Endless summer

Wishful thinking. I admit it. But summer will end suddenly in 2009. The sun will go behind the clouds, which will open up and drop many hectoliters of cold rain on us. At least, that's the way it will feel, in contrast.

Temperatures are running 10ºF/5ºC higher than normal for late September. The sky is luminously, abnormally blue. The grape harvest couldn't take place under better conditions. Neither could the hedge trimming and general yard clean-up.

Sunrise over the vineyards in late September 2009

It's dry — the last time the grass had to be mowed was July 15. That was more than two months ago, and it has hardly grown at all. The tomatoes and eggplants are still producing. The mornings are a little chilly now, however, and you can tell that that tomatoes plants are finishing up. Just when you think they have given their all, though, they keep on giving.

The garden from out back, and a compost pile full of apples

The Swiss chard is still giving too. I cleaned up the plants last week, pulling all the brown and yellowed leaves off the bottom of each plant. They bore up under the real heat of August, but I can tell that they are happier with September's cool, dewy mornings and sunny, but not quite so hot, afternoons. I pulled out half a dozen plants last Saturday and we ate them, leaves and ribs, in a sauce béchamel enriched with grainy, old-fashioned mustard (called moutarde de Meaux or moutarde à l'ancienne). They're good that way.

Chard from the garden, pulled up roots and all

The collard greens will probably experience a burst of growth as the temperatures continue to moderate. They are a late fall crop. I'm surprised they didn't bolt during the long hot spells of July, August, and earlier September. I'm hoping for some bigger, fleshier leaves. I've been watering them. Now I think I'll fertilize them.

Collard greens, getting ready to really grow, I hope

The corn, lima beans, and pole beans are gone. So are the tomatillo plants, cherries, pears, and plums. Apples, however, keep raining down, and we pick up wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load of them to compost over the winter. I told Walt that maybe we should cut down the biggest apple tree, the one that produces so many tons of fruit every second summer, but he doesn't think so. It's true that it's an attractive shade tree. Of course there are two others next to it that are just as nice. Don't stand under them right now — you'll get conked on the head.

A wheelbarrow load of apples — the umpteenth — from the big tree

The hedge trimming and clean-up work continue apace. We don't work on it that many hours a day, but we do put in our time. There's lunch to cook, however, and to recover from in the afternoon. And there's a certain dog that wants a walk every morning and every evening. It's nice to have the luxuries of time, good food, and nice weather.

Hedge trimmings and the clean-up — I finally realized that
piling the leaves on a tarp, bundling them up in it, and
dragging them to the burn pile was the best way to do it.

On our walk yesterday, Callie and I ran into Chantal Guerrier out on the paved road. She and husband Jean-Noël are busy bringing in the grapes. But like all the other local vignerons, they aren't in a very big hurry, because the weather is cooperating. The grapes are sunbathing, and ripening.

Tomates confites are roasted for 2½ hours in a slow oven
with olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, and a pinch of sugar.
This is a mix of yellow and red tomato wedges.

Sunday afternoon, Carolyn (who leaves comments here) and her husband came by for a light lunch. They were spending about a week in the area, as they often do this time of year. We had roasted red peppers and slow-roasted tomatoes (tomates confites) from the garden, with local goat cheese and local wines.

Surfinia flowers in a planter under the kitchen window
have been spectacular all summer.

They brought a bottle of Muscadet and some local rillettes de porc, and we had a little pot of pâté de lapin (rabbit) that I bought at the market in Noyers. Walt made an apple tart with a calvados-flavored custard base and apples from out back. It was a nice afternoon around a table out in the back yard.

Another indoor barbecue

We woke up to gray skies and showers yesterday, and during the morning it rained pretty hard off and on. That was because we had planned to have a barbecue with some friends from Belgium, Martine (Ladybird) and Christian. We were able to sit out on the deck to have our apéritifs, but it was too damp and windy for us to be able to eat outdoors.

So we were forced to move our barbecue indoors once again. We're getting used to that necessity. For lunch, I made some champignons à la grecque. I'll post a recipe later. Walt made a big grated carrot salad and a pear-amandine tart. We also had pasta with our radish-greens pesto. Martine and Christian brought some steaks, which we cooked in a pan on the stove instead of over the wood fire we had envisioned.

We had a really good time. Martine's native language is Flemish, but she is perfectly fluent in French and in English. Christian's native language is French — he's a native of Brussels. He speaks some Flemish and English too. We spoke French at lunch, which started at noon and ended with dessert, coffee, and digestifs at 4:30 or so.

We talked a lot about the political and linguistic situation in Belgium, which seems more and more to be a country divided along language lines. There are a lot of hard-core Flemish activists who want to ban French from their part of the country, which is the west and north. A lot of the Wallons, the French speaking Belgians in the south and east, say when polled that they wouldn't mind being part of France. Brussels is a world apart. It's more or less a French speaking enclave that is now surrounded by Flemish-speaking suburbs.

Anyway, that's probably a pretty superficial view of the situation. I've been to Belgium a few times, but years ago, and I'm certainly no expert.

Christian, especially, really liked our neighbors the Guerriers' red wine made with the local Côt grapes. That's Malbec outside the Loire Valley, except in the Cahors area where it's called Auxerrois. It's all the same grape. Christian and Martine plan to come back to Saint-Aignan on Thursday so we can go talk to Jean-Noël and Chantal Guerrier, taste some more wines, and buy some.

OK, this morning it's off to get a haircut at Mme Barbier's salon de coiffure. No time to dilly-dally. The pictures in this post are some more I took at Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe on Saturday.

Recognizing a pattern

It has happened again. Yesterday, visitors were are driving down from Paris to spend the afternoon. At about 9:00 in the morning, after Callie's walk, it started raining. Then it started thundering. There were sharp bolts of lightning right overhead, and deafening claps of thunder shook the house.

The bottom fell out at that point. It was a real frog-strangler of a rain. In the middle of it, of course, I needed to go out to buy bread for our afternoon meal. Yesterday was a holiday, so we had no bread delivery. It's always a treat to go up to the bakery in the vineyard, the one with the wood-fired ovens, to get some special breads — even in the middle of a storm.

It was literally as dark as dusk at 10:30 in the morning. A gloom settled over the hamlet, and we needed to turn on the lights in the house to keep from stumbling over the furniture. I drove to the bakery through a deluge of rain. Big drops slapped the windshield. Miraculously, when I arrived at the boulangerie, the rain slacked off. I was able to run from the car into the shop without getting drenched.

All our plans for a sunny afternoon outside, and chicken barbecued on the grill, were dashed. This is the third time we've had this experience. Two years ago, our friend Claude drove down from Paris to Saint-Aignan in very early June. She was delayed by heavy rainstorms along the autoroute, especially south of Orléans, that day. Meanwhile, here at La Renaudière, the rain was so heavy that the gutters backed up, causing a leak over the kitchen. Water streamed in, opening a crack in the ceiling. We thought the whole ceiling might cave in.

Last year in late May BettyAnn from N.C. and her French friend Danielle drove down to Saint-Aignan from the Paris area. They arrived at the Grand Hôtel in town, and I went down to meet them and let them follow me back to the house. The rain was blinding, and the thunder and lightning were downright scary. All hell had broken loose.

When we got to the house, Walt had been up in the attic to see if the roof was going to leak again. He was trying to push the folding stairway back up into the attic when we walked into the house. Suddenly, a wire or spring snapped and the whole thing came crashing down on him. It's lucky he wasn't seriously injured. Between his curses and the raging storm, BettyAnn and Danielle had quite a greeting at Les Bouleaux.

Well, yesterday it wasn't quite that bad but for a couple of hours late in the morning we wondered whether history might repeat itself. Our new friends Leesa and Alexandre said they were startled by one bolt of sharp lightning near Montrichard as they drove in. They had the impression that it struck the ground very near their car.

In Saint-Aignan, as I drove back home from the bakery, I followed the paved road down through the rue des Bas-Bonneaux, past Jean-Noël and Chantal Guerrier's house and wine cellar. I didn't want to use the rutted gravel road through the vineyard because I was afraid it would be flooded.

Jean-Noël and Chantal were standing outside the door to their cellar, watching the sky. I stopped to say hello. « Beau temps, n'est-ce pas ? », I said in greeting — nice weather, no? They said they had been trying to work in the vineyard earlier in the morning, but the hard rain and especially the lightning had convinced them to return home.

They asked if I was out for a promenade en voiture, a joy ride. I pointed at my bread and told them I had been up to the bakery in the vineyard because we had people coming from the Paris region to spend the afternoon. Ah, Jean-Noël said, stay right there for just a minute. I hadn't gotten out of the car.

I talked to Chantal through the car window and then J-N came back with two bottles of wine. "You and your guests can enjoy these this afternoon, indoors or outdoors," he said. One bottle was a blanc moelleux, a sweet white wine that's good either as a before-dinner drink or with dessert. We had tasted it a few weeks ago, before he bottled it, and thought it was extra, a we say. The other bottle was a dry rosé wine made with the local Pineau d'Aunis grape. It gives a peppery rosé that is crisp and refreshing.

"What do I owe you?" I asked Jean-Noël. "Oh, we'll talk about that later," he said. I'll have to go buy some wine from him soon. The two bottles he gave us went a long way to relax us all as we watched the thunderstorms wind down. The sun never did come out, but we were able to take a long walk in the vineyard in the afternoon. Callie enjoyed that, splashing around in the puddles, and we took a lot of pictures of butterflies, orchids, and roses.

Lisa posted a lot of photos from yesterday's dinner and walk in the vineyard on her blog, 1, 2, and 3.

Tasting the wines, smelling the flowers

Yesterday we went over to Jean-Noël and Chantal Guerriers' place to taste and buy some wine. It's April now and wines of the 2008 vintage are just getting ready for tasting and bottling.

When we got there, Chantal came out and greeted us. She sent us up into the courtyard (more like a barnyard) of the house that Jean-Noël grew up in and where his 87-year-old father still lives. The older Mr Guerrier came out and greeted us to. Jean-Noël was in one of the outbuildings pumping wine into what we call "cubitainers" for another customer.

Callie in the vineyard under a plum tree

The wine was a 2008 Sauvignon Blanc, and Chantal soon brought a couple of glasses for us. Jean-Noël tasted it along with us. The glasses were small, but they were filled almost to the brim. J-N said the Sauvignon was ready to be put in bottles. We bought 10 liters — that's 13.33 bottles — which J-N pumped out of the vat into one of our plastic jugs.

The other customer paid for his wine and departed. The next two wines J-N wanted us to taste were in tanks under a shelter on the other side of the barnyard. "Walk this way," he said. By the way, there are chickens and a rooster in a pen in the barnyard, and there are even a pair of pheasants in a separate cage. We admired the colorful birds. It is definitely a rustic scene.

The next wine we tasted was a late-harvest Chenin Blanc. It's a dessert wine and would also be good with foie gras, for example, or as an apéritif. The much-drier Sauvignon Blanc would be good with oysters. The Chenin is not yet ready for bottling, but it's getting close. J-N said he wouldn't sell it in bulk, but only in bottles. I plan to buy some when it's ready.

The third wine was a rosé made from Pineau d'Aunis grapes, a local specialty. The rosé is very dry and has a definite peppery taste. It's not ready to be bottled yet either.

As we were tasting the rosé, ad car pulled up into the courtyard and two men got out. "It's a car from the 37, so it might be serious customers," Chantal said — the 37 département is the one just west of ours, and it's capital is Tours, the big city of the region.

The two men were indeed serious customers. One seemed to have his own wine business, and he was looking for new stock for his shop or shops. The other is in the charcuterie and goat cheese business, and he has a boutique where you can sample his products. To go with the sausages and cheeses, you of course also need a little glass of wine.

At this point, we moved on to the wine cellar, which is a vaulted room under the old house. All the walls are covered in black, powdery mold or fungus because of the evaporating wine and alcohol. There are bare light bulbs hanging on wires off the ceiling. There are quite a few bottles of wine on racks along the sides of the cave, there's bottling machine, and there are several big fiberglass vats full of various new wines.

The first one we tasted was a 2007 Côt. Known as Côt in the Loire Valley, this varietal is called Malbec in much of the rest of the wine world. It's the grape grown a lot in Argentina, and by the name of Auxerrois it's the grape grown in Cahors, in SW France, to make what has been called « vin noir », "black wine." Côt'/Malbec/Auxerrois makes a dark, luscious red wine.

Walt and I had tasted the 2007 Côt last fall and bought some, so we knew we liked it. The two other customers (they were from small towns near Loches and we plan to visit their shops and tasting rooms the next time we get over that way) liked the 2007, but they weren't that enthusiastic. We then tasted the 2008 Côt, but it paled in comparison to the 2007. It's still a little too young.

One of them said what he really liked was a wine often called
« Tradition » around here, which is made from a blend or assemblage of three grapes: Côt, Cabernet Franc, and Gamay. Jean-Noël said the only assemblage he had on hand was a 2004 wine made with Côt and Cabernet Franc.

As I said, Côt is used to make the "black wine of Cahors, and Cabernet Franc is the grape used to make two of the Loire Valley's best known and most appreciated red wines, Chinon and Bourgueil. Both of these wine towns are on the other side of the city of Tours from us, to the west, and they sort of face each other across the Loire River.

When we tasted the dark, dry 2004 assemblage, the man who buys and sells wine was obviously pleased and interested. A 2004 is a very old vintage for most Loire Valley wines. He immediately wanted to know how many bottles of this wine J-N still had to sell. He implied that he would buy the whole stock.

We went on to taste some Gamay, but the guys from Loches were not impressed. Walt and I really like Gamay, and we bought 10 liters of the 2008 Gamay along with 10 liters of the 2007 Côt. Gamay makes a very light, drinkable red wine that we like. A lot of people think it's too thin. They like the heavier, "structured" wines made with grapes like Côt and Cabernet.

My impression is that if you like Gamay, that means you probably like all dry red wines. I know I do. Gamay is easy to drink, even when the weather is warm. It goes really well with foods of all kinds, to my taste. It complements and accompanies rather than overpowering the food. Gamay isn't the point — the food is — and Gamay's taste stays in the background, kind of the way a pretty blue sky highlights rather than dominates a nice landscape.

By the time we paid for our wine (30 liters, which is 40 bottles, for 40 euros!) we were slightly tipsy and past ready to eat lunch. Jean-Noël and his two new customers from Loches (it's ironic that that word is pronounced "lush" in French) were feeling no pain either.

Walt and I just had about a mile to drive up the paved road into the vineyard and then a mile on the gravel road through the vines (the one where we walk Callie) to get home. We didn't pass a single other car along the way. So we lived to tell the story.

I didn't take any pictures during the wine tasting so I'm dressing up this post with some recent pictures of flowers.

La Dame à Lili

Yesterday afternoon was beautiful, and I went out for my walk with Callie at 5:30. She wanted to go around the north side of the vineyard so we did, despite the dangerous donkey that lives over there. I was taking pictures of flowers, bugs, and berries.

I noticed, as did Callie, that somebody was whistling and calling for a dog on the other side of the woods. There are half a dozen houses up there, on the other side of the donkey pen and a little wooded ravine, along the paved road. Then I looked up into the vineyard and saw a yellow dog watching me and Callie. Callie saw the dog too, but she stayed with me.

I have now weeded and watered my collard patch.

As we looped around the parcels of vines back up toward the gravel road, there was that dog watching us again. I thought at first that it was Max, a dog that belongs to one of the grape growers and spends time with him out there when the man pruning back his vines. But we were pretty far from that grower's parcels, and it wouldn't be like Max to stray so far.

Cherry blossoms out on the edge of the vineyard

Then I realized it was Lili, and she was the dog being called. She's lives with a couple who moved to Saint-Aignan from Paris a few years back and whose house is up on the paved road. I wrote about Lili and the woman who walked with her back in December 2007 — here's a link to that topic. What I said then, in part, was that I didn't enjoy seeing Lili and That Woman — we ended up calling her La Dame à Lili, or The Lili Lady — because:

“Callie and Lili take off together and disappear from view for long minutes. I stand around calling Callie, but she doesn't come back. I'm afraid she'll end up out on the paved road, where The Woman and Lili live, and in front of a car. And when she finally does feel like coming back, she's a muddy, tangled mess. She has to have a full bath when we get home, and giving her a full bath every day is not my idea of Quality Time spent with her.

Besides, the woman who walks with Lili is so boring. We have nothing to say to each other, and we always end up standing around or walking together for a good part of the time I'm outdoors. That also is not my idea of Quality Time in the Vineyard. I'd rather be walking briskly, for the exercise, or taking pictures. Thinking my own thoughts. Keeping tabs on Callie's activities.”

So yesterday, there was Lili. It had been many months since I'd seen the dog, but I'd seen the woman in Saint-Aignan on market days a few times and, I thought, not all that long ago. We'd said Bonjour to each other a couple of times, but that was all. Even then, it had been a while since I'd seen her out in the vineyard walking her dog — well, she didn't actually walk with Lili. She just let the dog go running off and stood around waiting for it to come back to her.

Les pâquerettes — English or "Easter" daisies —
are blooming all around now

Lili was friendlier yesterday than she had ever been before. I squatted down and called her. She came to me, hesitantly. She let me pat her on the head and rub her nose. She's part Labrador and part Greyhound, I think, a pretty dog, and fast. She's bigger than Callie, but not that much. She came from a shelter and had behavior problems at the beginning, La Dame à Lili had told me.

This time, Lili tried to get Callie to go running off with her, but Callie stayed with me. Lili ran ahead, toward some people who were working farther up, in a row of vines. It turned out to be the Guerriers, our neighbors who have about 15 acres planted in grapes and make very good wines, which they sell at low prices. I wanted to talk to them, so I headed that. Here's a link to earlier topics about the Guerriers and their wine business.

Cherry blossoms with an insect visitor

The Guerriers saw me and Callie coming and were worrried that Lili, who had joined them, might be aggressive towards Callie. "Oh, the two dogs know each other," Chantal Guerrier said. Yes, I told her, they've known each other for a couple of years. She could tell by the way they interacted with each other. There was no sign of La Dame à Lili.

Chantal started to say something about « la mère de Lili » — "Lili's mother" — but stopped herself because that sounded funny. That's when I told her that we called her La Dame à Lili, a name that one of the other grape grower's wives had come up with when I stumbled over finding the right phrase. That woman agreed that Lili was a problem dog.

Callie in the back garden

Jean-Noël, Chantal's husband, said Lili had apparently run away from her owner while they were out for their afternoon walk, because they had heard Le Monsieur à Lili calling for her to come back home. You could see Lili's house out across the vines from where we were standing.

Last year it was usually La Dame à Lili who brought the dog out into the vineyard in the afternoon, and Le Monsieur who walked her in the morning, I told the Guerriers. But I haven't seen La Dame à Lili in quite a while, I said.

Ivy berries

« C'est parce qu'elle est décédée, oh... en septembre », Chantal told me — that's because she passed away last September. I was stunned. She died? Yes, Chantal said, she died suddenly and unexpectedly. One morning her husband took Lili out for a walk. He left his wife sitting in an armchair watching the TéléMatin news on TV. When he got back from the walk 30 minutes later, his wife was still sitting in the same chair, but she had died. It was her heart.

La Dame à Lili was just 64 years old, the Guerriers told me. I of course feel bad about what I said about the poor woman in that post just over a year ago, but it was how I felt at the time. Le Monsieur à Lili has decided to stay in Saint-Aignan for now, even though he has grown children in the Paris area, where he and his wife lived until about three years ago.

Happy 2009 to all

Happy New Year! It's 2009 already. I'm finishing up my 60th year on Earth, and we are already well into our 6th year in France.

Oysters to be opened and Champagne to be enjoyed

New Year's Eve and France mean just one thing to me. Oysters! Fresh from the market. Washing them. Opening them. Making mignonnette sauce. Photographing them. Eating them.

Yesterday's post was almost all words with no pictures. Today's brings the picture average back up.

The oysters, 26 of them, opened and ready to eat

We went to the special New Year's Eve market in Saint-Aignan yesterday and bought two dozen oysters. That cost 8.00€ and the man selling threw in a couple more for the price. He was selling them at 5.00€ a kilogram. At the supermarket, they were slightly cheaper, but it's nice to get them at the outdoor market.

We got no. 4 oysters. Those are the next to smallest. No. 1 is the largest size. The smaller ones are better, to my taste, especially for eating raw.

Une huître

How do you open them? With an oyster knife or a flat-head screwdriver. Hold the oyster with a thick towel all folded up to the right size, and insert the knife blade into the hinge at the narrow end of the oyster. Apply pressure and wiggle the blade around until it slips into the hinge and the oyster's top shell pops up. The insert a sharp knife into the shell, scraping the inside of the top shell to cut the muscle that holds the oyster shut. You've done it. Try not to lose too much of the water inside the shell.

That's mignonnette — red wine vinegar with
diced shallots and pepper — in the little bowl.

What do you eat them with? Some people like lemon juice. I prefer vinegar, because that's what we ate with oysters in North Carolina. And vinegar is served with oysters in France too, in the form of what is called a sauce mignonnette. That's about half a cup of vinegar (we used red wine vinegar, but it's your choice) with a finely chopped shallot steeped in it for a few minutes. Grind in a good quantity of black pepper and stir. That's it. Spoon some vinegar sauce, or squeeze some lemon juice, on the oysters as you eat them.

A loaf of good French rye bread, called pain de seigle

The other accompaniment is bread and butter. Rye or some other dark bread is especially good. You might be surprised to see what a French rye loaf — un pain de seigle — looks like. We got ours at the Chêne du Renard bakery up in the vineyard, and had it sliced there. I bought some beurre demi-sel to have with the oysters, rather than the sweet butter we normally use.

A bottle of Muscadet wine
from the Loire Atlantique département

And that's it, except for the wine. They say the best wine with oysters is Muscadet, which is made down at the mouth of the Loire River in what is the southeastern corner of Brittany. I bought a bottle of Muscadet at SuperU for the oysters.

But then I went to see Jean-Noël Guerrier to buy some of his red Côt (a.k.a. Malbec) wine and he gave me a bottle of his new 2008 Sauvignon Blanc as a gift. I admit it: I tried both the white wines with the oysters. I couldn't decide which one I liked better. Jean-Noël's was much more florid and fruity. The Muscadet was leaner and bone dry. Meanwhile, Walt had Champagne with his oysters, thanks to Jill Hertzmann, who bought him a bottle of Périer-Jouët when she was here in September.

Oysters

That's oysters then. They were delicious. They came from Brittany, but we didn't find out what town or area they were from. They weren't really small, even though they were no. 4s. No. 3s would have been bigger than what we like.

Lunch and a walk in Preuilly

It was a very easy drive down to Preuilly-sur-Claise yesterday. There was practically no traffic on the roads — there were a few cars in Châtillon-sur-Indre, where we stopped to get some cash out of the ATM at a Crédit Agricole office — and it didn't rain at all. Temperatures were slightly above freezing and skies were gray in the morning.

We drove in and found Susan & Simon's place without any trouble. We'd been there once before, last June, and I remembered how to get there. They were waiting for us in their warm main room, heated with electric radiators while they figure out what the best kind of heating system to have put in in their historic old house.

We had a gift exchange. We took S&S a bottle of Jean-Noël Guerrier's red Côt wine and a bottle of white Sauvignon wine from the Domaine de la Méchinière, both of them wineries in Mareuil-sur-Cher not much more than a kilometer from our house. We also took them a jar of apple jelly I made from our back-yard apples last summer, and a jar of plum preserves that I made from our own plums in 2007.

S&S gave us a fruitcake that Susan made, and we ate some of it when we got home last night. It's dark, sweet, slightly spicy, and full of nice fruits confits — delicious. Not at all like that same old dry American fruitcake that's been making the holiday rounds for umpteen years.

I see home-made bagels in our future.

S&S also brought us a special American present from London: I big tub of Philadelphia cream cheese. It never occurred to me that Kraft Philadelphia cream cheese was available in England. We can't get it here. Walt makes a mean bagel, as you might know, and now the pressure is on. Doesn't a bagel with cream cheese and a slice of smoked trout or salmon, with a big cup of black coffee (and maybe a glass of champagne!) sound like a fine way to start the new year?

Simon also made us a DVD of a British TV satire show about the American presidential election. We'll be able to watch that as we munch on bagels and cream cheese. Simon also poured a nice glass of sparkling wine from Saumur as a pre-lunch apéritif.

For lunch we walked just around the corner from their house to the Hôtel-Restaurant de l'Image. I posted a link to one of S&S's posts about it yesterday. I had my camera in my pocket and fully intended to take some pictures of the interior of the restaurant and the food we were eating. But we were so involved in conversation that I completely forgot. We were finishing dessert when I remembered. It was obviously too late.

What did we have? Well, Simon, Walt, and I all had an œuf cocotte avec jambon et crème as our starter course. That was an egg broken over a piece of ham in a ramekin with some cream around it. I can imagine the cream was poured on boiling hot so that the egg white cooked, and then the whole thing was quickly heated up in a hot oven. The yolk was still runny and we were given a big soup spoon with which to eat the contents of the ramekin. It was delicious.

Susan had a salade piémontaise, which is a kind of potato salad with mayonnaise and also other chunks of vegetables in it — tomatoes and sour gherkins (cornichons) especially — along with some chopped hard-boiled egg and some ham. It looked very good.

As our main course, Simon, Walt, and I all had a tajine d'agneau, a Moroccan-style braise of lamb with spices. It was served either with potatoes au gratin (that's what Walt had) or mixed vegetables (Simon and I had the veg'). The meat was tender and tasty, subtly spiced.

Susan had a duo of salmon and a white fish (brochet, pike, maybe) cut into chunks and cooked in a sauce in a gratin dish. It was very good too, she said.

For wine, we just ordered two little carafes of the house wine, a red and a white. Both were more than pleasant. In a little restaurant at lunchtime, that's the thing to do. Order wine by the pitcher. It's less expensive, it meant we could sample some red and some white wine, and it is always good. A nice little restaurant is not going to serve you a wine that isn't good or doesn't go with the food they are serving.

For dessert, Walt and I each had a "floating island" — île flottante — which is a couple of dollops of sweetened, beaten egg whites floating on dish of English custard (crème anglaise) with some shaved almonds on top. Simon had a cake called a gâteau médiéval, which was made with apples and walnuts. It also sat in a puddle of custard. And Susan had a concoction of prunes and chestnut cream (crème de marrons) served with whipped cream (crème chantilly). Which reminds me that I ought to buy a tin of crème de marrons when we go to the market this morning.

While we ate, Callie slept in a corner, halfway under our table and out of the way of the wait staff. We pretty much forgot she was there until, toward the end of the meal, she started making the little grunting and squealing sounds she makes when she is having a particularly enjoyable dream, probably about chasing a rabbit or a deer out in the vineyard. By then, we were the only people left in the restaurant.

So the Restaurant de l'Image gets high marks in my book. I enjoyed the meal and and the atmosphere. I obviously enjoyed the conversation, to the point of forgetting to take photos. The owner knows Susan and Simon, of course, and he came and spent 10 or 15 minutes talking with us as we finished our after-dinner coffees. He's interested in their house renovations and plans. We talked about heating systems of different kinds, and what makes the most sense for the future.

The sun had come out. We went out for a nace walk around the town with Callie, up by the château and the church and through some narrow residential streets....

A family affair (1)

One of the things I wanted to do with John and Candy while they were here at Thanksgiving was to go meet and taste wines with Jean-Noël Guerrier, our neighbor. I've written about him before, most extensively here.

Last Thursday, we drove up to the bakery in the vineyard to get some bread for our Thanksgiving dinner of roast lamb and flageolet beans (see Walt's posting about it). On the way back home, I drove down the road where the Guerriers live just to show J & C where it's located. As we drove by, I noticed that the door to their wine cellar was ajar.

Walking on the gravel road through
the Renaudière vineyard, into the sunset

I stopped and asked J & C to wait in the car for a minute while I went in and talked to Jean-Noël. I wanted to set up an appointment for a tasting the next day and figured it would be easier to do it in person than to try to get them on the telephone.

When I pushed the door open and walked into the dark cellar, I saw three people standing there — Jean-Noël, his wife Chantal, and an older man that I assumed was the senior Mr. Guerrier. I knew the old man lived in the house above the cellar but had never met him before. As I talked to his son, the man glared at me with a scowl on his face and didn't say a word. He looked like Abraham Lincoln without the beard — a prominent nose, strong chin and forehead, and that stern look in his eyes.

Jean-Noël seemed surprised to see me and a little addled, but he was friendly as usual. I made the appointment for noon the next day but I felt like I had intruded on some family discussion or dispute. Then I wondered if the whole idea was a big mistake. Had I barged in rather than waiting to be invited? I did just push the door open and yell in, « Il y a quelqu'un ? » Maybe that was rude. Had I offended the old man?

Candy reassured me that I had probably caught them in the middle of a family pow-wow, or row. They might have wondered how long I had been at the door and how much of their discussion I had heard (which was none, actually). Maybe the father was telling the son he was a good-for-nothing, wasn't running the business the way he ought to, or whatever. Or maybe the senior Guerrier thought I had a funny accent and wondered who in the world I might be, barging in like that.

The cellar itself is a sight to see. It's right out of the 19th century, which is when it was built. Jean-Noël said his great grandfather dug it out by hand, with pickaxes and shovels. The debris was loaded onto horse-drawn wagons and hauled away. Once the cellar was excavated, and the big round-arches of the ceiling constructed, a house was built on top. The cellar walls are black with mold, the lights are dim, bare bulbs hanging from wires, and one wall is lined with bottles of red wine. The ceilings are low, and the smell of wine and yeast permeates everything.

The Guerriers' parcel of Chenin Blanc vines
out on the gravel road

Well, we went for the noontime tasting the next day — all four of us. When we got there, the door to the cellar was locked and there was no sign of anybody around. After a minute or two, I thought we would just go back home and forget it all. But then Jean-Noël emerged from his house next door and greeted us with a big smile. The tasting was on, and I was glad because I wanted to buy some red wine.

Jean-Noël looks a little like a young Jean Rochefort (he's a famous French film actor who's made hundreds of movies over the years). They have the same bushy mustache. But Jean-Noël is a farmer, and he dresses in work clothes the way you would expect a farmer to dress. And he usually wears a wool knit hat — a toboggan cap — on his head, covering his ears. Last Thursday, the jacket he was wearing was definitely getting threadbare. His wife, Chantal, dresses in similar fashion, and might remind you of a young Audrey Hepburn playing the role of a street urchin.

Soon Chantal joined us in the cellar. We had probably interrupted their lunch. But they knew we were going to buy some wine, so business took precedence over the noon meal, I'm sure. The atmosphere was relaxed and the talk was lighthearted.

Chenin Blanc vines at La Renaudière

Like many people here in the Loire Valley, Jean-Noël speaks in extraordinarily clear, grammatical, unaccented standard French. He is obviously an educated man, and he certainly knows a lot about the business of growing grapes and making wine. His is a small-scale operation, and his Chenin, Côt, and Gamay wines are excellent. This time, he also wanted to talk to us about Obama and Bush and what is going on in America.

The wines he offered us for tasting included a 2007 white wine made from Chenin Blanc grapes. He grows them on a parcel of land on the gravel road that runs from our house out through the Renaudière vineyard. When I wrote about him in October (click here), I mentioned that the 2008 grapes from that parcel had just been harvested. He and Chantal confirmed that the grapes had indeed been taken in on a Saturday toward the end of October. So I knew exactly which parcel of vines they were talking about.

The Chenin Blanc wine was really nice — fruity but dry, with a nice golden color. He told us he was letting us taste it but he couldn't sell us any of it. It was already sold. In fact, he took a bottle out of a big wire bin and opened it for us. Chantal spoke up and pointed out to him that that batch of wine had already been sold, and that he had no business opening a bottle of wine that no longer belonged to them. "We'll just tell them we broke one bottle," he said, and laughed. We all laughed.

After tasting it, Walt asked him if he would like to "break" a few more of those, but he said he really couldn't. We laughed again. Actually, we know the people who have paid for that batch of 2007 Chenin Blanc — they are some English people who live in Saint-Aignan and sometimes walk their dog, a big white poodle, out in the Renaudière vineyard. Jean-Noël said he had mentioned us to them and they had said yes, they knew us.

The next wine we tasted was a late-stage bernache — that's a wine that hasn't yet finished the fermentation process, and it is an autumn treat here in the Loire Valley. It was a Chenin Blanc bernache, Jean-Noël said, made from the 2008 crop of grapes from that same parcel of land at La Renaudière. It was also delicious, but not for sale. We'll be able to get some of the finished wine next spring, if we act fast.

The third wine we tasted was a 2007 Côt. Côt (called Malbec elsewhere) is the Guerrier wine I like the most and was what I wanted to buy that day. Jean-Noël went to a big stainless steel vat and pumped some of the flowery, spicy red wine into our four glasses. His tastings, by the way, aren't based on sips but on full glasses of each wine. And he has one too — just to be convivial, I'm sure. The 2007 Côt was not a disappointment, even though the 2006 was a hard act to follow.

As we drank and talked, a figure appeared in silhouette at the cellar door. It was old Mr. Guerrier. He called out to his son, who dropped everything and went running toward his father. There was an embarrassed silence for a couple of seconds, but then Chantal started telling us what was going on.

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The dark days are near

That sounds ominous, doesn't it? At this time of year, the sun is already very low in the southern sky. And it rises later and later. At 8:00, the hour when we have gotten used to going out with the dog, it's still dark. The sun rises in the southeast now, not summer's northeast, and not before 8:30 a.m.

Saturday morning's sunrise, about 8:30 a.m.

The morning light is dim until after nine o'clock. At least it hasn't been too cold yet. There was a light frost up top, far out in the vineyard, Saturday morning. I didn't go out yesterday morning, but it was even colder Sunday than Saturday. Walt was looking at weather records for the region and saw that 10 years ago it was already in the lower 20s F in late October.

Fall in the vineyard

I noticed today that Monsieur Guerrier has now harvested a whole plot of white grapes that were still on the vine Saturday morning. My guess is that they'll be used to make a late-harvest, sweet wine. That's what's called a demi-sec or a moelleux wine here. They are only made in good years, when the fall weather stays fairly dry late well into October.

Unharvested grapes left on a parcel
of untended vines this year

In two months, it will officially be winter and the shortest days of the year will be upon us. Already yesterday, the temperature in the house was at about 60ºF (16ºC) even after the sun was well up in the sky. Walt built a fire in the wood stove. The sun is just not hot enough now to warm us up in the afternoon.

Looking out over the top of the vineyard

Besides, we are having trouble with our central heating system. The boiler fires up normally, but the pump, which sends hot water or steam to the radiators all over the house, isn't working. This happened before, two or three years ago, and we had a repair done then. I just called the company that does boiler maintenance, and they are sending a man out this afternoon.

Long shadows on Saturday at 6:00 p.m. in the back yard

Today I'm cooking a wintertime dish: Gratin d'endives au jambon. That's Belgian endives and ham cooked in a cheese sauce in the oven. I just searched the blog and realized that I've never posted the recipe before. I'll go make it now and take some pictures.

Then there's more yard work to do. It's supposed to rain tonight and maybe tomorrow, so today is a day to finish up some jobs out there.

A new walk

I've found a new path to take on my late afternoon walks with the dog. It's on a tractor path that will get very muddy once the winter rains begin, so I'm taking advantage of it now while it's dry.

A view toward the village center on my new walk

Actually, I've known about the first part of this walk for quite a while. When you go out our back gate, you turn right and stumble down the hill on a rough path that gets washed out by heavy rains. You walk past rows of vines and then where the vines end you turn right again, along the electrified fence that helps keep deer out of the grapes.

A typical old farmhouse on the walk, with a ladder
to get you up into the granary, or attic

A few steps farther on the electric fence has been lowered so that you can step over it and turn left onto a very rutted tractor path through some woods. Right now, the path is covered with autumn leaves and chestnuts in their spikey hulls. The path continues downhill, fairly steeply.

Callie walking on an old path through the woods

At the bottom of that hill, you are in the flat part of the Cher River valley. In past years when I've taken this walk, I've often turned right toward the river at this point, walking past houses (one with a swimming pool) and on dirt roads to make a big loop south and then west back to our house on the paved road, the rue de la Renaudière.

Looking toward and across the river, over fields and new houses

Or I've turned left and walked back up the hill through woods to a little settlement — a dozen houses, maybe, on the rue des Bas Bonneaux — and then on the paved road west to the vineyards again. There, a turn left takes you south through rows of vines to the gravel road that runs through the vineyard and back east toward our house.

New houses at sunset down in the river valley —
the yellow house, left, has solar panels on the roof

The other day I found out I could continue straight on instead of turning right or left at the bottom of the hill, where the woods end. The "new" path runs parallel to the river (but not close) and goes past fields, near a small orchard, and not far from 6 or 8 new houses that have been built on the flats down there. At this point, I'm going toward the village center.

Another old house you pass when you are walking back
up the hill on the paved road

The views are beautiful, especially on a bright sunny day like yesterday. The sun was getting low in the western sky, and the light was, well, luminous. It felt like one of those late summer days when the sun is trying to make its last stand.

Jean-Noël Guerrier sells wines retail out of his cellar.
It's better to call for an appointment rather than just drop
by, because he and his wife are often out working in the vines.

As far as Callie and I go, so far, is the next paved road, which is where Monsieur Guerrier and his wife live and where they have their wine cellar. I've been down there several times to buy wine from him, but always by car. It would be hard to carry 20 or 30 liters opf wine back up that hill on foot!

Back down in the river valley and on the way home at sunset

The end of the walk is a little loop on the paved road, doubling back until you come to the next path through the woods on the left. You go back down the hill, take a right, and walk back up the hill into the vineyard on the north side of our house. One advantage of this walk for me: it's kind of steep at points so you get a lot of good exercise walking uphill.