A Wine-ish Walk Around Beaune

Beaune is one of the major wine capitals of the world. So I shouldn't have been surprised to find that the town–which I've always thought of simply as a lovely medieval town with fabulous architecture–lives, breaths, and turns around wine, wine, wine.

Wine has a physical presence here too. One of the many things I adore about our new town: we live a block from the lively center, but two blocks in the other direction is a beautiful park with a lake. At the end of the lake there's a wrought iron gate, and when you go through it, you are magically IN the vineyards, in la campagne, and looking out over "la montagne de Beaune". 

First up on our walk, a stroll by the lake 

So our (mostly) daily walk takes us to the countryside, where we can wander amid acres and acres of vines. We climb up the "mountain of Beaune", which is a grand title for a large vine-covered hill, which is however the tallest one around. Hidden in the leafy glenn at the top are the sprawling gardens and houses of  the well-heeled Beaunois who want to escape the confines of the city.

Through the garden gate, and voila, the Montagne de Beaune

 On our walks we watch the progress of the vines. There is the pruning cycle, the spraying cycle, and now  la vendange, the harvest. We see the vine tractors that look for all the world like some of the crazy vehicles in Star Wars. But most vines here are picked by hand, so we also see the groups of tell-tale white vans, and sun-hatted worker-bees bending over the vines, or carrying the heavy hottes–a sort of backpack for collecting grapes–on their backs.

Alien vehicles

 One early September morning before the vendange, we were puzzled because here and there they were still pruning the vines into a perfectly manicured form. The vendange was to start in in 10 days, wouldn't they cut off some grapes? But when we left the path to look more closely. we understood:on these varieties or perhaps as a result of careful pruning, the grapes were all growing at the very bottom of the plants, lovely ripe purple fruit hidden in the lower foliage. Look for the dark clusters in the photo below.

Then down the mountain, past the vines, through the gate, and back to civilization. But this being Beaune, we are never far away from wine. We pass the lycée vinticole, the wine high school, on the way home; we admire a beautiful home that is an international wine distribution center; we pass by a small in-town château, a domain for tasting; then back to our flat, former site of a wine warehouse which burned in the 60's, making way for our little courtyard development. Later we'll raise a glass.  A votre santè!  To your health!

In the COMMENTS: Anne says another beautiful town in Holland is Leiden. And she should know–she leads "Music & Market" tours around Europe, check out her website here. By the way, my friend Ellen took that beautiful picture of Reims. Natalia, I've never been to Lichtenstein–hmm, I may not want to go!

Favorite READS: Mindy has read the whole series of the The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard. I don't know this author but I'm checking her out because the reviews say her novels are great for Downton Abbey lovers (I loved the movie, did y'all?).