The next leg

Wrapping up this set of posts about Moulin-à-Vent and the Beaujolais wines made there and near there...

The photo above shows our next destination. We were headed to the north, and it was still the middle of the day, so everything was closed and we didn't want to linger or just wait around for wine co-op tasting rooms and shops to open for the afternoon.

The Moulin-à-Vent AOC area straddles two French départements and régions. Half of of it is offcially in Burgundy, and the other half is officially part of the Lyon administrative area. The tower above has a typically Burgundian mult-colored roof.

We were headed toward the southern tip of Burgundy and the big town of Mâcon, which is its own wine area. Above is a view of the town of Romanèche-Thorins, which is also in Burgundy (département de Saône-et-Loire). This is looking basically south from the windmill, and toward the mountains.

Above and below are shots of a famous wine village taken from the Moulin à Vent. It's the village called Fleurie, which is another cru du Beaujolais. I mentioned it yesterday and quoted a wine expert saying that Fleurie wine, light and drinkable, is completely different from Moulin-à-Vent wine, which is "severe" when it's young and benefits from years of aging in the bottle. The two wine areas are adjacent to each other and the church in Fleurie is only a mile and a half from the windmill.

Here's an impressionistic view of the village of Fleurie that I made from one of my photos. Speaking of wine, as I was, we had bought only six bottles of cru Régnié so far, because we were driving around between noon and 2:30 p.m., hours when so many shops in France are not open for business. All the shopkeepers and employees are at home or in a restaurant eating lunch. Walt and I needed to move on because we had a long drive back to the Bourbonnais ahead of us, and we wanted to be there by dinnertime. Were we going to find some wine to take home with us, or not?