Wine Tasting? Really?

There was only one excursion offered today – a trip to the Beaujolais wine country with optional tasting. Our tour director, Rachel, urged everyone to go whether they drink wine or not. My sister-in-law Debbie doesn’t drink wine, but she said that she had a great time on the excursion anyway!

We left Lyon on the A6 (less than picturesque) but it didn’t take long before we were seeing small villages. Alex, our guide (the same one we’d had for our silk tour a week ago), told us to shout “Beaujolais!” when we saw our first castle, which appeared a moment later as we entered Chatillon.

We traveled through several small villages (populations in the few hundreds); Frontenas was one of the prettiest. We saw its Mairie (town hall), an old wash house (built in the 19th Century as an cholera prevention measure), and had a very small glimpse of the town church.

I’ve driven through a lot of wine country in California; this was both familiar and unfamiliar – and very pretty!

We visited Domaine de Fond-Vielle, a small family winery that was founded in 1742 (the other three buses went to wineries which were centuries older!).

The proprietor, Dominique, met us and gave us a tour of the vineyard, which has a great view of yet another village and castle, Oingt, which is officially one of the most beautiful villages in France.

We walked through a bit of the vineyard and met Dominique’s dog, Mascot; he told us about the grapes he grows (Gamay for red, Chardonnay for white – those are the only grapes allowed in Beaujolais, and climate change is posing problems on that front).

Budbreak had just occurred – which meant that harvest was 90 days away.

We weren’t just there to look, of course. Dominique explained the wines and the process of creating them.

And then we tasted three wines – a white, a rosé, and a red. I liked them all, and we bought a bottle of the red for our AirBNB in Paris (or maybe to bring home); it cost all of eight euros!

We left reluctantly and boarded the bus for our return to Lyon and the beginning of our cruise, beginning with a transit of the Écluse de Pierre-Bénite just south of the confluence of the Rhône and Saône Rivers.

We sailed a bit over 20 miles to Vienne, where we’ll spend the night before touring the town tomorrow. It’s been pouring down rain since we got here, so I think we’ll stay aboard tonight!

Lyon sleeps tonight

We decided against taking the ship’s Lyon tour today, assuming (correctly) that it would mostly cover places we’d already been. Instead, we had a more-leisurely-than-I-wanted breakfast before taking the tram up to Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse, which was filled with stands selling all kinds of food, from the most mundane boxed dried pasta (at only twice the price at Monoprix across the street!) to interesting sweets of many kinds to hanging whole aged hams to escargot.

We had lunch at Inch’Ka an Armenian restaurant in the food hall; possibly not the obvious choice, but I enjoyed it.

After lunch, we wanted to visit the Musée Lumière. The B metro wasn’t running, so we walked to the D metro and took it to the Monplasire-Lumière stop.

The museum was closed for travaux (construction), but we looked at their bookstore (mostly DVDs and Blu-Rays) and had a snack at Cafe Lumière. I happened to notice a bottle of Coppola Zinfandel at their bar and asked if anyone ever bought any – they don’t sell much, but there are takers. It’s a $12 wine in supermarkets at home; here, it’s more like $40. Location, location, location!

We had better luck with our next destination, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. I’d seen a description of it as “manageable”, but in the 90 minutes we were there, we were only able to see a small fraction of their sculpture and 19th Century painting collections.

We got back to the ship in time to hear our tour director’s talk about tomorrow’s Beaujolais tour, then we took a very short walk alongside the ship, where the galley crew was hard at work.

Bon soir!