It is official, Burgundy has had its best harvest in 10 years. The weather last summer was fantastic, no hail or frost in the growing season and so far fewer damaged grapes leading to more grapes being suitable to be turned into wine. In fact Burgundy has produced 1,584 million hectolitres (potentially 211,200 million bottles) of wine this year. This is the largest harvest since 1999. However, what are those remarks about quality not quantity? Amazingly because of the many hours of sun last summer and rain at just the right times, the grapes were also of a very high sugar content, leading to the possibility of one of the best vintages in living memory. So not only quantity but quality too. The farmers must be rejoicing.Anyone who has ever been involved with farmers will know that they are very pessimistic creatures and one can understand why. Not only do they have relatively uncontrollable variations in quality and quantity but they also have uncontrollable variations in their market. The French wine market has been under threat from new world wines for many years now. The methods of the new world wine makers produce consistent wines, they have ironed out the quality so that the average wine drinker will get just what he is expecting, every time he opens a bottle. The traditional production methods of the French, produce a different bottle every year, some years not so good, but some years exceptional. The new world wines will never be able to beat those exceptional years. Interestingly the two countries who buy the most Burgundy wine are the UK and the US, the UK has moved very clearly over to new world wines and the US has a booming “new world” wine trade of its own, but the connoisseurs in both these countries have always been willing to afford the good Burgundies.
So, as I said, the farmers must be rejoicing, sadly no. The economic crisis and the drop in both the Dollar and Pound against the Euro have already dealt a blow to the French and now just when the Burgundian winemakers can cash in after a number of poor years, even the connoisseurs have run out of money.My advise - if you want an excellent vintage at bargain basement prices, 2009 is the vintage to be laying down and 2010 is the time to buy it before the UK and US economies pick up and send the prices to the astronomic levels this vintage deserves.
La Tuilerie is in Cormatin which is on the edge of both the Mâconnais and Côtes Chalonaise wine growing areas. Here is our website
I am very impressed with the organisation that goes into feeding so many people at once – up to 6,000 at peak times. The menus and buying in of the food are managed by the Taizé permanents (lay people who live within the community for a long period of time) and the preparation work and serving is done by the youngsters who have chosen that as their work duty for the week. The kitchens are semi-open air in the summer and as you walk through the community you can see the kids stirring huge cauldrons full of the next meal. The meals are distributed at various locations around the community and you queue up at your allotted spot at meal times.
Bingo is BIG in this area. The January Bingo in Cormatin (held on the last Sunday of the month) attracts people not only from the town itself but from places as far away as Charolles (60km). Having said that the local villages of Ameugny, St Gengoux-le-Nationale and Cluny provide the bulk of the players.
Playing bingo is not exactly our cup of tea, so we volunteered to man the bar on the Sunday itself. We had wine, beer, soft drinks and “bugnes” (small deep-fried doughnutty kind of things) to sell. Most of what had been bought in was sold, with the bulk being sold in the 10 minute half-time break. It was rather frantic trying to not only add up the orders, but to relay the price to the waiting customers in understandable French. The rest of the time was dedicated to silent contemplation of the bingo cards with the underlying tension and excitement mounting as the prizes increased in value. The top prize of a Wii was won by a chap from Taizé and I couldn’t help wondering if he was one of the monks! 
Little Fifi, the kitten that arrived in the summer, is amazingly still here! Even though we have been away on holiday twice for about two weeks, she has attached herself to the house and to us and has decided to stay. While we were away different sets of people arrived every couple of days to top-up her food and water and to give her a little cuddle. To our relief on both occasions when we returned, there she was sitting in the middle of the courtyard squeaking away (she still hasn’t quite cracked a meow yet).
One of Chazelle’s residents is a retired Pâtissier (confectioner) and he of course supplies all the amazing desserts for village parties. He had made the Galettes des Rois for the occasion, beautiful puff pastry pies filled with confectioners custard, very lightly flavoured with almond, nothing like the supermarket cakes which have a heavily flavoured filling that is dense enough to sink a battle ship. But the real excitement about the cake is that there is a “fève” hidden inside it. Fève is just the French word for a broad bean and traditionally a broad bean was put in the cake, but nowadays the fève is a plastic, metal or in our case a porcelain figure roughly the size a of a broad bean.
too late to put it back on the plate, what should I do? I carefully ate around the fève and delicately put the little figure into my napkin waiting to see if anyone had noticed. No one. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted one of neighbours surreptitiously putting a figurine on to the serving plate, so whilst no one was watching, mine went that way too.
At this time of year when you are snowed in, like we have been for the last week, I use the time to try out new recipes and in particular to try and perfect local dishes. The French are big on cheese in all regions but we in Burgundy sadly only have two AOC cheeses, so it is a bit strange that one of the most popular local delicacies is in fact a cheese choux pastry recipe called Gougère.
Le Tour is a national institution if ever there was one. The whole country gets excited as it winds its way through the highways and byways of this great country. The original Tour was done by a group of sixty young men in 1903 who set off on their bikes from Montgeron (just outside Paris) for a six stage 2428 km race round France, but only 21 arrived back in Paris 19 days later. They had no back-up teams, no following trailers, no spare bikes, you feel hungry, you stop and eat the sandwiches which you have prepared yourself that morning, you get a puncture you sit down at the side of the road and fix it, now that is real racing!
Le Tour starts in a different place each year, but for many years has ended in the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The journey is not a continuous one around the roads of France anymore, Le Tour hops and jumps from place to place, sometimes the riders are bussed and sometimes flown between the finish of one day and the start of the next, thus allowing a number of different routes to be chosen each year. But everywhere they go there is a BIG party. Le Tour transforms the French roads and villages it passes through for a brief but exciting moment in time.
To travel in a circle around France it is almost impossible not to travel through Burgundy. In 2006, Le Tour came to Mâcon and turned the city upside down as the riders raced up and down the main boulevard in a very exciting finish to the 18th stage. In 2007 Le Tour came even closer to us by passing through Cormatin itself in the 6th stage and in 2010 Le Tour will be just down the road starting the 7th stage on July 10th in Tournus. We have some trusty campers who come every year to stay with us when Le Tour is nearby and who knows maybe we will see all of you guys and gals again and possibly some new faithful followers next summer!
Taizé is deserted by the monks at then end of each year. Only the monks too old or infirm to travel and a skeleton staff of so called “permanents” (young volunteers who live all year round in Taizé) and one or two other monks remain. The week spanning the new year is the one week in the year that no one can stay in the Communauté. The services still go on, but are usually held in the tiny Romanesque church in the village itself, much as all the winter services used to be up until about 15 years ago. All of the rest of the monks will have gone off to the annual European Taizé meeting. This is all part of the “pilgrimage of trust on earth” initiated by Frère Roger over 30 years ago.
“Many people spread across the earth are taking part in the “pilgrimage of trust” in their daily lives. … Sometimes we have to go towards new horizons, far away or nearby, to discover the hope of the Gospel over and over again. Our world, where so much suffering wreaks havoc, needs women and men who radiate God’s peace by their lives. So let us make courageous decisions to go forward on the road of love and trust.”
Ten permanents and a handful of brothers of the Taizé Community and sisters of St. Andrew also arrived. They have been working with the local representatives to get this event off the ground. The shear logistics of accommodating, transporting and feeding such a large crowd is mind-blowing. One should not underestimate the amount of people involved. Mâcon, the capital of our département Saône-et-Loire, has just over 30,000 inhabitants, so this event will have housed, transported, fed and ministered to a crowd almost the size of the population of Mâcon. Quite incomprehensible.
Christmas again, I can tell that because it has snowed leaving the countryside white all around, but more importantly, the Decorations are out. I use the capital letter deliberately to show my respect for this wondrousness of this festive tradition. The Chazelle Decorations are to be admired and bewondered for their truly magnificent decorativity. The tree stands proudly next to the council notice board in the middle of the village and next to the tree is a wooden box about 6 foot high resembling an upright coffin. Inside this box is a Father Christmas half sitting, half standing next to a little nativity scene – rather mixed messages there but who cares, we need to cover all angles. So that is Chazelle Decorated for another year.
Cormatin on the other hand has beautifully hand-made wooden models each year. Monsieur G makes these models himself and they are of amazing quality. Each year the collection grows and I must say I look forward to seeing the new models each year. Last year he came up with a model of the Château which lights up at night and is a very good copy indeed.
This year’s new addition is a nativity scene, complete with Mary, Joseph and the baby of course, but also the three wise men and the shepherds, not to mention the animals, a cat, a cow, a donkey, a camel, two sheep and a ram and reindeer both with beautifully shaped horns/antlers. They are not full size, but not far off.
Johnny Hallyday is a national icon, in a country where religion and state are strictly separated, he is a god for the masses. He first started making pop/rock records in 1959 and is still on tour today (albeit on his 3rd final tour). His face appears on the posters of the gossip magazines every week, quite a feat for just one individual. The ins and outs of his many marriages, his latest child, his latest divorce and any other titbit is chewed over and regurgitated. However, one has to have some respect for someone with a career spanning 4 decades and still making records that attract an audience of all ages, not just the aging baby boomers and the born-too-laters.
A few years ago the Vignerons de Buxy (our local wine merchant in St Gengoux le National) decided to experiment by making “Rotten” wine. The wine is however not rotten, just the grapes. This type of wine (commonly called late harvest wine) is made from grapes that have been allowed to rot on the vine. It sounds disgusting, but apparently it is a well known way of making an exquisitely sweet dessert wine.
Friday evening, one week ago, and we were making paper roses in the village hall. Stacks of crêpe paper were put on the table along with little piles of wire and the lesson began. Fold and turn, fold and turn, go slowly to create a loose flower vaguely resembling a rose, too tight and you end up with a tulip! When the flower is done, you wind one of the little bits of wire around the base to secure, leaving a tail of wire for something or other. This is an annual occurrence and of course the old hands had brought their pliers, we just ended up with very painful fingers. 360 roses were created by the stalwarts of Cormatin that evening. It was however, a mystery to us what the roses were for, something about selling a real rose and getting a paper rose or visa-versa in any case I wouldn’t be too happy to spend 1 Euro on one of the paper roses we had just made…
We buzzed off homewards at 10.00, still none the wiser about the paper rose issue, instructed to return to help out after lunch. We popped in to get a newspaper so that we could sit down in the warmth at home, with our feet up, for a couple of hours. Whilst performing this usually simple transaction, we were confronted by the lady in the newsagent and told in no uncertain terms that we should buy some tickets off her for 5 Euros 50 each and go back to the Téléthon and collect two portions of “Petit Salé” - absolutely delicious she was having hers for lunch. Back to collect our food parcels and eventually we made it home.
I was even allowed a few minutes off from Mulled Wine duty to inspect the wonder myself. A giant Téléthon logo made out of florists’ oasis, was standing beside the stall selling roses. Every time a rose was sold, a paper one was placed in the logo as a measure of sales, with the aim to fill the whole logo by the end of the day. The little boy charged with the onerous duty of placing the paper roses had either misunderstood his task or got bored of standing around in the cold and he had filled the whole logo long before the roses had gone, ah well it made a nice photo.
Cluny and horses go together. Since Napoleon re-established The Haras Nationaux (National Studs) and built one of the establishments on the grounds of the abbey in Cluny, Cluny has been inextricably linked with horses. One of his reasons for building in Cluny was to prevent the re-building of the once powerful abbey, but in reality it transformed Cluny. Cluny was able to leave its faded-glory days behind and became an important horse town. 
Because of that, Cluny has a thriving Hippodrome where flat racing, harness trotting and steeple chasing take place in the many meetings per year and numerous private riding stables and private breeders have sprung up to meet the increasing demand from the public for horses for leisure purposes. The most recent addition has been the Équivallée - a show jumping venue next door to the Haras. The creation of this facility was meant to cement the future of horses in Cluny. The General Council of Saône-et-Loire committed a total of eight million Euros to finance the infrastructure of Équivallée in 2005 and in May 2009, the first phase was completed which included an all-weather ring and a safe and secure area for visiting horses to be stabled. So far just under 2.5 million Euros has been invested and the second phase, which involves building a large stable complex, is expected for 2010. The Équivallée is rapidly becoming one of the most popular show jumping venues in France because of its facilities and location.
Having said all that, prior to all this investment, in 2003, a new government policy was announced which had the objective of altering the fundamental structure of the Haras. Last spring, the merger between the Haras Nationaux and the École Nationale d’Équitation (the school set up to train the Cadre Noir [the elite of the French cavalry]) was announced and it will become effective on 1 January 2010. The merger will result in the creation of a single public institution for the horse industry and for horse riding in France. To be effective and efficient, this will mean closures around the country. There are currently 22 Haras Nationaux in France and one huge site of the École Nationale d’Équitation, which on its own is as big as, if not bigger than, 3 or 4 of the Haras sites put together. Something will have to give and the threat of closure of the Haras at Cluny is real and raises serious concerns for the area.
It seems no work of Man's creative hand,
This poem inspired a little girl with long dark ringlets living on a little farm in South Wales, seventy years ago. It fired her imagination and made her want to travel and although she travelled throughout the world she never managed to get to Petra, until last week. And that is how I went there as well. The little girl was my Mum and at the age of seventy nine she finally achieved her dream with me and Cees in tow. We were not disappointed.
which you walk through to access the ancient city of Petra. The city, carved out of the multi-coloured rock face, reveals itself when you emerge at the end of the long walk through the canyon.
This year there was a double celebration in Cormatin when the 60th anniversary of the erection of the Deportee’s memorial was also celebrated. To mark the occasion, the memorial has a new inscription and a large flagpole has been placed behind the memorial which will fly the French flag continuously. The inscription reads:
However, at the moment it’s not possible to ring the Chazelle bell. During Madame P’s funeral quite recently the solemn bell ringer was charged with ringing to bell to call the mourners to the mass, imagine his surprise when all of a sudden he was hit on the head by the bell rope that had detached itself from the bell and now had the aforementioned rope wrapped around his neck. In a church that can barely seat eighty people, this happened in full view of the whole congregation and set off giggles rather inappropriate to the occasion.
Now considering that Chazelle has only three streets connected in a triangle and consists of about twenty house and a church, this all seemed a bit far fetched, even people who forget to bring their instructions as to how to find us never spend more than about 10 minutes in Chazelle before someone gives them directions.
Back on to one of my favourite subjects – food. I love trying out all regional dishes. We are just on the edge of the country’s biggest chicken farming area, the Bresse, so chicken is one of the local specialities. The Bresse chicken is the first animal/meat to be awarded its own AOC (in 1957) which means that the farming of these birds is strictly regulated and they can only be reared in the Bresse itself. During the bird flu scare a couple of years ago, all the chickens in the country had to be kept indoors to prevent migrating birds contaminating the human food chain. This caused enormous problems for the Bresse. Part of the AOC rules for Bresse chickens is that they spend a large proportion of their time outside and there are at least 10 m^2 available for each bird. These rules had to be modified temporarily whilst the outdoor ban was on and that caused an uproar around here. This chicken is said to be the finest in the world and commands a suitably high price.
In Cluny there is a tower called the Tour de Fromage, the Cheese Tower. A fascinating name for a brick structure. You have to pay to climb up the tower and see the marvellous view over the town, so imagine our excitement when the local paper announced free entry on Sunday 3rd October. We discussed when to go to avoid the crowds and decided that about eleven o’clock would be the best time. So there we were in front of the doors of the Tourist Information Office which give access to the tower and to our dismay the doors were locked. How is this possible? A big notice on the doors explained all “We are sorry that due to circumstance not of our making, an error appeared in the Journal de Saône et Loire [the aforementioned local paper]. The free visit to the Cheese Tower was on Saturday 3rd October not Sunday 3rd October as published, we apologise for any inconvenience”. Having been in Cluny on Saturday and not visited the Cheese Tower because it was free the next day I was rather fromaged off to say the least.
Never mind, there is always the chance to try out a different restaurant in Cluny, a bit early, but if we walk to the Bio-restaurant near the station that some friends had recommended, we will work up an appetite and be there at lunch time. Not our day, that was closed too. Ah well back to Casse Croute as per usual for the best chips in town.
After admiring the view for a bit we started down the stairs which are very steep indeed. Not something to be done by two people who have a fear of heights and won’t go above three rungs on a ladder. When we finally got to the bottom after having to stop a number of times to let the less wimpish to overtake us. Both of us arrived at the bottom with trembling hands and wobbly legs. Off to the kebab shop to recover.
The monks in Taizé accept no money, no donations, no inheritance absolutely nothing, not one penny, they earn their own way in life. This attitude is very different to other religious orders who rely on donations, great benefactors, some have land and therefore income or they just expect their parishioners to pay for their services.
The pottery is stunning in its simplicity which give it a style and beauty all of its own. You can buy a whole dinner service or you can buy the pieces which are “stand-alone”. Most notably the candle holders and the oil lamps. It all sound a bit twee and amateurish, but the quality and style of the pieces are a match to and are, one could argue, better than many of the other artisans in the area. Their aim is to “produce objects for daily use with prices everyone can afford” a goal they certainly achieve. Most of their pieces are “stoneware” with some objects cast using a porcelain paste, the lamps are made this way.
Frère Daniel started the pottery workshop in the early days of Taizé and together with Frère Lutz, the pottery production has flourished over the years. Most of the work is done in the winter months when there are few visitors and then the workshops become factory-like in their scale of production. In fact some of preparation and initial firing of the pottery is done in conjunction with neighbouring potters as the demand for the pottery becomes too great for the monks to keep up with. The shop in Taizé is bursting with pottery in the days leading up to Easter, but by October, it is looking distinctively empty.
Earlier this year Frère Lutz exhibited his pottery alongside the collages and aquarelles of Frère Stephen in Mâcon at the Galerie Mary-Ann. For more details of work in exhibitions check-out the Taizé website 
Each one of these events has its own committee and sturdy group of followers that are needed to organise the event and make it a success. We volunteered to help out with the randonnée and were taken up on that challenge this weekend. So at seven thirty Saturday morning, before the sun was up, we were at St Roch hall, the gathering place for the organisers. Fresh brioche arrived from the baker and small strong coffees were served to fortify us for our task. There were five different walks, 7, 13, 20 & 30 km and each walk had its own colour. To complete the walk you follow the arrows on the ground and as long as you stay alert, you end up back where you started. Some randonnées are marked out better than others, on some we have been horribly lost, but the Cormatin walk is always done well. We had a big responsibility on our shoulders as we were split up into teams, armed with cans of different coloured spray paint and we were driven to our respective starting points. We had ten kilometres to mark-up with yellow and orange paint. So on this damp morning, there we were, spraying the roads of the villages around Cormatin with arrows to show the right way to go and crosses to show where not to go, all done for the walkers who might or might not turn up on what was predicted to be a very wet Sunday.
For starters, the mayor’s wife had made a delicious salad of chicory leaves with walnuts, ham and cheese cut up into small blocks all covered in a delicious vinaigrette sauce (maybe I’ll be able to get the recipe for the vinaigrette if it is not a family secret). When I saw that Cees was tempted into taking a second helping, I whispered that this was just the starter and not to take too much, he whispered back that I shouldn’t be silly as this was all we were getting. That’s men for you! His eyes popped out of his head when a huge casserole full of venison was placed on the table. The deer had been shot the previous weekend by none other than the mayor himself and donated generously to the randonnée workers for this lunch. It turns out later that the mayor doesn’t eat game, so he was grateful for some enthusiastic consumers. This casserole, not much more complicated than venison cooked for hours in red wine with some herbs, onion and garlic, was absolutely amazing, served very simply with boiled potatoes. Lunch them continued with cheese and finally pears poached in red wine with brioche. All of this liberally washed down with the local brew. The meal started at twelve o’clock and us ladies were finishing the washing-up at three while the men were finishing their coffees. Food is not something to be rushed, it is to be discussed and above all, enjoyed in the company of others. It is a time to swap gossip, get the latest news and to hear stories and what stories! As the wine flowed the stories got better, the ones about the mayor shooting an eighty four kilo wild boar and the funeral with the missing body will have to wait for another blog..
We arrived at the refreshments post at the half-way point and were greeted with baguettes and ham or sausage, cheese and chocolate and of course wine. That boosted our resolve and off we headed for the second half of the walk. We finally staggered back to St Roch at about two o’clock wishing we had trained better. We were then invited to join the rest of the workers for supper at seven that evening. I must admit I felt a bit guilty about saying yes after the wonderful lunch the previous day and the fact that we hadn’t helped out at all on the Sunday, but why not. The evening was a much simpler affair than Saturday’s lunch, bits of pizza from Pizz’a Marco round the corner, quiche from one of the boulangeries in the high street and left-over bread, ham, cheese and wine from the walk’s refreshment posts. There was lots of chat about the day’s events, despite the dreadful predictions, the weather had been kind, cool and cloudy in the morning and cool but sunny in the afternoon, that brought the locals out and just under 500 had participated in the various walks, all in all not bad. We chatted about the organisation and it looks like we might be on the hit-list for doing more work for the village events. A great way to meet people and get involved, and also a great way to enjoy French food at its best, in the convivial company of our neighbours.
The locals are up in arms as you could imagine, graffiti (a thing you rarely see around here) has started to appear on the bridges over the road, the first road-side signs have been put up and emails are flying around between interested parties.
Our trusty campaigner ends his email with the comment “It is thus that the current debate has been preceded by a long battle, started in the XIIth century, to eliminate tolls on this road. This gives formidable historical legitimacy to those who try to preserve this asset against today's feudal lords: the sharks of capitalism…” With rhetoric like that we are bound to win!
Every red-blooded male is out with his gun on a Sunday killing anything that moves. Having said that, la chasse is far more regulated these days than it used to be. By the early 80s there were virtually no wild animals (including little birds) left in the whole country, only cities still had sparrows, everywhere else everything had been blown to pieces by the millions of guns in the possession of the French population. Many accidents occurred killing both other hunters but also unsuspecting walkers out for an Sunday afternoon stroll.
and for pheasant and other game birds 20th September to 31st December, no hunting when there is snow and the local paper reminded hunters that racing pigeons are not wild animals and are protected by the law! However, the Chasse supplement of the local paper did not mention the dates for the most hunted animal in Burgundy. Fortunately during our picnic at Cluny’s Ouvrez les Portes a couple of weeks ago, we were given those dates as well. From the 1st of July until mid February you can hunt snails!
On the 20th of September (coincidently my birthday), we had to sort out a chasse of our own. It was a drizzly day but worse than that, the toilet in one of the gites had given up the ghost, the chasse (flushing mechanism) needed replacing and with guests arriving that evening, time was of the essence. After lots of water on the floor, lots of cursing and two tons of silicon we had a leak free chasse, just in time for the new guests.
