving a brief description of the farm, but I have pictures this time. It was quite a simplistic old farmhouse, but it was so simple and peaceful, even Anne Coulter could become a more pleasant person if she stayed there. After working long hours of pulling up weeds, I would grab a glass of vin rouge and watch the sun set behind a curtain of weeping willow branches. Then we would eat a large delicious meal that Joyce cooked (we ate very late) and drag ourselves to bed, only to do it again the next day. I loved doing everything 'the old fashioned way' even down to feeding the goats and hanging the laundry on the clothes line (I take great pleasure in the simplest ... read more