Laura Bradbury's Blog, page 6

Contemplating the Fall Colors of Burgundy

Last week my mother-in-law Michèle sent me these photos she took of the fall colors in the vineyards around Villers-la-Faye. This year was particularly spectacular, everyone back in Burgundy said, with the vineyards a riot of orange and yellow and red.

Its fall colors are how the Côte D'Or or the "Gold Coast" - the world-famous strip of vineyards running from Dijon down to Beaune - earned its name. Locals always joke that the more fitting reason is because of the mind-numbing worth of these vineyards (Romanée-Conti and La Tâche, anyone?).

For me though, the fall colors of our beloved Burgundy have a different meaning. Michèle's photos - as well as the one above snapped by my friend Charlotte (aka "Marie" in My Grape Village) - remind me of that very first year I came to Burgundy.

My first (wonderful) host family lived in Nuits-Saint-Georges. I took the school bus every morning from Nuits to Beaune and returned on it late every afternoon. This meant, of course, that I passed through Premeaux-Prissey, Ladoix-Serrigny, and Aloxe-Corton to name just a few of the picturesque winemaking villages which flank La Nationale.

I remember watching out that bus window as the color evolved and changed day by day. After the flurry and excitement of my arrival in France, those fall vineyards put me in a contemplative mood, full of wonderings and questions about what the next three seasons in France would bring. 

Little did I know then that they would serve up new friends, trips to Paris, the Alps, and Brittany, unbelievable meals with food and wine beyond my wildest imaginings and, most importantly, Franck and the beginnings of a life together that would be forever intertwined with France and the Côte D'Or.  

Now, seeing these photos, I find myself poised on the brink of a new beginning once again.  

This next year is - in one way or another - going to bring a huge amount of change into my life and the lives of Franck and our Bevy. I hope this next chapter will turn out to be both a gift and a new adventure. 

I study these photos of the Burgundy vineyards, especially the bottom one taken by Franck's aunt Marie-Hélène and which matches almost exactly the early morning scenes which unfolded through the school bus window over two decades ago. 

I find myself wondering...when the vineyards turn these same brilliant shades a year from now...where will I be? What will I be doing? How will I be feeling? The possible scenarios flicker through my mind. I hitch my hopes to the optimistic ones, although I know that life could easily hold some surprises that I haven't even begun to imagine yet. Good ones, I have to believe. 

Al Fresco Deliciousness in France

One of our favourite things to do in Burgundy is to have picnics. There are so many stunning spots around Beaune, Magny-les-Villers, and Villers-la-Faye and something about the fresh air and sunlight make the already delicious french food taste even better.

It is so incredibly easy in France to pick up the makings of a succulent feast at the Beaune market on Wednesdays and Saturdays, or the little food shops like the charcutier and fromager in the pedestrian centre of Beaune. Even the - pourquoi pas? - local grocery store is a source of incredible picnic-makings. Have you seen the cheese section in a french grocery store? 

Next, pick up a few bottles of wine from your favourite local winemaker (there are a myriad to choose from). A picnic in Burgundy without wine is frankly viewed as a bit of a travesty.

Don't forget to take your french market basket to carry everything. We leave one or more of these for our guests at our four vacation rentals , but you can buy extras at any market in France.  

Next step is to meet up with family or friends (or better yet, both) and enjoy the pastoral splendour of Burgundy while you sip wine, nibble at delicious cheeses, baguette, charcuterie, and fruit in the most decadent, languid manner possible. The whole point of a french picnic is to lose complete track of time.

Actually, there is another point to a french picnic - the indulgent post-picnic nap in the grass or against a tree trunk.  

Here are some of our favourite picnic spots in our magical corner of Burgundy:

- On Les Chaumes just above La Maison des Chaumes. There are two picnic tables and tons of space on Villers-la-Faye's grassy hilltop. Views down to the vineyards and, on a clear day, as far as Mont Blanc in the Alps are superb.

- On the field behind the Virgin Mary statue above the nearby village of Pernand-Vergelesses. This is where these photos were taken. If you have read my books, especially My Grape Year , you will know this statue holds such special significance for our family. The view down the valley towards Beaune of some of Burgundy's most valuable vineyards is not to be missed.  

- Along the burbling river near the playground in the village of Bouilland. One cannot find a more bucolic environment and on a hot day everyone loves wading in the river to cool down a bit. An alternative in Bouilland is to go up to the top of the cliffs that surround the village and enjoy the views from up there (although those who suffer from vertigo need not apply).

These three suggestions are just to get you started - explore and find your own favourite spots. Most of all, take the time to relax into the simple, unadulterated pleasure of the french picnic. That is, après tout, what Burgundy is all about.  

 

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Brocante Tour of La Maison des Chaumes

I am addicted to treasure-hunting. 

When in France I take every opportunity to go to local brocantes (like an antique store, but less curated and generally MUCH less expensive). I also hit every vide-grenier I can find, much to my daughters' exasperation. Vide-greniers are like village-wide garage sales, but in the street or a local field because French people think it an exceedingly odd concept to invite strangers into their homes to buy their old stuff. 

I have decorated our four vacation rentals with a mix of new (i.e. mattresses, sofas, all the stuff I would personally never want second-hand) and the antique treasures I have found in Burgundy. Here's a quick little tour of the house we consider our family home in Burgundy - La Maison des Chaumes. 

This armoire is one of my cherished finds. Its honey patina never fails to make my heart sing. It is pretty much the first thing one sees when they walk in the front door of La Maison des Chaumes and in my mind sets the tone for our house - simple, casual, welcoming, and authentic.

We found it at one our favourite trocs on the outskirts of Dijon (trocs are basically just another name for brocantes - they are more or less interchangeable). I plastered myself against it, prepared to fight off any usurpers while Franck found a salesperson and paid for it right away.

I still cannot believe what a steal this armoire was - it was ours for a mere 180 Euros...la victoire!  

This little beauty at the end of the main hallway of La Maison des Chaumes is what is referred to as a un confiturier, or a cupboard traditionally used to store jam. I found the iron statue on top at huge brocante in the Saône-et-Loire that runs every summer on the banks of La Saône river. 

The two paintings above the bent-wood chair (I picked up the chair at a vide-grenier in Pernand-Vergelesses) in the girls' bedroom were bought last summer in Normandy, where we were staying for a week with a friend in their incredible family home. The brocante-ing in Normandy is almost too good to be imagined and I never seem to leave a brocante there with empty hands. I found these two old paintings and loved the serene note they would give to what is - when our family is at La Maison des Chaumes anyway - an extremely full and messy bedroom. 

This is one of my favourite pieces in any of our houses. Franck and I found it in one of the trocs in nearby Chalon-sur-Saône. This old cupboard has the most amazing patina and was used in a village bakery for who knows how many years. I picked up the old-fashioned desk calendar at the Saturday morning brocante on the Place Carnot in Beaune. My girls love arguing over whose turn it is to change the day and the date. 

Last but not least is our monastery table that we found just after moving into La Maison des Chaumes at the same troc in Dijon where we found the armoire years later. It has been the solid basis of countless french lunches and dinners with family and friends. As Burgundian table culture encourages, we often stay around this table for hours. It is without a doubt the heart of our french home. 

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My Grape Year Available FREE to Amazon Prime Members

Just a quick head's up that for a limited time My Grape Year - the first book in my GRAPE series - is available for free to Amazon Prime members through the newly launched Amazon Prime Reading Program.

Just over a thousand titles on Amazon.com were selected to be part of this new program and I was thrilled that I was asked to participate with My Grape Year.

You can find the selection of books on the Amazon Prime Reading program here. To find My Grape Year in the scroll-down list of categories, click on "nonfiction" and then "Biographies and Memoirs". 

All my books are always available to read for Kindle Unlimited subscribers as well. Bonne lecture!  

Franck's Vintage Family Wine Harvest Photos from Burgundy

Franck's mother scanned and sent me some family photos she found of the grape harvest. To honour this year's recently completed harvest, and because they are simply too good not to share...

The harvest used to be a family affair, especially in the Hautes-Côtes where Franck is from and where our three village rentals are located. Villages like Villers-la-Faye and Magny-les-Villers were never as wealthy as their counterparts lower down on the Côtes, such as Gevrey-Chambertin and Pommard. Franck's maternal grandparents, like most villagers in Villers-la-Faye, owned some livestock, had a large vegetable and fruit garden, went fishing, collected snails and mushrooms, and of course had their own grape vines. 

At the harvest the entire extended family would come to help pick and squeeze the grapes. It was invariably festive (inevitable as it involved a lot of Burgundy wine) and usually spread out over several days.  

In the photo above I have a particular soft spot for the wizened great-great grandfather at the front of the photo pouring himself a mug of wine. He clearly has far more time for le bon vin than family snapshots.

It's interesting to look for features in Franck's ancestors that have been passed down to my girls. Clémentine, in particular, has a face and build that could fit right into the family photo above.  

You can see that traditional Burgundian harvest baskets were always used. They were shaped with an indent in the middle so that they could easily be carried on one shoulder with the other hand balancing a full load of grapes. Few winemakers harvest with the traditional baskets anymore, but I do know of a few and always make a point of going to watch them at harvest time. 

I wonder about this little guy with his own little basket of grapes and his injured thumb. Did he get it stuck in the wine press? Cut it on a pair of harvesting shears? 

Here they are loading up the baskets full of grapes on the portable pressoir that was shared by the villagers and used to press the grapes as soon as they came from the vineyards. Franck's grandfather, the eponymous Pépé Georges that I refer to quite a bit in My Grape Village, is standing up on the left wearing a sweater and a cap.

The Bouhey family wine domaine (see the inscription at the bottom of this photo) is still at the entrance to Villers-la-Faye and run by the older brother of my friend Sandrine (who, if you remember, was the one - along with Franck's sister - who set Franck and me up on a blind date in My Grape Year).

Here is Franck's cousin was trying to "help" pressing the grapes in the family cellar. I believe the guy in the glasses is Franck's great-uncle Fernand. Fernand was reputed to taste so much wine while it was aging in the barrels that he would find he had no wine left when bottling time came. He would shake his fist and curse the barrel makers for using inferior wood that soaked up all the wine, when really it was his own liver that did the soaking.   

As you can see, the harvest was hard work, but also a huge family celebration. I love this last photo of Franck's Aunt Renée and her husband Marcel (the couple on the right). She was always front and centre at all family celebrations, and still plays a mean accordion (as she did at our wedding).    

It All Started With a House in France

Our French vacation rentals began with our simple, typically Burgundian village house in Magny-les-Villers - La Maison des Deux Clochers.  It happened to date back to the same year the Revolutionaries in Paris stormed the Bastille, but it waited for us until 1998. 

We were in no position to buy a house in France, especially not one built in 1789 that undoubtedly held a bouquet of surpises for us along the lines of ancient plumbing and a leaking roof (and nesting snakes in the cellar, as it turned out).

But we visited it anyway. We discovered the cheese fridge built into the thick stone living room wall and the two cats that, as far as we could tell, belonged to everyone who shared the common courtyard.

It was totally the wrong time in our lives to buy a house. We were returning to Oxford in a few months so I could take my Master's Degree in Law, we had little money, we had been married for almost a year but still couldn't seem to steer ourselves in the same direction as a couple, we had no idea how to renovate a house and no idea how we would pay a monthly mortgage. But...we fell in love.

The same thing happened with my writing. When I sat down to write the story of La Maison des Deux Clochers and how this little house had completely turned my life on its axis, I had no idea what I was doing. I had just been given a devastating health diagnosis the day before, I had never finished writing a book, I had no idea how to get a book published... 

But I loved La Maison des Deux Clochers and, even more than that, I loved the story of this simple house and how it utterly changed our lives. So I scribbled "F--k You. I'm not dead yet" on a post-it note, stuck it to the corner of my computer screen, and started writing. Nine months later I published my first book - My Grape Escape.

That was four years ago. I just published my fourth book My Grape Wedding in July. We manage four vacation rentals in the Burgundy vineyards. I am still alive. 

Life, for me, can often only be understood in retrospect and through the process of writing. It has crystallized, like a blurry image sharpening to stunning clarity, that some of the most momentous moments on my journey happened because of this one, magical, simple house.

And I don't know how it is possible, but the same shared village cats are still roaming the courtyard. 

The Family Winemakers of Burgundy

Many of our friends and family in Burgundy are involved in the wine trade in one way or another. Burgundy is famous for its big wine houses, of course, the ones that most people have heard of like Patriarche, Champy, Louis Latour and so on. 

In my opinion though, the true lifeblood of wine production In the Côte D'Or is the small family-held Domaines.

My dear friend in France, Charlotte (who I renamed "Marie" in my book My Grape Village because our eldest daughter is also named Charlotte and two Charlottes was just too confusing for this here writer) supports her husband Marc-Olivier as he manages and runs his family wine Domaine in the picturesque village of Volnay.

I have witnessed first hand what back-breaking work it is to produce wine at a small Domaine. Unlike the corporate winemakers, the smaller winemakers have to wear many hats - vineyard labourer, marketing manager, President of Exports, accountant, Director of Vinification, salesperson, etc. etc. etc. 

However, the wine I have tasted in Burgundy which has truly surprised and floored me is almost without exception from these smaller domaines...wine so unexpectedly sublime and original that I have felt like dropping to my knees in worship. 

I have been privileged to taste the Domaine Buffet wine on many occasions. I remember at one dinner a few years back where we were drinking old, mostly unlabelled bottles to try to ascertain their age. I think the oldest one was estimated to be from around 1910. 

There is a personal touch, and an attention to the pure expression of terroir at Burgundy's smaller domaines that just cannot be replicated in a bigger structure that has to please a large number of global palates year after year. This is why it hurts my heart that the family domaines have been affected the most by the nasty curveballs Mother Nature has thrown at Burgundy's winemakers in the past four years. 

First there were several violent, destructive hailstorms. This year a late frost reduced many of Burgundy's grape yields in our area to 0-20% of what is normal. 

I am sending prayers up to the weather gods that the next few years will be kinder to winemakers in our little corner of France, so the family domaines can build up their stocks again and continue to perform their magic for the benefit of every wine lover. Burgundy would be so much less without them. 

To The Beaune Market...

It is the simple activities I enjoy the most when we are at La Maison des Chaumes, our house in the vineyards of Burgundy, France. Top of my list is going to the Saturday morning market in Beaune.

You can see why every time I am in Burgundy I try to go to as many Saturday morning markets as I can. It is always a tantalizing adventure. Not only do I find a myriad of fresh ingredients to enjoy during the days to come, but even more importantly I bump into friends, family, and acquaintances. We always take the time to chat, often retiring to the nearby café for an espresso and a proper catch up.

Then I meander back to the market again and I always stop off at the brocante stands set up on the Place Carnot. I have found more treasures there over the years that I can count, many of which now adorn our four vacation rentals in and around Beaune. 

Franck's grandfather, who lived in the family home in Villers-la-Faye, was a Saturday morning market devoté. He was an early-bird, but he would spend so long chatting and visiting friends at the market that often he could be in Beaune from seven o'clock until one o'clock (when the market shuts down) and still run out of time to buy any food. 

If you have the chance to experience the Beaune market for yourself, it is every Saturday from around 7:00am to 1:00am on the Place Carnot, the Place de la Halle, and spreading out like an octopus from there. It is literally steps away from our vacation rental in the heart of Beaune - Le Relais du Vieux Beaune. There is also a smaller market every Wednesday at the same time. If you are traveling to France do not forget to excavate time in your schedule for market meandering - it is not to be missed.  

A 13th Century Wine Cellar in Burgundy

"Merde, I almost forgot," the owner said as we sat in the notary's office. We were just about to sign the final papers to purchase an 18th Century apartment in the medieval heart of the winemaking town of Beaune, France. "What am I going to do with that extra cellar?" 

In Burgundy and especially in Beaune where people live, breath, and drink (bien sûr) Burgundy's world famous wine, "cellars" do not fit the description conjured up by the non-French mind. They are not filled with potatoes and old ping-pong tables. Rather, they are more along the lines of this:

Our 13th century wine cellar under Le Relais de Vieux Beaune in Burgundy, France.

In Burgundy "cellars" are called "caves" and they are where wine is stored deep underground where the humidity and temperature remain as constant as possible for optimal aging conditions. 

When we toured the apartment which became one of our most popular vacation rentals in Burgundy - Le Relais du Vieux Beaune - we briefly ventured down into the cellar.

It was part of the real estate tour although I cannot fathom why. There was no wine to be seen and it was dirty and dingy; hardly a winning feature at first glance. It was, we were informed by the real estate agent, sorely neglected and had been used to store coal back when coal was still used as a mainstream heat source (so around the time Dickens penned Great Expectations I figured).  

Still, Franck and I noticed the beautiful stone vaulting of the ceiling and the stone pillars, all of which dated the cellar back to the middle ages, centuries before the building above had been constructed.

On that first and even the second visit, there had been no mention that this cellar was for sale - it was merely being shown to us as part of the overall building. 

So when the owner mentioned the cellar at our signing we were intrigued, albeit bewildered.

"You mean the one that's all black from the coal?" Franck asked

"Yes. That one. I hadn't thought about it until now, but I don't want it. What would I do with a dirty, old cellar?" He turned a questioning gaze to his realtor, but she just shrugged. 

"Do you want it?" He asked us.

"For how much?" I said. "We've maxed out our budget purchasing the apartment." This was not some negotiating tactic, it was the absolute truth.

"I don't know....," he said. "I've never bought or sold a cellar before. How about I throw it in for two hundred euros?" 

I had to restrain myself from yelping. Franck and I exchanged a look.

"Sure," Franck said. I was impressed with his ability to maintain a veneer of nonchalance. "I don't know if we'll ever be able to do anything with it, but I guess we could take it off your hands." 

That is how we woke up one morning not owning a wine cellar in Beaune, and how we went to sleep that night the proud possessors of one.

The story of how we cleaned, renovated, fixed up, and baptized what we now refer to as Le Cellier du Vieux Beaune is a tale in and of itself. It involves hunting for ancient stone sinks, sliding a several ton block of local marble down the stairs without crushing anyone, a newborn baby, and a riotous baptism (not of the baby, but of the wine cellar). 

If it sounds like a book, excellent! I have plans to write the story of our Beaune wine cellar as a novella after finishing up My Grape Paris (the next book in my bestselling GRAPE series).  I'll also be blogging more about the creation of the cellar soon...

In the meantime, In Vino Veritas! 

Win This Oh-So-Frenchy Prize

I’ve been hearing that some readers have already downloaded and read their e-book copy of My Grape Wedding (selling for only $2.99 on Amazon.com) .

For all you speed-readers out there, here is a chance to win this gorgeous market basket from the Saturday market in Beaune + paperback copies of all four of my ‘Grape’ books.

I coerced Franck into buying this for me when he was in Burgundy in March and made him bring it back to Canada as a carry-on so I could give it away as part of the prize in my My Grape Wedding contest.

All you need to do to enter is write a review on Amazon.com and then send me a quick email at laura@laurabradbury.com to let me know.

Reviews make such a MASSIVE difference to us writers. Merci!