Wed 20th Aug
Our Apartment: Apartment Rousseau at the complex Beaune Sweet Home.
The drive down to Beaune from Troyes took about 2.5 hrs and we made into our apartment by 2 pm. The place was right in the middle of the Old Town so well located for sight seeing. It was a good sized apartment, modern and clean and appointed with good quality linens and towels and came with off site parking. It was a great base for exploring Beaune over the next two days.
We headed out to the Tourist Office to see if they had any walking tour guides and found Beaune Old Town area to be quite lively, having a lot more people milling around than had been in Troyes. It had quite a compact Old Town and was very flat so was quite easy to explore. We walked a section of the rampart walls and visited the Cathedral but found the latter to be a poor contrast, with much less stained glass, compared to the numerous churches we had seen in nearby Troyes and I’d love to know why this region missed out on that particular craft benefit. It was just 2.5 hours to Troyes but the towns were so different! The other main difference being that we had left the ‘Champagne’ region of Troyes and entered the ‘Burgundy’ region of Beaune (mostly Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes).
Dinner tonight was at Le Bistrot Bourguignon which was ok but not great and not a place I’d recommend. We were both tired after our day of travel and had a relatively early night.
Thurs 21st Aug
It was an overcast day but that suited us just fine as we had a lot of walking ahead of us. We were using the Tourist Office audio guide to explore more of Beaune, then had a visit to the last family owned mustard mill followed by a wine degustation tour of the oldest and most prestigious wine cave in Beaune, Maison Champy.
The first part of the morning was spent using the audio guide; which was supposed to take one hour but we found ourselves only half way through by the end of an hour. It was a great way to explore Beaune on foot though as the accompanying commentary provided lots of interesting information. We discovered that the area has been a UNESCO listed site since 2015, due to being a cultural landscape of ‘outstanding universal value’, that Beaune is considered the wine capital of Burgundy, that there is evidence of vines being in the area since the early 1st Century Gallo-Roman era, that there are kilometers of wine tunnels underground in Beaune and that 15 religious congregations had wineries here before the French Revolution.
We took a break from our guided walk at around lunch time as we had a 1.30 pm visit to La Moutarderie, a family owned mustard mill in operation since 1840. Mustard production had thrived here as Verjuice, produced from the grapes of the area, was used instead of vinegar to great advantage. The tour through the mustard plant took about one hour and I was glad when it ended as my eyes were stinging from the mustard oil in the atmosphere but it was very interesting and is an activity I would recommend if you’re ever in the area.
There was a bit of time to kill after the mustard mill visit and before our winery tour so we stopped off at Musee du Vin de Bourgogne, the old one in town, but it was not really worth the 6 euro entry fee. Mind you, the tourist office girl yesterday had alluded to as much so we weren’t too surprised. There is a better, more modern, museum just outside the old town that was highly recommended but I’m not sure we will have time to include this.
It was just a 5’ walk from our apartment to our 5 pm appointment at Maison Champy, the oldest wine company in the Burgundy region dating back to 1720. This was an excellent way to spend 90’ becoming more familiar with French wines and their different growing / labelling processes and it is an experience I would highly recommend. Our guide, Hortense, was very informative and engaged which always makes tours more enjoyable. I’m just recalling our food tour in Paris where our guide was quite unenthusiastic and looked like she’d rather be anywhere else than with our small group! We even ended up buying some Maison Champy wine to share with our children who were joining us in Provence. There was a lot of history with the venue as well that involved Louis Pasteur, who helped the Champy family with their initial endeavors of transporting wine to England in a hygienic way and Gustave Eifffel, who helped design an extension of their winery. Eiffel’s metal work is still visible to this day! It was a most enjoyable way to end our rather full day.
Thankfully, we enjoyed a night of dining in at home and it was pure bliss and a much better dining experience than the previous night.
Fri 22nd Aug
It was our last day in Beaune and we had a fairly full agenda with a morning visit to Hotel Dieu and and afternoon wine safari.
Our visit to Hotel Dieu was very interesting and the place was super busy with loads of large, guided tour groups. The Hotel is a significant establishment for the town as it dates back to 1443 when the Duke of Burgundy built it as a hospice for the poor and marginalised following the devastation of the 100 year war. Today there is still the old hospital, now a museum, but also a winery and a new hospital that serves the community. The winery aspect was the weird one but apparently grateful patients and the wealthy of the community made bequests and / or donations of vineyard plots in the past to the Hospice and wine production then stemmed from that land ownership. To this day the Hotel Dieu holds a high profile annual wine auction where the proceeds are donated to local charities and to the existing hospital. It was a great way to spend 90’ and your ticket entry includes an audio guide so this is another activity I would recommend if you’re ever in Beaune.
There was a bit of time to kill before our afternoon wine safari so we took the small tourist train trip around the city. This was a 40’ journey that covered ground we’d already seen except it did venture just outside the rampart walls to show how close the vineyards were to the city. They are very close! This was an ok activity but only something you might consider if you’re short of time in Beaune.
Our afternoon wine safari was excellent and I’d highly recommend this if you’re ever in Beaune. Our guide, Thomas, was wonderful and chaperoned us to three different domains where we tasted about 5 wines at each venue. He is a native of Beaune and he, along with his brother, are the third generation managing their own domain of 25 acres producing 50,000 bottles per year. So he definitely knew what he was talking about. Mark and I are now more knowledgeable about the classification of wines by appellation.
Thomas explained this by way of a drawing:
Plots: There are only 1,247 plots in the whole of Burgundy.
Grand Cru – produced from exceptional single vineyard plots. (Generally on higher areas of hill / mountain). There are only 33 plots in the whole of Burgundy, making 1.4% of Burgundy’s wine production. There can’t be any more of these plots by law. Even if someone buys that plot and would produce an inferior wine, it would still retain this classification.
Premier Cru – produced from single vineyard plots. They make up 10% of Burgundy’s production.(Generally on higher areas of hill / mountain)
Village – appellations that take their name from the one village where the grapes are grown. They make up 37% of Burgundy’s production.
Regional –from plots anywhere within a region and they make up 52% of Burgundy’s production.
It was a wonderful way to spend our last afternoon in Beaune but we now have a lot more than just our luggage to drag down to load into the car tomorrow! We check out of here in the morning and have a 4 hour drive down to Mallemort, in Provence, where we are catching up with our three children and two grandchildren.
Sat 23rd Aug
It was a glorious morning for our drive down to Provence but we took a quick walk out to visit the local markets in Byron before we left. These are held every Saturday and there has been a food market here since 1203 with the covered part of the market here since 1443. The produce looked so spectacular I just had to take some photos; but check out the prices. Chicken worked out at AU$40 a kilo!
We had greatly enjoyed our short time in Beaune and would highly recommend a visit to the area. Our accommodation was excellent and very reasonably priced and I’d highly recommend. The building used to be a winery which was converted into apartments so they have a lot of charm and character. There are four apartments in the block and we chose the only one that had a terrace but this came with a trade off as it was the only one without lift access. Access to our apartment was up one flight of a spiral stone staircase so it was manageable, even with Dagwood! We booked directly with the hosts but the place is available on Booking.com as well.
