Touring the Burgundy wine region in France

BURGUNDY IS THE NEW GREY

For our holiday last October we turned to Burgundy, leaving from Scotland’s grey capital. It was so grey, it was dreich. Even the Forth bridges were barely visible as our captain carefully navigated his way out of Rosyth in a London pea-souper.

Anyone who can successfully navigate with Michelin maps is pretty smart, so Pat deserves a medal for her efforts. Michelin maps are to Ordnance Survey what Japanese is to Cockney and our best efforts got us to Cambrai, well north of our ultimate destination, for the first night. The grim, grey North Sea weather came with us into northern France, but this wasn’t a holiday about lying in the sun. The agenda had more to do with le shopping for booty, les fine dining experiences, un surprise connection in Chablis and plusiers d’architectural and engineering pilgrimages. It all got done, right down to the last not lying in the sun’. We were going back to Burgundy and this time not just passing through, but using it as a base. There was a looseness to the pre-holiday planning, in as much as we adopted the principle: let’s wing it (which is reasonably safe in October). Notwithstanding this, we did pre-book a nice hotel mid way between Dijon and Chablis, a sensible idea – to have at least one fixed point in an itinerary.

The Hotel de la Poste is steeped in history and is located in the centre of Avallon. Kennedy, Eisenhower and Napoleon all slept under that roof. Bryan Ferry probably too. There was lots of bowing and nodding at breakfast, as all the other guests were Japanese. We know, from having had a hotel ourselves, that they take eating very seriously and it was no surprise to find that all the boiled eggs had disappeared early. One man is still there, going back for more, eating for his country. Saturday was market day and we took full advantage by securing industrial quantities of ail rose de Lautrec before heading out for a drive in the Parc rgional du Morvan. A long way to come, from Morvern to Morvan, and something of a disappointment too, because for instance: when a sign says Auberge du Lac, 1 km’, you expect to come across an auberge, by a lake, in about 1 km. No auberge, no lake, just lots of brown signs la Gulliver’s World or Shakespeare Country and lots of trees. Also a bird and fish reserve centred on a small pond, but with no birds (except a fleeting glimpse of a jay) and no fish as far as I could see. We climbed a small hill to a tor called Roche des Fes and had a picnic