Bonjour, les amis du vin et cuisine, and welcome again to Cépage et Cuisine, Mary’s and Brian’s wine and food blog. If you haven’t checked the blog in a while, we’re posting daily reports from our wine and food vacation in France. Take a look at recent postings. Since we're posting frequently, use the links on the right side of the blog page to access reports dating back to May 8. Thursday, May 12 was a day spent close to home. A morning in France is not complete without a walk to the nearby patisserie and boulangerie. My dietary restrictions don’t permit me to indulge, but I enjoy the aromas, the culture, and interactions with the people in the shops. Mary chose the abricot or apricot tart. Here she is to talk generally about French breads and pastries.
I don’t eat croissants in the U.S. very often. I think a good, fresh croissant in the U.S. is as good as a fresh croissant in France. A big difference between France and the U.S. is that where we live we don’t have easy access to a bakery like this. Some neighborhoods in cities have them, but in France, there is a boulangerie, a bakery, in every little village. Many people just walk to them. They’re like a morning gathering place in the community where people see each other and exchange greetings and news. Many of the shops are also patisseries, or pastry shops. The French pastries are lighter and not as sugary sweet and syrupy as U.S. pastries and tarts. The French palate seems to pay more attention to finesse and flavor nuances in contrast to Americans who tend to prefer richer, bolder, sweeter flavors. Think about the pastries you might see at Starbucks. French bread appears automatically on the table of any French restaurant, café, and bistrot. Bread or rolls on the table is not unusual in many American restaurants, of course. I noticed a slight variation from restaurant to restaurant in the bread in France, which is not surprising because so many different small bakeries make it. Good bread is good bread, no matter where it is made. Fresh, daily baked bread is just a more regular part of life in France than in the U.S.
Our first appointment of the day was at Domaine Bouchard Père et Fils. Bouchard is an old and large Burgundy producer located in the Beaune Chateau or castle. Here’s the Bouchard maison or family home inside the Chateau and elaborately landscaped grounds. The family actually owned a vineyard privately, Les Caillerets, in the village of Volnay, as early as 1735. Private ownership was unusual at that time. Most of the vineyards were owned by the church or nobility until the French revolution as we discussed in a previous post. After the revolution and over the years, Bouchard acquired many vineyard sites up and down the length of the Côte d’Or. We’ve enjoyed their wines many times, red and white, and have found that we can trust the label. If it’s a Bouchard wine, it’s probably going to be balanced, varietally correct, and pair well with food.
This is one of the few tours that charges a fee. It was €15 per person, but it was very interesting, lasted almost two hours, walking through the ancient subterranean cellars of the Beaune Chateau, dating to the 11th century, and seeing 150-year-old bottles of wine still stored there and occasionally opened for special occasions. The tour then concluded with a tasting of four reds and four whites, beginning with Bourgogne and progressing up the ladder to village, Premier Cru, and Grand Cru, illustrating how complexity, finish, and other characteristics vary with vineyard site and classification level. The monks got it right! It was very educational. We bought a bottle of Volnay Caillerets 1999 to have with dinner the next night back at Villers-la-Faye. If you’d like to learn more about the Burgundy classification of Bourgogne, village wine, Premier Cru, and Grand Cru, take a look at a blog post I wrote back on September 30, 2010. You can access that by clicking on the archives, year, and month on the right side of the blog.
After the Bouchard tour, we walked down the street in Beaune to a bouchon, a butcher shop, and picked up some charcuterie, a summer sausage, and a small quiche, then to a nearby fromagerie for a bit of cheese. We went back to the house for an easy lunch.
After lunch we went to the nearby village of Magny-lès-Villers (Magny “near” Villers-la-Faye) for our afternoon appointment at Domaine Naudin-Ferrand. Magny-lès-Villers is almost literally a stone’s throw from Villers-la-Faye, less than a kilometer, or about a half-mile. We can see the Magny rooftops from our house in Villers-la-Faye. Frank Germain, who with his wife, Laura, owns the house where we are staying, was a school classmate of Claire Naudin who now manages the domaine. Frank and Laura provide a bottle of Claire’s wine for all their guests. We enjoyed the wine and emailed her to ask if we could visit. She was planning a big social event for May 14, but agreed to see us. Her wines are pleasant, light-bodied, fresh, low in alcohol, around 12%, and definitely built for food. She does her own vineyard work, too, in the Hautes-Côte de Nuits and Hautes-Côtes de Beaune. She was so busy, we didn’t stay long.
Just up the street from Domaine Naudin-Ferrand, the hillside view gives you a good look at our village, Villers-la-Faye. You can see Villers-la-Faye is separated from Magny-lès-Villers by just a field, really. And just off in the distance beyond Villers-la-Faye, you see the next small village.
The main course for Mary was coq-au-vin, chicken braised in red wine, and ris de veau for me. We were both interested in the coq-au-vin because Mary makes it from time to time based on a variation of Julia Child’s recipe. We were eager to compare the version we make at home with the “real thing” in Burgundy. I’m happy to report that Mary’s coq-au-vin passed the test with flying colors! She says the only thing she would like to do differently is use a different red wine for the braise and allow it to reduce to a richer consistency. She said the Restaurant Simon version was absolutely delicious.
The carte, or menu, was completely in French and our server didn’t seem to know any English. I know that veau is veal, so I ordered it, thinking it would be some sort of cutlet and not the typical breaded version we often see in Italian restaurants in the U.S. It actually was quite delicious, not a large cut of meat, but what surprised me was the texture and appearance. It was very soft, almost like a firm pudding consistency, and white in color. I was open-minded and ate all of it and enjoyed it. The flavor was delicious. Days later, while browsing through a French language phrase book, I found the rest of the term, ris de veau. It’s not veal cutlet at all. It’s the pancreas of the calf! I’m glad I didn’t know that until later. I enjoyed the dinner very much, but I don’t think I would have been brave enough to order calf pancreas if I had known then.
The chef was nice enough to prepare a delicious fresh fruit dessert for me.
The wine was another lovely village-level vin rouge, this one from Vosne-Romanée. I chose it partly because I know the wines of Vosne-Romanée tend to be quite elegant among Côte de Nuits wines and partly because the vintage, 2001, was fairly mature on the wine list and within the price range I was willing to pay. I thought the coq-au-vin, which is cooked in red wine, would pair just fine with an elegant and well-structured Pinot Noir and that the wine would be fine with veal (before I knew what the veal really was!). Like all our dinners in Burgundy, we were delighted with the wine. It had a wonderful perfume, great elegance and balance, good length, and complemented the food seamlessly. Here are my notes on the wine.
That’s our post for another day of food, wine, and French culture. Keep reading Cépage et Cuisine for more on our daily adventures. In the meantime,
Cheers,
Mary♥Brian
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