Some sidewalk scenes

From Champagne (the town of Vertus on the south end of the Côte des Blancs) and from Bourgogne (that's Burdundy, at Chablis). Maybe this will convey the feel of walking on the sidewalks in small French towns. Click on the pictures to enlarge them.

A café-tabac in Vertus

Also in Vertus, this picturesque house...

...and this one, which seems almost haunted

And in Chablis, showing a bakery, a wine shop,
and a French deli or charcuterie

The weather here is cold, especially early in the day, and clear. Summer is a fading memory. Predictions are for a slightly warmer but much damper week, with rain by Tuesday. I'm looking forward to that.

Lunch in Chablis

On our way back from Champagne, there were two stops I wanted to make — or maybe three. One was the village of Chaource, to buy some cheese. We did that, leaving the autoroute at Troyes and driving south on little roads. The second stop was Chablis, and we made it there in time for lunch. A bonus was the picturesque, bustling town called Tonnerre — it's about halfway between Chaource and Chablis, and we drove right through the middle of it. I'd like to go back there one day.

I had been to Chablis twice before. This past June, CHM and I drove through the town on our tour of northeastern France, and I wrote about it here. My previous visit to Chablis had been with Walt in June 1993 — we were driving from Paris to Provence, and the first day we stopped and had a picnic lunch on a bench beside the river (or maybe it's a canal) with a view of the vineyards climbing the hills on the other side. It is a very nice memory.

In Chablis, two shops, side by side, specializing in
the chitterling sausages called andouillettes.

This time, I wanted to buy some more bottles of Chablis wine and just see the town again. I wanted to walk around in the streets a little, weather allowing. I love going to towns and regions that I've always heard of and finally seeing what they actually look like. Since I've been studying, learning, and teaching French since the age of 14, I've heard of a lot of places but been to many fewer. A lot of the names that call out to me are places where wines, cheeses, or other food products are made or grown. Or where great events in history occurred.

Shops in nice old buildings on the main street, and
a beautiful door in a turret on a back street in Chablis

So it was appropriate that we arrived in Chablis in time for lunch. It was almost exactly two weeks ago, and the sun came out while we were there. I was able to take some pictures. I bought a couple of bottles of Chablis wine in a little grocery store. We looked at the menus posted outside several restaurants in the middle of town, and finally decided on a medium-priced one that seemed to have a wide choice of dishes we could all three enjoy.

Here's the restaurant. It wasn't fancy but the food was good.

The restaurant, Au Vrai Chablis, was not at all fancy. But what it lacked in décor, it made up for in good food and wine. We of course wanted to drink some Chablis wine. The menu Walt and I chose included poached fish as a main course, and that was perfect with the dry, crisp local Chardonnay. My first course was a feuilleté farci aux porc et champignons — a puff pastry shell with a pork and mushroom stuffing — with a tossed salad.

My lunch started with a feuilleté farci...

...followed by poached fish with vegetables and rice.

The restaurant was not crowded — or at least the room we were in was not crowded. In fact, the only other diners in the room with us were a French couple who arrived after we did, ordered, ate, and left before we had finished our meal. In the room next to the one where we sat, there was some kind of celebration going on. There must have been 10 or 15 people in there, and they were drinking champagne. The scene made for good people-watching.

The Chablis wine we had at the restaurant — chablis
is made exclusively with Chardonnay grapes.

We felt very lucky to have found Au Vrai Chablis, because the food was so good and the atmosphere was so informal and convivial. The two women who waited on us were talkative and easy-going. And the price wasn't bad. For three of us, with a nice bottle of Chablis plus coffees and more, the meal came to less than 80 euros — about 25 euros per person for three courses, wine and coffee included.

One last chance to buy some good andouillettes de Chablis...

The other place I wanted to visit that day was the town of Sancerre, which is on the Loire River about halfway between Chablis and Saint-Aignan. It's a hilltop town that's famous, especially, for Sauvignon Blanc wines. I wanted to buy a few bottles but was we left Chablis, driving through Auxerre, it started raining. If we couldn't walk around in Sancerre and see the views from the top of the town, it wasn't worth going there. So we didn't. I will get back there one day. The last time I went to Sancerre was 11 years ago — and it's only about 70 miles from Saint-Aignan.

Pictures from Mareuil-sur-Aÿ in Champagne

A couple of weeks ago in Champagne, we spent an afternoon poking around in the village called Mareuil-sur-Aÿ. It was a place I discovered by accident back in June, when I was driving through the region from Epernay toward Châlons-en-Champagne with CHM.

The name struck me because here in Touraine we live very close to the village called Mareuil-sur-Cher, just a few miles west of Saint-Aignan. I've done a little reading, and there appear to be 19 villages in France named Mareuil. Four of them are in Champagne. Mareuil derives from an old Gaulois (Celtic) word meaning "a large clearing (in a forest)" — somehow, the term survived a few centuries of Roman rule and a long millenium during which the French language gradually came into existence. The modern French term for "a clearing" is « une clairière ».

The main street through Mareuil-sur-Aÿ, in Champagne

Mareuil-sur-Aÿ — the umlaut on the Y means you pronounce the word as two syllables, [ah-ee] — is one of the prettiest villages along the Marne River, east of Epernay and on the south side of the Montagne de Reims. Oh, and Mareuil is pronounced more or less as [mah-RUH-yuh], with the middle syllable getting the tonic stress.

The fountain on the main square in Mareuil-sur-Aÿ

Thanks to Cheryl for the photo

In that Mareuil, there's a pretty little square right on the river/canal (the two are one at that point), with a fancy fountain like one I've seen in Paris at the Parc André-Citroën — the water squirts up out of a pattern of holes in a stone plaza, dancing in some rhythm so that some columns of water are higher than other, alternately.

"My grocer is a great guy" is what the sign says. If you look
closely, you'll see that his head, hands, and feet
are not attached to his body.

On the river/canal are pleasure and tour boats. Along its banks are a big park with tall trees planted in symmetrical rows and the entrance to a campground where people sleep in the little trailers called caravanes. There's a grocery store and a café/bar, pictured here.

The café/bar was closed for the day.

We of course tasted and bought some champagne in Mareuil. First we stopped in at the Billecart-Salmon winery, which we had heard of. We went up a big stone staircase to a glass-fronted office where a well-dressed woman was sitting in front of her computer, with her back to us. We stood for a minute, waiting for her to notice us. When she did, she came out and asked how she could help us. I said we'd like to do a tasting — une dégustation — but she said that wouldn't be possible. Tastings were by appointment only, and we didn't have an appointment. The place felt very snooty.

Then we drove down the street to Guy Charbaut's wine house, where I had stopped last June. We went in and a woman came out of a much less fancy office to greet us. We asked if we could taste and buy some wine, and she said Oui, bien sûr. She took us across a courtyard to a big banquet room that was fairly rustic or down-home in style. She poured us tastes of three or four wines, and we bought more than a dozen bottles.

We like the Charbaut champagnes a lot.

The woman turned out to be the recently deceased Guy Charbaut's daughter-in-law. She and the younger Monsieur Charbaut, her husband, now run the business. It was nice of her to take as much time as she did to talk to us about the wines and pour the tastes. She told us that she and her husband had been to New York 12 or 13 years ago and had dinner in the Windows on the World restaurant on top of the World Trade Center. So we talked about September 11, 2001, for a few minutes. Madame Charbaut was down-to-earth and charming.

Changes of season

We've had a houseguest, an old friend, for the past three weeks, and we've been busy. We went and spent a few days in Champagne, which involved renting a car larger than the little Peugeot that would hold three of us, the dog, luggage, sheets, towels, and coolers. Oh, and that would be spacious enough to allow us to bring some champagne home with us.

Yesterday we drove over to Vouvray — a sparkling wine to rival Champagne's is made there — which we consider to be our old stomping grounds in a way, since we all stayed in a gîte over there more than 10 years ago, on vacation. Without that experience, we probably wouldn't be living in Saint-Aignan now. Vouvray is about an hour's drive from here, just outside the city of Tours.

The vineyard workers' vehicles parked
by the side of the gravel road

Meanwhile, the garden and the vineyard won't wait. Not that we have anything to do with vineyard maintenance except to watch the work crews go about their autumnal business and yell Bonjour ! when we see them, which is nearly every day right now. All the grapes have been picked for a while now, and the current task seems to be the removal of the stumps of vines that have died over the course of the growing season.

I'm not sure what this is but it's a pretty tree
on the edge of the vineyard.

In the garden and yard, leaves and trimmings are the biggest concern for us right now. I spent a morning raking up leaves both out front and out back last week, and then carting them to different spots where they are needed or just where they can decompose over the winter, out of sight. That kind of work isn't a lot of fun but there is a sense of accomplishment when it's finished.

A burn pile covered with a tarp and a garden plot covered with
maple leaves for the winter — and of course
a lot of apples on the ground

We got nearly an inch of rainfall yesterday, and that was the first real rain we'd had in October. September was dry too, and on television people have started talking about sécheresse — drought — again. We had a week of gray skies but then the sun came as as the weather front approached. Now it's supposed to be sunny again for a few days, so I'll be able to get some more work done. There are of course a lot of apples to rake up.

Here I am out by the back gate in the afternoon sun

I'm looking forward to winter, in a strange way. The garden will be sufficiently cleaned up, the potted plants will be brought inside for the season, and the focus will turn to indoor tasks and activities. I have plans and projects. Some have to do with food and cooking — I look forward to stews and soups and other stick-to-the-ribs dinners.

Our house and the neighbors' seen
from the Renaudière vineyard

We are used to winter beginning at La Toussaint here in France, and that holiday, like Halloween, falls at the very end of October. Usually rains move in then, and the weather turns cold. This year, the cold may have come a little early. The weather widget on my computer desktop says the temperature in Saint-Aignan is –2ºC — below freezing.