We spent most of our time in the historic part of Beaune, which is still surrounded in parts by the old medieval city wall. The moat has been replace with grassy parks or by parking lots.
The narrow streets are filled with vacationing wine shoppers!
Aside from wine, the other big attraction in Beaune is the Hotel Dieu (House of God) which was a charity hospital dating to the 1400's. In 1435, the Hundred Years War between France and England for control of France ended, leaving Europe in a mess. Bands of marauding and pillaging outlaws roamed the land, and the citizens of Beaune were destitute, suffering ravages of starvation and illness. Nicolas Rolin, the Chancellor of Burgundy authorized the construction of a hospital to care for the people of Beaune.
The hospital was state-of-the-art gothic architecture for the time, including a colored tile roof, various patterns of which were soon popular on new construction projects all over the region.
I was very interested in how medicine was practiced in the middle ages. Patients were cared for in a 28 bed ward in a huge stone room in the hospital. Each bed accommodated two sick people--frontrunner to the semi-private hospital room, I guess. The colorful red curtains look nice, but they were used to keep patients warm and probably to keep away the smells of the other patients. There was also a slot constructed in the floor of the sick ward where contaminated bandages and other material were dumped into the river running under the hospital. This was considered very advanced thinking for the time, since it would be a few of hundred years before the development of the "germ theory" of illness.
Hotel Dieu soon achieved a reputation for good medical care, attracting the attention of area nobility. They donated money to build a ward for private patients, distinguished by white curtains. Patients were cared for by an order of nuns who soon built a large convent in Beaune. Nicolas Rolin also gave farm lands and vineyards to the hospital so it could sustain itself financially, and the nuns soon became involved in farming and wine-making as well as patient care. Wine is still produced and sold under their old domaine name.
This is the apothecary (pharmacy) where the medications were made. Pharmaceutical chemistry in the 1400's was little more than witchcraft, since there was no standardized treatment. Pharmacists concocted medical preparations using local herbs grown by the nuns, and then added various chemicals, all based on local lore. Blood letting was still the mainstay therapy for illness.
Hotel Dieu continued to provide patient care for several hundred years until a new hospital was built, and it even housed a home for the aged until the 1970's when it became a museum.
Aside from wine, food is the other significant contribution to French culture from the Burgundy region. Classic dishes like boeuf bourguignon and coq au vin originated here. So we went in search of some local cuisine and found it at L'Auberge Bourguignonne.
We were just a couple of boys from Texas "fixin' to have some supper" when the waiter brought the wine list. This was one of the choices and it seemed the right one for us! So we ordered a bottle with dinner. (BTW, the French pronunciation is "fissawn.")
Once again, we both chose the same food. The starter was Feuillete d'Escargots a la Beaunoise--snails in a delicious wine sauce with a puff pastry on top. Delicious, and no shells to mess with!
Main course: Estoufface de Boef Bourguignonne--Tagliatelles au Beurre. Beef Bourgignon with butter noodles. Perfect with the Fixin wine!
And next, the assortment of cheeses. France boasts over 300 types of cheese. Having had cheese with almost every meal we have eaten here, I think we are only up to number 49 or 50! And finally dessert: Tim had profiteroles and I had double chocolate something-or-other. By this point, we had reached the bottom of the bottle of Fixin, and we were fixin' to call it a night!
The next day, we set out to see how they made wine. We toured several small caves in Beaune, but Patriarche Pere & Fils was the most impressive--and fun!
Patriarche Pere & Fils occupies the convent built by the order of nuns who ran the Hotel Dieu. The nuns built wine cellars under the convent for their own wine-making business. After the French Revolution, the nuns abandoned the convent. Apparently when the French peasants rose up in 1789, they were fueled by Protestantism and a belief that the King and the Catholic Church were in collusion to oppress them. So in addition to the king and queen, many Catholic sites were attacked and even destroyed. Fortunately the convent and its vast limestone wine cellars were spared even though the nuns fled. After the revolution, Jean Baptiste Patriarche bought it for a song and continued the wine-making tradition of the nuns, but under his own domaine name.
Over the years, Patriarche and his successors enlarged the wine cellars of the convent so that they now encompass 2-3 hectares of space and 3 kilometers of passageways under the village of Beaune. Some 3 million bottles of wine are stored here.
Patriarche is also a master of marketing. Unlike other caves, their wine tastings are conducted in the vaults of the cellar. When you start the tour, they give you your own silver metal tastevin or wine tasting cup. As you pass through the cellars, there are a series of successive rooms, each with 2-3 old oak barrels upon which rests a lighted candle and a bottle of wine for tasting. There is something about candlelight that just makes wine taste better. We are not wine experts, but in the cellar lit by candles, Patriarche's wine seemed wonderful. Conveniently, next to each tasting station is a stack of bottles of that particular wine and several handy metal carrying baskets. Here you can see Tim has filled his basket with wine bottles. We bought a case! But since we can only bring 4 bottles home, we will have to drink the other bottles in Paris. Fortunately, this will not be a problem!
From Beaune, we continued along the Route des Grands Crus through Burgundy to Nuits-St. George, another quaint wine-making village. Within the Cote D'Or of Burgundy, there are several rival grape-producing areas. Cote D'Beaune and Cote D'Nuit are two with a long rivalry, each claiming their own "terroir." Terroir has no corresponding word in English, but roughly means "a distinct individual quality based on climate, light, soil, water. and our own secret recipes." We couldn't tell much difference, and truth be told, they sell each other's wines anyway.
Nuits-St. George has decorated is public spaces with--what else?--grape vines pruned into trees and planted in pots with decorative flowers. This one was a chardonnay vine. All wines from Burgundy are made from either pinot noir grapes for the reds or chardonnay grapes for the whites.
Along with claiming the best grapes, each village also boasts one or more chateaux--monuments to the long tradition of French wine-making.
The Route des Grands Crus boasts several lovely chateaux along with some really great wines and wonderful food. Next stop: Reims and the Champagne region.
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