Sancerre, pop. 1,329, is a famous Loire Valley wine village located about 2½ hours south of Paris by car and less than 2 hours west of Saint-Aignan. It's what is called
un village perché (a "perched" or hilltop village). There's also a language school there where foreigners can spend weeks or months taking classes and improving their French.
These are views of the town from high ground to the west. I took them in June 2015 when Charles-Henry and I were on our way to the town of Jars, just north of Sancerre. Red, white, and rosé wines are made in Sancerre — which is one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France — using locally grown Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc grapes.
These are views of the town from high ground to the west. I took them in June 2015 when Charles-Henry and I were on our way to the town of Jars, just north of Sancerre. Red, white, and rosé wines are made in Sancerre — which is one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France — using locally grown Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc grapes.
The Sancerre wines cost at least $25 a bottle in my neighborhood. They are so good.
ReplyDeleteSo picturesque!
ReplyDeleteI'd love to be in a language immersion class there.
ReplyDeleteSancerre is also the home of the Brasserie Sanceroise... one of the first micro breweries to [re]open in Central France.
ReplyDeleteThey reopened in 1998 in the Art Deco Sancerre brewery that had closed in 1969, and started off using the original 1920s brewing equipment... when Pauline and I first visited in 2002 whilst house hunting, he had already built a reputation for a decent drop!!
The design of the building is such that it has a clerestorey to light the building and he has filled those windows with the embossed and badged bottles of 64 of the 67 breweries that existed in our region before WW1.
By the beginning of 1939, that number had reduced to 27 and had further dropped to 14 by 1950....
he has found all the bottles in his collection at vide greniers and told us that he thought the three missing breweries had used a standard bottle form, but without any embossing or a distinctive stopper!... he suspects that they had an inkstamp label rolled onto a painted area of the bottle.... quite a common practice in the UK at one time... especially in the 1980s as microbreweries began to emerge.
Now there are almost 50 in Central France... a very good one at Amboise [Art is an Ale] and a very new one in Loches [Wabi] so, for people like me who are allergic to the majority of wines, things are looking up...
[I'm fine with most rosé and light white, especially petillants]
We rode bicycles thru the Loire, and remember the ride up to Sancerre, a lovely hill town. Had a great omelette, fries, and a bottle of Sancerre that evening.
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