Wine Walt in a bottle

At the Relais d'Artémis restaurant in Bracieux on Saturday, we of course ordered some wine to go with our lunch. The restaurant's vin du mois — wine of the month — was a rosé from the nearby Touraine-Mesland vineyard.

I took the picture of the wine bottle and label at the table, and only afterwards realized that I had caught a picture of Walt "in" the bottle.

A rosé was a good choice to go with our meal, which consisted of fish and veal dishes.

Mesland is a village just a few kilometers west of Blois, on the north side of the Loire River. The vineyard covers 110 hectares (about 275 acres) and is a sub-appellation of the much larger Touraine wine production area. Other local sub-appellations are Touraine-Amboise, Touraine-Oisly, and Touraine-Chenonceaux.

The waitress who brought the wine to our table told me that this particular rosé was made with Cabernet Franc grapes. In Touraine, rosés are often made with Gamay grapes, and sometimes with a special local grape called Pineau d'Aunis.

Mesland and other Touraine still wines are reds made from Gamay, Cabernet Franc, or Côt-Malbec grapes, and whites from Sauvignon Blanc or Chenin Blanc grapes. The region also produces a lot of sparkling wines that are known as Fines Bulles de Touraine.

Le vin du mois au Relais d'Artémis : un rosé de Touraine-Mesland

L'enseigne du restaurant Au Relais d'Artémis à Bracieux, près du château de Chambord

Start with dessert

At the Relais d'Artémis restaurant in Bracieux, there was a notice at the bottom of the menu saying something like : Merci de commander votre dessert au début du repas (Thanks for ordering your dessert at the beginning of the meal). So when the waitress came to take our order, CHM of course immediately told her that he wanted Tarte Tatin for dessert. The young woman was a bit confused but then saw the humor in the remark and laughed.

So I'll start the restaurant report with dessert too. As somebody said, life is short.

Here is the Tarte Tatin that CHM ordered and enjoyed. It's an upside-down apple tart, caramelized, served with a scoop of
glace à la vanille. It's a local invention and specialty in the Sologne region.

Walt and I both wanted to have the apricot dessert — Poêlée d'abricots au romarin, sorbet framboises — but there wasn't any left. We had a late reservation and the place was hopping. So we chose other desserts.

Walt had what was called a tartare de fraises. It's strawberry season right now in the Sologne.
Thanks to CHM for the photo.

My dessert was Croustillant au chocolat, crème anglaise au poivre de Séchuan.
I won't even try to translate all that. I don't eat much chocolate, and this was delicious.

Even after eating three other courses, I was able to finish my Croustillant au chocolat.

Here's a photo of the restaurant taken from the street.

Tomorrow: appetizers, main courses, etc. By the way, there was an English translation for each dish on the menu in the restaurant.

La gare de Blois

There's so much to do and so much to talk over that I don't have a lot of time to write a blog post. I'll just post a few pictures. We picked CHM up yesterday at the train station in Blois — la gare de Blois — at noon.

Blois is a funny name, phonetically speaking. Most people pronounce it as one syllable: [BLWAH]. To do so, you have to pronounce the vowel AH the French way, in the back of your mouth and up your nose. If you say it the American way, in the front of the mouth, you end up with two syllables, something like [bluh-WAH]. It's the way Americans say [pee-noh-nuh-WAHR], in four syllables, rather than [pee-noh-NWAHR] in three syllables, for the grape called Pinot Noir.

La gare de Blois

But you also hear French people say Blois as more or less two syllables, and not the same way. A couple of years ago, CHM and I were on the train, coming from Paris back to Saint-Aignan. The conductor on the train distinctly said something like [buh-luh-WAH] when he announce the stop. I'm not sure he was a native French speaker. Even yesterday, however, I noticed that the woman announcing the arrival of the train from Paris said something that sounded like [buh-LWAH], two syllables, for Blois.

Waiting on the platform are passengers heading to Paris. On the right side, we were waiting for the train from Paris to come in.

Those are the strange observations of my phonetically trained mind (and tongue). Speaking of tongues — or in tongues, I guess — tomorrow I'll write about and publish pictures of the restaurant in Bracieux and the food we ate.

Le train en provenance de Paris rentre en gare...

« Les trente glorieuses »

Années, je veux dire. Today is the 30th anniversary of Walt's and my vie commune. How's that for franglais ? We're going out for a nice lunch in the town of Bracieux, just south of the Château de Chambord. The restaurant is Au Relais d'Artémis (link).

Our friend CHM arrives from Paris by train at noon, and we'll pick him up at the train station in Blois. It's not far from there to Bracieux. He has invited us to lunch at the restaurant, because we are also celebrating the 30-year anniversary of our friendship. CHM hired me as his assistant when he (we) worked in Washington DC, and my first day on the job was the first Monday in January 1983. We've been friends ever since.

Here's the menu we plan to choose from at the restaurant in Bracieux. I'm thinking mille-feuille of salmon and
green asparagus as a starter, and veal with oyster mushrooms as a main course.

So there you have it. The weather is supposed to be sunny for the next four or five days. CHM will stay with us for a week, and we're going to a party with some local friends and fellow bloggers on Monday. On Tuesday, I'll be cooking up a batch of Brunswick Stew, a southern U.S. speciality, because CHM said he'd like to try it. I'm going to make it with rabbit and turkey, onions, herbs, tomatoes, beans, okra, and corn.

One of the roofers I contacted by e-mail answered me! He asked me which day next week would be best for him to come over and evaluate the problem. Maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel. Since the roof only leaks when we have very hard rain, we're safe for a while now. But the roof needs to be repaired before we can repair the water damage in the kitchen.

By the way, the real trente glorieuses (années) were the years from 1945 until the mid-1970s, when France and other European countries saw growth rates and standards of living soar.