Made it to the small town outside of Beaune where I had rented a place for a week -- Remigny -- basically a narrow road with small stone houses and apartments lining it for maybe five blocks (then countryside) -- no stores, no businesses, no streetlights. Fortunately, my landlord spoke English -- he was a part-time chaffeur for various multinational companies doing business in the area -- and took it on himself to be my personal concierge -- telling me the best places to go to taste wine, making reservations for me and driving me around the countryside to places and wineries where English-speakers never set foot -- even smuggling me into a Chateau (that was also a winery) for a private wine tasting and tour (mentioned I was writing a blog and he morphed that into I was a jounalist writing stories on undiscovered wineries in Burgundy for the American press) -- I just had to nod my head and smile occasionally as he interpreted!
Beaune lies at the center of the Borgogne wine region -- to the south are wineries specializing in red wines using Cabernet Savignon grapes -- to the north are wineries making only white wines with Chardonnay wines. This is the "heavy-hitter" area for wine in France where the cost of a bottle of wine can quickly escalate into the hundreds/thousands of dollars and where plots of land have been in the winery families hands for hundreds of years. As you can imagine, they take wine and grape growing very seriously.
A quick overview -- wine here is classified into four levels or categories -- Regional, Village, Premier Cru and Grand Cru -- depending upon which plot of land the grapes came from. There's a national "Wine Board" in France that has evaluated and assigned a rating to every plot of land in Burgundy based upon things like the type of soil, the plot's location on the hillside, the drainage, the angle at which the sun hits the vines in that plot, etc....
"Regional" wines are made from grapes grown in the least desirable plots (for that area) -- wines labelled "Village" have to be made from grapes grown within the borders of a specfic village/town and from the next level up of desirable land -- "Premier Cru" wines are made from grapes grown in specific plots (each plot is given it's own name) located on the lower slopes, upper slopes or top of the hillside --- "Grand Cru" is made from the most desirable plots -- typically mid-hillside -- the Premier and Grand plots can be as small as ten square yards each. It gets even crazier as four or five wineries can own a mere two or three rows of grapes within a single plot (French law required that when a father died, his land had to be divided equally among his sons -- resulting in multiple divisions over hundreds of years). All of this documentation shows-up on the bottle's label if you know how to read it -- and then you look at the name of the winemaker to decide how "good" the wine actually is -- like I said it gets complicated.
Took another wine tasting class in Beaune focused on learning to identify which level of wine we were tasting by sight, smell, taste and complexity -- then had to identify in blind tasting which level eight wines fell into -- did pretty good and it was actually fun, kinda, remember people in France have no sense of humor -- you don't make jokes when you're talking wine! The class confirmed that I have pretty "common" taste in wine -- preferred some of the "Village" wines ($20) over the Grand Cru wines ($100+) which is seen as a "no-no" in France.
Also rented a bicycle and biked through the vineyards -- not easy as the paths go up and down the slopes and you ride for miles with no shade (in 90 degree heat). But here I was riding within two feet of grapes that would be made into thousand dollar bottles of wine -- weird feeling! Beautiful scenery! Only downside was the bike I had was crap, chain kept coming off plus I had three flat tires -- finally called my landlord to come rescue me fourteen miles from the apartment.
The last day I went wine tasting during the day and accompanied my landlord to a Bastille Day party (French Independance day) held in the village where I was staying -- had a choice of mussels (clams in the shell) or sausages (hot dogs, no bun) and fries and wine (a lot of wine!) Interesting, typical small town event -- 80-100 people who pretty much all knew one another and were going to live right there the rest of their lives -- none of whom spoke English. Plus they had a guitar player and a vocalist singing American folk and rock -- not bad except they really didn't know the English words to the songs and were just kind of "winging" it making up words as they went along -- imagine "Born in the USA" melody but only half the right words -- I'm sure I'm the only one who noticed!
From here I go to the town of Chablis (after which the wine is named and also considered part of Borgogne) for a day and then head to Belgium to catch an overnight ferry to England.
