macon area

drove through aix this morning. it has such a lovely color. lots of people out on the street. clothing marche day. had breakfast with amy and bob in their lovely garden. wonderful ambiance. this is the life...

heading back towards paris, but only going halfway again. (just want to mention here how amazing it is to have an ipad with which we can consult google maps for real time TRAFFIC! allows us to detour around terrible traffic jams. amazing!) p was able to book a bed and breakfast in macon wine country. we drove through the lovely hilly countryside, dense with vineyards and found our b&b in an old stone farm house at the edge of a very small town with narrow streets. we dropped our bags and headed straight out to find some wines to taste.

when j was born, we were living in paris. it was summer, and we had rented a house in macon for a few weeks after her birth, so we could get out of the hot city. my mother and p’s parents and sister came over to join us. now, 14 years later, we were back in the neighborhood. we didn’t remember the name of the town, but knew that the local wine was “st. veran” and it was over the hill from the town of fuisse where they make “pouilly fuisse”.

so today, we headed out on our first mission to see if we could find the town and maybe even the house where we stayed. p. recognized the town name of “leynes” and then recognized the landscape. i recognized the doorway that looked out over the main street and onto the hills of vines. p. recognized the owner’s name. we pulled in and were pleased to see that the owner was there. we explained that we had rented his house all those years ago, just after j’s birth. we asked if we could do a tasting and he happily brought us down to the cave. i remembered thinking that his wines were ok, but not great. we were pleased to find some decent and very reasonably priced “st veran”s. we bought 6 – 2 st veran, 2 macon and 2 cramant – which is a bubbly wine made with the champagne process. we drove through the town of leynes, which was very quiet. then we headed to fuisse, where we had hiked to, years ago. we found another very quiet town, but with places to taste wines. we knocked on one door on the street. it felt like a children’s tv puppet show when the big round man with googley eyes opened the shutters above the door and said in a booming voice “aah-oui?”. when we asked if we could taste his wine, he said that he would be right down. then, like in a puppet show, we heard the sound effects of feet clonk, clonk, clonking down the echoing stairs. he had only one wine to taste. it was markedly better than the “st veran” and a little more expensive. when we said we would take one bottle, he said “ah, no”, “[the minimum is 6 bottles. i am not running an epicerie (deli) here]’. 6 bottles was really more than we wanted so, we said, “no, never mind”, and he then offered us 3 bottles. we agreed, though i guess we could’ve negotiated ourselves back down to one bottle.

we then drove into macon, which being a larger town, had more to offer for restaurants. we had a lovely meal along the river and decided we really liked the town. it felt big enough to offer everything, but small enough to feel manageable, old enough to have interesting buildings and rich enough to have nice shops. in addition, it is close enough to the vines that one can be back among them in 10 minutes. Print this post