Computer problem and backup plans

I got out of bed as usual and turned on my desktop computer upstairs. I have the same routine every morning. Then I came downstairs to make a pot of tea and start reading mails and writing a blog post. As I got to the bottom of the stairs I heard a loud, sad whining noise coming from upstairs. No it wasn't Callie, and it wasn't Walt. It was my computer.

I had to go back upstairs in the dark and turn the computer off. I hope it's just the cooling fan and not a hard disk that is dying. Actually, I've never known a hard disk to make noise like that, and I've had several of them die on me since I started using computers at home about 25 years ago. So it must be the fan. That should be easy enough to fix or replace.

The problem is that I have literally hundreds of thousands of photos going back to the 1990s, both raw, straight-out-of-the-camera images and Photoshop-edited, blog versions of many of them, stored on the main hard disk on that desktop computer. The computer itself is nearly seven years old; the hard disk is newer, but not by much. I have a second, external hard disk plugged into a USB port, and I have all the photos and many other documents and archives backed up on that disk. It is therefore unlikely that I have lost much, whatever the computer problem might be, because I just did a backup two or three days ago. I didn't have anything special to do this morning — but now I do...

All that is to say that I don't have access to my photos this morning. What I do have is a collection of photos from my two Paris "vacations" last summer stored still on my tablet computer. Here are some of those that I never got around to posting. These are photos of a big monument to the 19th century French scientist Louis Pasteur that stands in the neighborhood where my friend CHM has his apartment. The Institut Pasteur is also in the neighborhood.

Pasteur of course came up with the process named after him, pasteurization, based on the germ theory that discredited old ideas about spontaneous generation being the cause of food spoilage. In other words, food like broths, wine, beer, and milk spoiled because of germs floating in the air, and not because organisms developed in them spontaneously. He also contributed to the development of modern vaccines, including the rabies and anthrax vaccines and immunizations for animals and humans. You might know a lot more about all this than I do.

The Pasteur monument in Paris is on the circular Place de Breteuil, not far from the Sèvres-Lecourbe metro station, nor from the guilded dome of the Invalides church where Napoleon's tomb is located. There's a well-known restaurant, Le Bistro de Breteuil, on the Place, and there's a fine open-air market a couple of days a week on the Avenue de Saxe, just on the other side of the Place. The Avenue de Breteuil and the Place de Breteuil make up one of the most beautiful areas of contemporary Paris.

Winter soup

The temperature this morning is a mere 1ºC, or about 34ºF. That's the coldest temperature we've had in many many months. To prepare, I've now brought in all the big potted plants — aloe, jade, agave, etc. — that spent the summer and fall outdoors. We haven't had snow, but the region around Lyon has as much as 6 or 8 inches on the ground.

A potée of pork and winter vegetables

And to fortify myself, today I'm making soup. I said a few days ago that we were having a potée — a big boiled dinner of vegetables and pork. I haven't blogged about it since, so I'm putting a couple of pictures here.

The view last week over the back hedge at La Renaudière, outside Saint-Aignan in the Loire Valley

The vegetables that went into the potée were collard greens and kale, onions, carrots, leeks, and potatoes. The meats were a salt-cured pork shank, a fresh pork loin roast, and a couple of smoked Montbéliard sausages from eastern France. Herbs like parsley, coriander, and bay leaves lent flavor, along with some garlic cloves and some clous de girofle (cloves), plus black peppercorns. And the cooking liquid was chicken broth left over from poaching a bird a few days earlier.

A lunch of leeks (foreground), carrots, potato, greens, pork, and sausage

We've had two meals of potée since Saturday. There's still some left, and that's what I will make into soup today. I'll spent a little time dicing up all the leftover vegetables and meats, and then heat them up in the potée broth, which is pretty richly flavored at this point. That should warm us up despite the chilly temperatures outdoors.

Peaceful daily walks around the vineyard with Callie have replaced the long commutes

and endless traffic jams that I had to deal with back in the 1990s.

My father died 23 years ago, in November 1990, at the ripe old age of 64. He and I were both born in March. That means I have officially outlived him now, because I turned 64 last spring. Was quitting work, selling everything in California, and moving to France the right thing to do, from today's perspective? It was. I wonder what the state of my health would be if I were still in California, fighting the traffic, the noise, the cypress pollen, and the work stress.

More about Romorantin grapes and wineries

I realized after posting yesterday that I hadn't given the names of any wineries in the Cour-Cheverny appellation, where wines from the Romorantin grape are made. Romorantin is not grown anywhere else.

It was one of those coincidences, but Walt was looking at the TV schedule last week, just a couple of days after we had visited the the cave cooperative in Mont-près-Chambord, and he noticed that one program we like to watch, called Echappées Belles, was doing an episode about the Sologne region. We watched it Saturday night.

By the way, the grapes in the photos accompanying my post today are not, I repeat not, Romorantin grapes.

Besides a report about happenings in the zoo at Saint-Aignan (le ZooParc de Beauval) and at the Château de Chambord, the host, Jérôme Pitorin, also did a segment on the Cour-Cheverny wine district and the Romorantin grape. He feature a woman named Laura Semeria who is a vigneron near Cheverny and who owns and operates the Domaine de Montcy.

You can watch the Echappées Belles video about Sologne here (at least if you are in France; I don't know if you can watch it in other countries). The segment about the grapes and wines starts around minute 55, and the show lasts 90 minutes in all. You can get the Domaine de Montcy web site here.

The other producer I'm aware of is a grape-grower and wine-maker near the village of Soings-en-Sologne named Henry Marionnet. His Domaine de la Charmoise is where "the oldest vines in France" — pre-dating the phylloxera epidemic of the late 19th century — are planted. Marionnet is getting older, and his son Jean-Sébastien will take over the operation from him.

The Marionnets' web site is full of information about the grapes they grow and the wines they make. Their vineyards and winery are located only 20 miles from Saint-Aignan, and less than 20 miles south of the Château de Chambord.

Note: The photos in this post are ones I took out in the Renaudière vineyard last week. They are just decorative here. I'm not even sure why these grapes were still on the vines so late in the season.

Cépage Romorantin

Cépage in French means grape variety. I've been here in the Loire Valley for more than 10 years now, but I learn something new about the local grapes every month.

The part of Touraine where Saint-Aignan is located is the Vallée du Cher, the local river that is a tributary of the Loire. The wine production areas along the Cher River are now in what has been dubbed the Touraine-Chenoceau appellation. The main grapes grown here are Sauvignon Blanc, Gamay Noir, Côt (a.k.a Malbec), and Cabernet Franc.

Just north of Saint-Aignan, south of Blois, is a different wine district called Cheverny. It's centered on the town and château of Cheverny. I knew of its existence, and we've had Cheverny wines in restaurants, though we had never been up that way to buy wine for home consumption until last week. I thought that Cheverny wines were made with the same grapes, basically, that are grown around Saint-Aignan.

And they are, with one exception. There is a separate wine district, sort of embedded in the Cheverny appellation, called Cour-Cheverny (which is another village in the area). All the wines that carry the AOC Cour-Cheverny are made with a grape varietal called Romorantin, named after the largest town in the Sologne region. Saint-Aignan is on the southwest edge of Sologne and on the eastern edge of the old province called Touraine.

The Romorantin grape is used to produce white wines in the Sologne. The grape has an interesting history. It seems that the Renaissance king François 1er, who had a residence at Romo (as it's called locally) in addition to his residence at the Château at Blois (among others), ordered 80,000 grape plants from Burgundy in 1519, about the time he started construction of the grandiose Château de Chambord.

The grapes he had brought in and planted in the Sologne came to be known as the Romorantin cépage. Recent DNA testing has shown that Romorantin is a hybrid of Pinot grapes and another varietal called Gouais Blanc, which is not well known or even well regarded in France. (I think Gouais is grown more in Germany).

The Romorantin hybrid is not very well known either. Apparently, it used to be grown more widely around the Loire Valley, but nowadays there are very few vineyards (about 150 acres in all) planted in Romorantin, nearly all in the Sologne. In fact, one local grape-grower and wine-maker claims that he has the oldest vines in France on his property just a few miles northeast of Saint-Aignan. They were planted in 1850, and they somehow survived the phylloxera epidemic that devastated most of the vineyards in France and other parts of the world in the late 19th century.

There is a lot of information about the Romorantin grape and the Cour-Cheverny appellation on the Internet. I don't know why I had never researched it before. Oh, and I bought a bag-in-box of white Romorantin wine called the P'tit Blanc at the wine co-op at Mont-près-Chambord last week. Note that it is a 2006 vintage, which makes it pretty old compared to most Loire Valley wines. They sell it for about 2.20 euros per liter.

I have to say it's very good. It reminds me of Chardonnay. I particularly like French Chardonnay wines like Chablis and Mâcon, not to mention Blanc de Blancs Champagne wines, which are 100% Chardonnay. Now I know I like the Romorantin P'tit Blanc too. I foresee more trips to the Mont-près-Chambord wine cooperative in my future.