Hi,
I’m Jon Pither and welcome to my new blog. Here I hope to discuss various bits and bobs during my pitherings about, such as stuff related to Java, wine, friends and family, and so forth.
Currently I’m moving jobs, moving house, and planning a marriage. During this three pronged attack on life I managed to get in a wine tasting trip to Burgundy, and as I’m writing this I’m preparing to get to the local beer festival.
See you around from time to time!
A couple of weeks ago we took a trip to Burgundy. Our charge was to resolve a matter of great importance! We needed to find suitable wedding wines for our wedding in December. We would scour over the extensive vineyards of this region, relentlessly throwing ourselves into countless degustations, mercilessly comparing great wines against fine cusines, all in the quest of satisfying our guests yearning for something different and pleasurable to drink on our special day.
We decided we needed suitable quantities of Bourgogne Cremant (sparkling wine), red and white. I hope to talk about wines that we discovered and brought back in the ‘wine’ section of this blog. I did take a journal throughout, but I’m not overwhelming confident in attesting to the quality of my notes, especially when they were written after the third or fourth degustation of the day!
This is a picture of the gite we stayed at in Vezelay. As you can see it’s surrounded by lush countryside and was a very peaceful place to be.
The gite was the hunting lodge of the Marshal of France Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban. Currently it’s looked after by a French farmer who has a ludicrously high level of attention to detail. This is evident by the immaculate state of the gite, wonderfully restored. On our first night he brought round a magnum bottle of his own wine which we found to be very pleasant, nice and light. During our stay, he was always bobbing around ensuring everything met his high standards. In fact on the last day he put air in my tyres, a necessary intervention considering the weight of our cargo. The fields around the gite covers a wide surrounding area. I took my guitar into the middle of one of the larger ones and made as much noise as I could, almost breaking the strings and my vocal chords. Fortunately no one back at the gite could hear me or they were too polite to say.
Above is the view of Vezelay from the bottom of the hill. Vezelay itself is lovely, well worth visiting. On the way up to the church at the top there’s lot of nice places to eat, a couple of tastings if you fancy it, and the scenary is fantastic. There’s a good walk from the Git to Vezelay, which we planned on doing but only half our of stronghold actually did.
Below are pictures of the church, and the view from the top of Asquins, which is the nearest village to the gite.
We soon got ourselves to Avalon, which is lovely nearby little town. We thought the food market was amazing, if not a little overwhelming. Fresh fish, meats, cheese, veg everywhere.
A couple of these cheeses in that counter are from Chaource, which we stopped at on the long drive down from Dunkerque. I bought tonnes of other stuff such as a brawn which I never ate. I’m not quite Hugh Fernely Whittingstall just yet. Below is a pic of what we did with all this food. I should note that this was the one night it rained, but usually the sky was a highlight; a sheet of bright stars. The night it did rain we were treated to a lighting storm. Couple of glasses of wine, seated on top of a hill looking over a forest, it was a like a front row seat to the end of time! Probably a bit dangerous in retrospect as we were making ourselves suitable targets for a lightning strike.
The rest of the trip belongs in the wine section of this blog, as I write about wines that stood out and the vineyards we visited. However I must talk about the fantastic restaurants we ate at. I’m sure that in the UK we could match France at the very top gourmet end of culinary venues. But what France has is a level below that, where you can get exceptional food for a fraction of the price. In Chablis for instance we spent 25 euros a head on a fantastic meal, proper Coq du Vin, snails, some chocolate dessert and three or four bottles of wine, including premier and grand cru Chablis. Fantastic value. We’ve spent around 150 pounds on a meal in the UK that was far short of this one.
I’ve heard a saying before that I think embellishes this about the region we explored – “Champagne is France’s soul, Burgundy it’s stomach”. My stomach agrees! Below is a couple of pictures of us dining at the restaurant ‘Le Montrachet’, which is situated at… Montrachet! As you can imagine there were quite a few Montrachets on the list. I finally met my match in the chocolate dessert. Anyone that has eaten with me on more than one occasion will know that the chocolate option on the dessert menu is usually an automatic choice. After encountering this particular one which proved to be my chocolate nemesis, I feel I need time to lick my wounds. Some more lighthearted dish like the souffle below will do me just fine thanks.
