Monday, April 8, 2019

Today was our big splurge day. Instead of the included Beaujolais Wine Country tour, we chose to do the Beaujolais & Truffles tour that would take us to a wine chateau and two working farms. We met our guide for the day, Annabelle, and boarded the bus to discover that only one other couple had signed up. We would be driving through Beaujolais, plus two regions in Burgundy, Charolais and Mâcon.

We enjoyed the bridges of Lyon on our way out of town.

Our first stop was to see the views from the Moulin-à-Vent monument. The windmill was built around 1450 and operated until 1819.

 

We then visited the Château de Pierreclos and sampled a variety of wines outdoors in the most beautiful of settings. Accompanied by bread and gougère (a savory cheese pastry), we tasted two whites, two reds, and two liqueurs: a 2016 Mâcon Pierreclos (chardonnay), a 2016 Pouilly-Fuissé, a 2017 Bourgogne (pinot noir), a 2014 Chénas (gamay), a crème de cassis, and a crème de peche. Delicious! We then wandered through the castle and at the end we purchased a bottle of the Pouilly-Fuissé to share at dinner.

 

Inside the chapel

Chapel

Next stop was to the truffle and saffron farm of Olivier and his 15-year-old dog Chinook, an Appenzeller Sennenhund from the Swiss Alps. Olivier served us a delicious multi-course lunch. We started with French bread with truffle butter, a truffled butternut squash soup, followed by vegetable chili over rice, truffled chèvre and pâté of duck, beef, and pork, and finished with a saffron cake and truffle chocolate mousse. It was a delightful meal, and Olivier was a great host who loves to talk and is passionate about his farm and his dog. Throughout the meal, Chinook stayed under the table and mostly rested her head on Gord's lap.

Then it was time for the truffle hunting demonstration. The fields and woods were across the road from the farmhouse. Chinook doesn't cross the road on his own--Olivier picks her up and carries her across. We walked to the woods and Chinook set to work sniffing the ground while Olivier talked. Chinook would start scratching the dirt in one area, Olivier would whistle for her to stop and then he would walk over to where Chinook was waiting. Olivier would check out the dirt with his fingers and, sure enough, he would find a truffle. Click here for a video. Truffle season is in the fall, so the truffles were small and soft, so Olivier reburied them. It was cool to see the special connection between Olivier and Chinook. As Annabelle said to me when we were boarding the bus, she is worried about Olivier when Chinook dies.The week before Olivier told us that Chinook had been very sick and he thought they were going to lose her. He does have another dog, a puppy, that we didn't meet, but Olivier says he is not a good truffle hunter.

We next drove to Chèvrerie la Trufière, a goat farm, met the three-week-old baby goats, and were given a tour of the cheese-making facility by Coralie. The tour ended with a tasting of young and more mature goat cheeses, accompanied by white wine, of course. I purchased some confiture au lait, a caramel sauce made from goat's milk, to bring home.

 We saw fields of Charolais cattle specific to the area as we drove along.

We returned to the boat in time for Captain Pierre's farewell toast followed by the port talk and our final dinner on the Viking Delling.