Vouvray 2000 — a walk around the neighborhood

We arrived in Vouvray and checked into our gîte late one afternoon in early October 2000. We were pretty exhausted and jet-lagged after an 11-hour flight to Paris from San Francisco and then a four-hour drive from CDG airport, northeast of Paris, to Vouvray, about 150 miles to the southwest.That means you have to cope with some Paris traffic.

That evening, we got something to eat (can't remember what) and decided that the next day we wouldn't drive anywhere. We'd just walk around the town and get the lay of the land. And have a nice lunch somewhere.

Vouvray is a wine village (pop 3,000) where fine white wines — sparkling and still; sweet, semi-sweet, and dry — are produced. It's not a prettied-up place. Producing wine is agricultural and quasi-industrial. It's interesting to see. (The Champagne region is like that too, by the way.)

Another feature of the village is that it has quite a few troglodyte houses (cave dwellings), like the one on the right below. We took our cameras with us on our walk that first day. When we got back to the gîte, Sue said she was going to have to find a place to buy some more film. She hadn't expeced Vouvray to be so picturesque.