Our Day For Beaujolais

I don't think a trip to Provence would be complete without visiting at least one winery.

We had passed on prior opportunities with optional Viking excursions like the one to Tain-l'Hermitage in Tournon, which received high marks.

Instead, we held out for this included Viking excursion on our last full day of the cruise.

I think Julie felt inspired like great painters by the region when she snapped the top photo, which I thought was so good that I added a few lines to the top of this post so that I could make it the first photo be seen in it.

I call Julie's masterpiece, "Beaujolais Laborers Share a Humble Lunch."

For our second day in Lyon, we took a road trip north to the Beaujolais wine producing region.

As we rode in the tour coach, our guide shared some general information about the area and its wine.

Our first stop was Beaujo, a village about 45 minutes to an hour away from where our ship docked.  Most people seemed primarily interested in the public restrooms of the large gift shop.  

Julie and I wandered into a small church nearby, which while much smaller than other Cathedrals we saw on this trip was much smaller, because after all this was a small village.

We walked along what seemed to be the main street to find centre ville.   What we mostly found were closed storefronts, many of which seemed to be permanently out of business.  

Perhaps they bustle with life during the festival seasons in Provence in early summer, but my guess is that many did not survive Covid-19 tourism curtailment.  French country villages often seem to have a lot of vacancies, probably owned by wealthy city-dwellers as peaceful escapes from urban stress.

A photo by Julie made it look very much like Old World Village in Huntington Beach.

Back on the bus, we headed toward the Ordenas countryside (according to Julie's iPhone photos) to visit Château de Nervers, one of many wineries Viking uses for this standard inclusion excursion.

Our guide shared that he had been leading tours there for years, and that he really liked the family who owns it.  They are trying to refurbish the mansion and upgrade the vintages, admirable goals both.

He said they came to own the winery because the prior aristocratic owner liked to gamble but lacked the wisdom to either win or know when to quit.  He kept borrowing money, and eventually had borrowed so much that he offered the winery including the mansion as payment for his debt.  It is a story oft-repeated with slight variations in the best of families and sometimes can be the basis for a good mystery on TV.

The estate rests in a lovely setting among rolling hillsides, and the mansion remains photogenic, if a bit rough for wear.  Unfortunately --- or perhaps fortunately, depending on how bad the interior might actually be --- we were not granted access to the living space of the residence.

We were instead led into the cellar, where we learned about the process of creating wine from Gamay grapes.  It begins by pouring grapes into sealed aluminum or concrete vats where the lowest third is crushed by gravity, squeezing out "must" which ferments naturally.  I don't believe too many believe it's like the classic "I Love Lucy" episode with barefoot women stomping around in a vat of grapes in Italy, but that was pointed out.

Because gamay grapes apparently don't produce a lot of alcohol naturally, it has become a practice for many wine-makers to add sugar to fermenting grapes, a process called chaptalization, so that would normally be a wine with about 10 to 10.5% alcohol content into one that is more acceptable at 13 to 13.5%, but wines made this way often lack subtle character notes.

That lack of character probably explains why back in 1395, the Duke of Burgundy banned growing gamay in his region to make way for more noble pinot noir grapes so they could continue to boast "the best wine in Christendom."

That's why gamay growers were pushed south into Beaujolais, which took its name from the Province ruled by the lords of Beaujo before it was ceded to the Duke of Burgundy in the 1400s.  The fact that winemakers continued to grow gamay grapes in the granite-rich soil that proved quite acceptable for the roots would indicate there is at least some consumer preference for it.

I've heard third hand that much of the table wine in Paris is Beaujolais, and I have to say that in both France and Italy, I often find the cheap house wine suits my palate.  Beaujolais is a light-bodied red wine.

Beaujolais is now a French Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC) wine, requiring specific methods of viticulture and wine-making.

In the early 2000's, several growers resorted to adding too much sugar to try to compensate for a patchy harvest of particularly poor quality, giving all Beaujolais a blackeye.

This rather took away some of the blush off the rose from glory days of the 1980's to early 1990's, when some entrepreneurial spirit came up with the idea of Beaujolais Nouveau, an accelerated release of very young wine (like 4 days old) in November while it was still fresh, making an asset of the fact that Beaujolais does not age well in the bottle.

As happened with yacht rock and hair rock, consumers moved onto another fad, and in 2001, a big controversy was that over a million cases had to be dumped or distilled due to poor consumer demand.  Lyon Mag, a employee-owned print magazine, ran a story by a wine critic claiming the reason the wine had to be dumped was the poor quality.  Growers sued for libel under an obscure law against denigrating French products, winning $350,000, which was enough to drive the magazine into bankruptcy.

At our tasting, I'm afraid I would come down on the side of that critic if the four samples we had were similar to what he tasted.  I think one that was touted as being one of their best vintages was four years old, so considerably longer than four days, which may have been the problem, though some vintners are trying to age some Beaujolais longer to encourage complexity in its flavor.

Beaujolais Nouveau is ideally a fruity, light-bodied, refreshing wine that goes down easy.

It's funny to me how frequently cruises have winery tastings where the wine served is so much worse than everyday wine on the ship.  

In this case, we were led to what looked like a storage shed or barn with long wooden benches for us to uncomfortably perch on.  It is a far cry from most wineries, where you at least have we have a chair or perhaps stand at a table-topped barrel or bar counter of that height.

Then again, I'm spoiled by California wineries that cater to demanding American day trippers and bachelorette parties who have no qualms about getting back in our cars or limo to go to the next winery a mile down the road if the one we're act proves less than ideal.

This was Provence, where they seem to think we should overlook shabby features because, after all, this is world-renowned Provence.  No further explanation needed.

I would also guess that they have a better wine that they could serve, but maybe that is just for that Beaujolais Nouveau Festival in November.

That's not to say that I didn't enjoy the trip to the countryside, and our guide, a transplanted Dutchman, played his part well.

I simply think the excursion could be done considerably better.  They could have at last let us keep our wine glasses with the winery logo as souvenirs.

Please don't sue me into bankruptcy, Beaujolais winemakers.  Taste is subjective, and some seemed to like the wine, with a few enjoying to the point of buying bottles to take home.

There was an optional excursion for about $250 for truffle hunting plus a winery, and I must assume that had the best winery in the area.  Mike and Linda, who we originally met at dinner on the first evening of the cruise, said that was a fantastic excursion.

After a return to Lyon for one more look-see, we enjoyed our final great evening of wining, dining and even a little cha cha aboard Viking Delling.