On Wednesday the 21st we had a fabulous lunch at a restaurant chosen at random because we were hungry, then picked up our rental car at the Tours train station and drove out of the city to do some tourism on the north side of the Loire River.
Our first stop was the Dolmen de la Grotte aux Fées: a Neolithic tomb in the middle of a wheat field near the town of Mettray. It has walls and a roof made of slabs of natural stone, presumably moved to the site with rollers and erected by large groups of people working very hard. The tomb originally had dirt walls outside the stone ones, but millennia of erosion have stripped them away.
Here's a photo, with Dr. Diane A. Kelly for scale (170 centimeters).
Like many ancient sites in western Europe, this one has been attributed to the fairies, with the vernacular name "La Grotte aux Fées" (The Fairies' Grotto). Thirty years ago in Brittany, Diane and I stopped to visit a similar structure known locally as "Le Roche des Fees" (The Fairies' Rock).
We moderns may snicker about this, attributing human-built structures to supernatural beings, but it's worth remembering that these things pre-date the arrival of Indo-Europeans to modern France. They were very old a very long time ago. As far as the people of Roman Gaul or Christian France knew, they might as well have been built by fairies.
From the dolmen we took a leisurely drive on country roads to the town of Vouvray. Wine snobs may have already figured out why we were there: a winery tour and tasting. In this case, we visited the Domaine de Thierry-Cosme, and it vastly exceeded expectation. I had figured there would be a brief stroll around the winery building, maybe a look at the "caves" cut into the limestone bluffs, and a taste or two.
But the winery owner (I never caught his name but I assume he is M. Thierry, or M. Thierry-Cosme) had more ambitious plans. He bundled us (and his charming dog) into his truck and drove us up onto the top of the limestone plateau to have a look at the actual vineyard. His tract is right at the edge of the Vouvray region. There's a hedge at one side of his field, and on the other side of it the Touraine region begins.
After looking at the vines, we got to see the harvesting and pressing machinery. Wine making is now thoroughly mechanized. There's a big kind of tractor that straddles the rows of vines and gently shakes the grapes loose, catching them in rubber conveyor belts that dump them into bins.
Back at the winery building the grapes go right into the press, which uses hydraulic pistons to squeeze out every drop. A hectare of vineyard can produce five to six thousand liters of wine, or roughly one bottle per grape plant.
The next stage is fermenting. The winery has something like a dozen enormous stainless-steel fermenting tanks, all temperature-controlled to manage the transition from grape juice to wine as perfectly as possible.
After the ferment, the wine gets bottled (we didn't see how that's done but I assume it involves pouring wine into bottles and then capping them). Then it goes into the cave. The cave is a tunnel cut into the limestone — according to our host, his grandfather and his father did a lot of expansion by hand with picks and hammers. The temperature in the cave is always about 15 centigrade (60 Fahrenheit) year-round, and that is perfect for aging wine.
Our host also casually mentioned that his grandmother was born in the cave, as her family had owned it and lived in the front part. They certainly weren't the only ones: even today you can see lots of house fronts right in the limestone cliffs along the Loire.
One thing I learned is that Vouvray is better known in France as a sparkling wine than a still one, which sounded weird because most of the Vouvray I've seen in the U.S. is still wine. So we wound up buying a bottle of Vouvray Demi-Sec, and with careful packing Diane managed to get it back to our own cellar intact.
Winery, with Dr. Diane A. Kelly for scale.
Vouvray in hand, we went back to Tours and had a light supper at the little restaurant across the street from our hotel. That evening (and since this was the day of the summer solstice, at latitude 47 North, evening lasted a very long time) the old quarter of Tours was hosting a music festival. There were musical acts playing every few blocks: a brass band, a hip-hop group, a band doing covers of the Cure, a punk band, an open-mike stage . . . and presumably dozens more I didn't see. The streets were packed. My favorite metric for crowds, "Like Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras" was no hyperbole this time. We wandered about, listened to some music, tried to avoid getting separated by the mob, and at about 10 p.m. decided to pack it in for the night, even though it was still just twilight.
One bit of good news: when I checked my email I found a notice from Objets Trouvés at De Gaulle airport. They had my bag! I made an appointment to recover it on the day I was to return to Paris.
Next time: Castles and Magic!
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