Saint-Émilion

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K- The theme of our final few blogs is basically going to be the same - ancient and medieval cities, beautiful countryside, local markets and good food and wine. I could really just cut and paste the place names. However, for our own historical record I will continue to blog as accurately as possible.

Our first stop after leaving Colondannes was La Rochelle, a seaport on the Bay of Biscay and an important harbor since the 12th century. It is a pretty town with beautifully maintained architecture and impressive fortifications. As we so often do we spent the evening walking around before enjoying a kir or two. We then retired to a traditional French Irish bar to watch Euro 2012 - another great thing about being here was to follow the football in countries that cared about it as passionately as we did.

Our next stop was the famous and historic town of Saint-Émilion in the wine region of Bordeaux. A World Heritage site in it's own right Saint-Émilion is surrounded by beautiful vineyards and although we had not intended staying here we managed to find a cheap (enough) hotel and set off to explore the local vineyards. We quickly found that the French vineyards are not set up to be as visitor friendly as say Napa. Visitors are certainly invited but a lot is by reservation and many are closed at weekends. Fine for an organized visitor but less convenient for our "stop when you find somewhere nice to stay" type of travel. However,after several false starts we managed to find a smaller vineyard which did not require a reservation. We were the only tasters and we enjoyed discussing the wines in french with the 3rd generation owner. It is a cliche but the whole time we were in France (and indeed Europe as a whole) we were aware of the history that is everywhere and also the continuity. Having lived in the USA for 10 years now I am beginning to relate to the equally cliched American tourist who exclaims all the time as to how "old", "cute" and "quaint" everything is. I had to stop myself from occasionally doing the same!

Anyway, the wines were superb and their price tags a little more reasonable than we could expect at the larger Saint-Émilion houses so we purchased a couple of bottles for our increasingly gourmet picnics and headed off to find a picnic spot. Unfortunately, as you might expect, most of the local area is turned over to vineyards and we spent an increasingly stressful hour or so driving through beautiful, verdant scenery looking for somewhere to stop. Just as we were about to stop speaking to each other and I was about to eat my own arm we spotted a small church and yes, a picnic spot. Not quite next to the graves but in a nice sunny garden where we settled down for a sausage, cheese, baguette and tomato picnic that was to become a familiar part of the next 3 weeks (with the odd bit of foie gras thrown in).

Back to Saint-Émilion we explored the old town a little more and finished off the dregs of our wine on the edge of a vineyard looking over the valley before heading off in to the old town for dinner. After the best duck confit I had EVER had with the most sublime duck fat roast potatoes we completed our evening by watching France getting knocked out of Euro 2012 by Spain. Given our historic love / hate relationship with the French, especially as regards sport, this was an opportunity to gloat at their utter misery. However, because we were guests in their country and were enjoying such wonderful hospitality we instead commiserated fully. In addition, our own Quarter final was looming and an English football fan learns quickly that what goes around comes around!

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Photos

Picnic time!!
Actually a different location but the principles were the same throughout!

On the way to have my first Kir
La Rochelle

A picnic spot at last!
Note our tiny car - we drove 3000 miles in this!