Pouilly-sur-Loire wines

After our lunch at Les 200 Bornes, we had at least a two-hour drive ahead of us. We talked about stopping in Vezelay, but the weather was rainy and windy. We've walked up to the top of Vézelay before, years ago — you have no choice but to walk, as far as I know — so we weren't as motivated to climb up there in bad weather as we might have been. Besides, we didn't want a sopping wet Callie in the car for the rest of the afternoon.

The map shows our route that afternoon. From Pouilly-sur-Loire we drove along the edge of the Forêt de Bellary (or Belary — the spelling seems to vary) to the little town of Varzy, which I visited with CHM a few years ago. The museum in Varzy possesses one of CHM's grandfather's paintings. From Varzy we continued to Clamecy, past Vézelay, and on to Avallon.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before we left Pouilly, I wanted to buy a bottle of Pouilly-sur-Loire wine. It's made from Chasselas grapes, and not much of it is produced these days.

Rather than search for an individual producer's winery, and risk getting lost in the stormy weather, I thought it would be a lot easier just to go to the wine cooperative in Pouilly, which was right up the road from the restaurant. Luckily, it was open. I bought my bottle of wine, and we were back on the road by two o'clock. 

The primary wine of Pouilly is a Sauvignon Blanc known as Pouilly Fumé. I thought I had never tasted the Pouilly-sur-Loire wine before. 

So there we were in the car carrying a bottle of white wine along with a container of my home-made Bœuf Bourguignon for our dinner at the gîte rural (vacation rental in the countryside) that we had rented — taking white wine to Chablis and Beef Burgundy to... well... Burgundy. As it turned out, we had just eaten the last restaurant meal of our three-day trip.

And it turned out too that I had actually tasted Pouilly-sur-Loire wine before, but didn't remember. Just a couple of days ago, searching through old blog topics for I forget what photo or nugget of information, I came upon this post about a lunch I had in Paris in 2008. It featured a bottle of Pouilly-sur-Loire white.

So here's my photo of the wine cooperative building in Pouilly-sur-Loire. You'll notice a drawing of the same building on the label of the wine bottle above. We enjoyed the Chasselas wine as an apéritif on our first evening in the little gîte we were staying in — before we heated up some Bœuf Bourguignon and cooked some pasta to go with it. We were glad we had decided to take the beef with us. We didn't have too look for a restaurant, and we didn't have to do any heavy-duty cooking. Besides, there weren't any restaurants in the tiny village where we had landed.