Day 5 - Beaune

Today was our designated wine tasting day and we were picked up at 10 am by our tour guide Sue Boxell of Burgandy on a Plate. She drove us to the Cote de Nuits area of Burgandy.  This area primarily produces Pinot Noir (Burgandy). There is a small percentage of Chardonnay (White Burgandy) but it is a very small percentage of the total in this particular area.    

The first place was in Nuits St. George. It was a distributor so it was just a straight wine tasting of one white and three reds. Kate had never experienced "spitting" during a tasting and this place had some pretty fancy spitting basins with water that would intermittently run to rinse them out.  

From there we drove through the vineyards of the Grand Cru wines taking pictures and just generally looking around.  Most notable among them was Romanee Conti vineyard. These are the most expensive wines in the world, costing around $5000 per bottle. This area of France is so beautiful.  Rolling hills, vineyards everywhere you look, and beautiful towns that were built in the early to middle renaissance.

Then we drove to look at Clos Vougeot which is where the Cistercians originally began planting grapes in the 12th century.  From there we went to Chateau Gilley for lunch which was a delicious three course affair.  The restaurant was elegant and inside an old Chateau room.  It was like a cellar and it had vaulted ceilings.  The place was gorgeous.  Outside it looked like there was supposed to be a moat that grass had grown into. 

We then proceeded to Geverey Chambertin for a tasting at the cave of a small wine maker.  This was such a treat!  He gave us four barrel tastings-one of which was a Grand Cru (which rarely ever happens).  Trying the wine directly out of the barrel was awesome.  Only one of them we tried was ready to be bottled...the others were in the final stages of fermentation and there was still a little bit of the malalactic acid, so you could smell it but the taste wasn't affected.  The Grand Crus are the most prestigious wine of this area, so when we tried it, we definitely were not letting it go to waste by spitting it out.  This man was so hospitable and the whole time he was talking I could understand most of what he was saying!  Of course I was intently staring at his mouth the whole time, but you start somewhere right?!

After this tasting, we had a cheese tasting.  The cheese is all from free range Goat's milk.  They had 100 goats and milked them twice a day (and we got to watch! It was so cool!).  They said that it takes about 2.5 hours each time.  They take the milk and let it sit for a day in a warm room then put it into molds where they let it sit between 1-2 days.  After that, they stick it in the fridge and let it age for various amounts of time (from a few days to a month) depending on the projected flavor of the cheese.  After explaining to us how the cheese is made, the lady took us to her house, which is a 300 year old farm house, and served us a plate of cheeses, varying in age.  They were all amazing, but I really liked the youngest, which was very light in flavor and very creamy.  I also really liked the oldest, which was aged for a month, and it had developed more of a moldy looking crust, but it was the strongest flavor and was definitely one of the best.  Needless to say we bought some cheese.  (But we forgot to take pictures)

We came back to the hotel and we thought our power was out, but it turned out to be a switch that was switched off.  We felt so dumb after asking the front desk to fix our power and they come back saying everything was fine. 

We decided not to eat dinner because we had a ton to eat today and it was a tiring day, so we figured that we would just chill at the hotel and sleep before our early train to Geneva tomorrow morning.