The Loire, so far

Your feedback to these dispatches has been amazing - it’s nice to know that you enjoy what we’ve been experiencing! In response to demand, a few of you have been asking about the Loire valley, so it is with great pleasure that this dispatch will be a report on the playground of French kings of old, the Loire valley.

Before getting much further into it, I’ll set the scene: Amy and I are enjoying a carafe of red wine, produced locally in the Loire valley, that came to a total of 5,90€. After exchange, that works out to about nine dollars, which should give you the first tip-off: wine is cheap. Cheaper than water, as it turns out, cheaper than coffee, and definitively cheaper than tea. I know it’s a digression from the Loire, but it’s definitely worth taking note of, so let’s have a breakdown (keep in mind I’m through the better part of the carafe, so you’re just going to have to keep up with my train of thought):

Tea, with milk: 2€50
Coffee (small, STRONG cup): 1,25€
Water, Evian, 500ml: 2€
Wine, 750ml (admittedly, cheap but good): 1,85€

For the curious, the euro is about 1.5 Canadian dollars. We’ve done some “self-catering” as the guidebooks call it, i.e., buying our own groceries and making our dinners, and the grocery stores sell the wine themselves: I know, for readers from Quebec this isn’t a strange thing, but us Ontarians still buy it from the government, so it’s a hell of a novelty. And they have row, after row, after row of the stuff. It was a jaw-dropping experience, especially when you consider the price.

So, back to the Loire. We drove down from Erik & Laure’s on the tenth, with a trip carefully laid out by Mappy, an on-line direction service that takes your start and destination and gives you a complete roadmap of how to connect point A to point B. It’s really accurate, right down to when you should slow down for the photo radar stations (yes, Ontarians, France has these, but they’re carefully signed). Still, France is unique, and managed to screw us up about three times. Mostly when we were passing through a town of any reportable size; that is, one where the main drag isn’t the highway. We’d have to use the force a bit to figure out which way the highway was going to connect us back, and given our relative inexperience with the road signs, we still managed to get completely lost. Luckily, my shifting has been getting better, so I’m able to do all sorts of fancy three-point turns without much pain. Stalling the car has become the exception rather than the rule.

Our computer-directed plans took us south, avoiding Paris completely, through non-toll routes and generally replete with big sky, sprawling farmer’s fields, and all manner of French scenery. We didn’t make any stops as we wanted to arrive at our reserved hotel at or around the time I’d said on the reservation form (6 PM), but then, there wasn’t much we wanted to stop at anyway; the towns are so small, you tend to drive right through them with a slow-down for a traffic circle on either end (those are getting easier, too). All you get is a sign with the town’s name going in, occasionally, you get a sign advising you of the reduced speed limit - but not always, a few buildings that have been around for three or four hundred years, and then the same town-sign with a red line through it advising that you’re now done with that town. Then it’s back to hay fields, corn fields, or more bizarrely - fields of dead sunflowers. As in, baked to a crisp.

So, we went straight for Blois, which we figured was going to be our hub for Loire exploration. It would figure - we were completely fine through our entire trip, directions and jedi mind powers working just fine, but when we got within 2 kilometers of our hotel, we got completely lost. I imagine it had something to do with the line indicating our direction just “ending” at the name of the city we were going to, and not actually getting a highly detailed local map; you bet that’s a lesson we’ve since learned. We went towards the first source of civilization we could find, a community centre, and asked around where the address we were looking for was. A group of women gave us a few different sets of directions. We decided to choose the first set and drove off, without too much confidence. We weren’t more than a kilometer away when we were hailed by a car being driven by one of said women, pointing at us to turn right. We hooked up at the next turn and she gave us some more directions, and we did in the end, arrive exactly where we needed to be. It’s the second example of serendipity, of the universe consipring to help us get where we need to be, and something that we’re definitely paying attention to now.

The hotel we arrived at was an example of a “self-service” hotel - a lot of them have been automated such that you show up, touch a few buttons on a kiosk, slide your credit card, and get rewarded with a key and a room number. When we arrived, a note taped to the door to “Mr. Andrew” advised exactly how I could retrieve our key, and I was to find later that the reservation service had left two messages on my cell phone with key retrieval instructions. For a self-service hotel, it felt pretty personalized!

I’ve managed to blather on for this long without even talking about the Loire valley. It was indeed the playground of kings - no less than thirty grand chateaux - castles, let’s face it - dotted along the Loire river from Sancerre in the east to Angers in the west. And these aren’t just any castles, they are built with stone mined from quarries in the area, the finest stone, and then decorated with ornate carvings, tapestries, sculptures, furniture, paintings, you name it. In some cases, thousands of hectares of land set aside for the development of precision gardens, row upon row of exotic trees. We have (so far) visited two: Chateau Cheverny, and Chateau Chenonceau.

Chateau Cheverny is good example of French design. Everything is symmetrical; from the paths leading to the castle, to the layout of the garden, you get a sense that the role of architecture was to prove that the kings could defy nature by imposing an ultimate sense of order upon it. And impose they did. Cheverny is a big lego block of a building: long, relatively thin, but tall. Three sections of building, topped on the two outside parts by large domes, and marbly white. The building is surrounded by a field of fine stones, raked into position by tractors. Of all the chateaux, it’s supposed to be one of the best for showing how a chateau would have been furnished, and it was exceptional: plush velvet chairs (none of which you could sit on), rich mahogany desks, tables and armoirs; paintings of former kings and queens, counts and duchesses; tapestries that have adorned the walls for hundreds of years, only to be hidden by a fairy-tale four-poster bed with crayon-coloured velvet coverings; and the interior of the building, which deserves a special mention. Every exposed ceiling beam was painted with the continuing flow of the royal coat-of-arms. The walls were “papered” with Cordova leather, painted with elegant patterns, and then decorated with dozens of painted scenes, derived from moments taken from Don Quixote. I suppose if you lived in an age before television, just walking around and taking in the mastery of the scenery was a considerable entertainment.

Cheverny was also host to a permanent exhibition for Tintin, as apparently the chateau was the inspiration for Moulinsard, the chateau owned and inhabited by Tintin’s friend Capitaine Haddock. Apart from faithful recreations of items and scenes seen in the Tintin stories, it was perfectly missable, and a bit of a let down in comparison to the overwhelming chateau: perhaps a bit of an edge over the other chateaux in the area, which must all be competing for the same tourist dollars. But I guess if you were a die-hard fan of Tintin, you’d have reached nirvana.

Chenonceau, like Cheverny, inspires the same feeling of “wow, that’s big”. The avenue just to approach the castle itself is probably three hundred metres long, and lined with trees that are probably each one hundred metres high. We’d had our doubts about going to Chenonceau when we did - it was beginning to rain, it was only going to be open for another two hours, and it cost 9&euro each for us to enter (~$27 Canadian). But even just walking down that huge tree-lined avenue was worth it, and it only got better.

Without the brochures in front of me, I can only tell you that Chateau Chenonceau was built by a King for his mistress, and to look at it, you have to wonder exactly what she did for him, because it’s another architectural masterpiece and probably took dozens of years to complete. It’s comprised of three main areas: a large expanse out front with a small tower, then a drawbridge which takes you to the castle proper, replete with living and bedrooms, and then a long stretch of building which actually crosses the river Cher. This last section houses long halls on the first and second levels of the structure, and servant’s quarters and kitchens below. The stores of the castle were actually replenished by boat, and the whole thing would have been extremely defensible in the event of attack given its independence from the land.

In contrast to Cheverny, Chenonceau was more open; Cheverny was massive, but only a few rooms on the first and second floors were open, and they were only the lavish rooms that the royalty would have inhabited. In Chenonceau you could visit practically every room in the castle, including the kitchens and servants’ areas. Our self-guided tour took us right up to closing time, and when we left we spent the rest of our time there in the gardens and hedge maze. The maze wasn’t extremely difficult; my guess is the last thing you want to do, if you’re a hedge maze designer, is make it so complicated the King gets lost.

In addition to the chateau tours, we also visited a few places that were quite interesting: a chocolaterie, and an underground mushroom farm.

The chocolaterie is just a few minutes from Blois, at Montrichard. It’s owned by a guy named Max Vauche, who is obviously quite high up in the chocolate business in France. The outlet was pretty small, but the chocolate was tasty and the designs were ornate. The tour was a little bit cheesy (odd, in a chocolate place) but nonetheless informative; it’s quite the process to make chocolate. The video portion of the tour showed off their investment plantation in some tiny island off the west coast of Africa. The cacao nut is about the size of a softball, but shaped more like a football. Inside are the actual beans, woven in a gummy tissue.. The beans are scooped out and poured into a pile where they’re covered with big leaves and left for three days to ferment; they’re then carted off to be dried on the ground somewhere else for a few more days. Pile them into fifty-pound bags and then they’re sold at the market at a government-regulated price. Interestingly, most people who harvest cacao don’t even know what chocolate tastes like, as the production of chocolate doesn’t form part of their economy. The Vauche plantation was quite innovative in bringing back some finished product to the people (or producing it on site, I can’t remember) so that the harvesters are actually cognisant of why they’re actually harvesting the nuts.

There’s a whole science in producing chocolate: how much sugar to add, keeping it at a constant thirty degrees celsius; pouring it into moulds and then letting it dry. I’d tell you more but the lady giving the tour started talking a bit more quickly as she realized she was running overtime and I was starting to get a bit tired from keeping up with her. Anyway, it seems the French know a thing or two about chocolate but I don’t think that’s much of a surprise to anyone. Ironically, we didn’t have time to buy any there, and a huge queue had formed, so it wasn’t until much later that we actually sampled some French chocolate from another supplier. Yes, it is good.

The Champognierie (mushroom farm) requires some explanation. All the chateaux in the area, all the city halls (a “Mairie”), big homes, etc., were built with a type of stone called Tuffault, which was mined from several areas around the Loire. In one area alone there are four hundred kilometers of tunnels that descend up to 250 metres. Eventually a law was passed when sections of pasture started collapsing that prohibited further mining operations. However, the mines have a few interesting properties: they have a high humidity, a constant temperature (regardless of the year) of twelve degrees celsius, and absence of sunlight: the perfect conditions for growing mushrooms, and storing wine. In fact, most wine storage facilities are called caves (their owners, cavists) and you can tour them and see thousands of bottles stacked one after the other in huge racks.

In this particular Champognierie (there are four like this in France) they concentrate on growing mushrooms that are a bit more difficult to grow and hence have a larger market value. The ones we’re accustomed to eating (white mushrooms and the brown-topped Cremini mushrooms) are grown in large greenhouses. The ones produced in the Champognierie are more exotic varieties such as Royal Blue, Oyster and Shittake, which sell mostly to higher-end restaurants.

In addition to the mushrooms, this particular Champognierie hosts a section of mines that has been transformed into an underground sculpture exhibition; started just after the second war, someone had the idea to use the mine as a site to showcase France’s village heritage. Various showpieces would be carved into the mine walls showing different aspects of the village: churches, the Mairie, pubs, a livery, etc. Apparently the project fell out of favour and ran out of money, and now only lately a single guy does it himself with no formal training. It’s quite stunning to see, even if you can’t go right up to something and walk around (there are plenty of barriers to keep grabby hands at bay).

Some time has gone by since I started writing this particular entry - the softening effects of the red wine of a couple of days has long since faded - but we’re still in the Loire valley, in Tours, after having gone through Chinon and Chenonceau in hopes of finding an opportunity to pick grapes during la vendage, or the autumn grape harvest. We’re finding it a bit difficult, as the various municipalities decide amongst themselves when their vendage will be, and owing to the hotter-than-usual summer, the latest word is that the harvest won’t start until the 20th, or pretty much the day we leave France for a jaunt over to Ireland to visit my family there. Maybe not this trip!

As I round off this entry I’ll leave you with a summary of thoughts about the Loire valley:

  • Wine is cheap

  • Chocolate is delicious

  • Driving is interesting

  • Life is good.


Amy and I celebrate our second anniversary tomorrow. Hope you are all enjoying the fall colours and are healthy and happy!

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