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This year is an important year for the byways and highways of our region. We are celebrating 20 years of the Voie Verte – an old railway line turned into a cycle track that spans the whole of Burgundy – one for the fit and healthy amongst our visitors and 80 years of the Route des Grands Crus – a route that enables you to visit all of the big wines chateaux of Burgundy - one for the connoisseurs.
Unsurprisingly the first event we have been to was for the Route des Grands Crus.
A week or so ago we saw a note in the newspaper that Château du Clos de Vougeot was open free of charge to celebrate the event and as it is a chateau that we had long been planning to visit, we headed off to just north of Beaune, on a thundery Sunday afternoon, to see what the place had to offer.
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| Château du Clos de Vougeot under thundery skies |
Opening time was 14.00 so being chronically early, even after an en-route picnic, we arrived at 13.00. The town was already packed with cars and no one was allowed to drive up anywhere near the chateau itself unless they had a disabled badge. We parked in town and looking at the sky we did wonder just how wet we were going to get, but we headed off none the less. The walk turned out to be shorter than we had thought and arriving at the chateau we were greeted by a wonderful array of vintage cars lining the approach to the man entrance.
We entered the chateau at about 13.30 and were amazed to learn that we could go in and have a look around.
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| Part of the wine press |
Parts of the chateau are Mediaeval in which you can find some interesting wine making equipment. There was the biggest wine press I have ever seen which I couldn’t photograph as it was just too big! At 14.00 there were supposed to be speeches and the opening of a photo exhibition, but we managed to sneak in before the doors were really open and look at the photos which were very good indeed. Having been to enough of these types of events, we managed to get out in time before the room flooded and we had to listen to endless speeches consisting mainly of thank you for coming Mr the Mayor, thank you for coming Mr the MOP, thank you etc etc…… (fill it in yourself, but make sure you have enough names to last at least 15 minutes) then another half hour of drivel before you get to the one or two interesting sentences about why we are actually there and then of course a glass or two of wine. We didn’t think it was worth the wait, well actually we had guests coming round for drinks late that afternoon and we had to get back, so we headed off just as the guests were filtering in.
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| Enjoying a picnic amongst the vines |
We had seen what we had come to see and we hadn’t been disappointed. The living quarters of the château are interesting, but the real highlights are the winemaking buildings including the cellars. I would thoroughly recommend a visit to this château, to combine with a couple of other things on a trip out into the Cote-d’Or and of course a picnic amongst the vines is a must.
Just in case you are wondering, we even managed to get back to the car before the heavens opened.
