France by Bicycle | PART 13: BLAYE

We leave our gracious host in Mortagne-sur-Gironde and head further inland along the Canal des Deux Mers, or the Canal of the Two Seas. Our goal is Bordeaux, and soon we find ourselves riding into the western edge of the gorgeous wine-growing region of the same name. But we are slowed by the serpentine path along the myriad canals of the Gironde Estuary and then by the charms of the town of Blaye, where we run into a fellow traveler who is backpacking the Camino de Santiago. In Blaye we also stumble into an incredible wine tour. Little did we know that we were in the heart of a major wine producing village, and we get an education and some welcome entertainment from the south African host, Leslie. We will never see (or taste) wine in the same way!

Music:

Accordion and Glockenspiel Comedy – JK Productions
Pond Five
081716572-accordion-and-glockenspiel-com
a href=”https://www.pond5.com/royalty-free-music/item/81716572-accordion-and-glockenspiel-comedy-short-version”Stock Music/a provided by JK_Production, from a href=“https://www.pond5.com/”Pond5/a

Parisian Cafe – Aaron Kenny
YouTube Audio Library

The Nymphaeum Part III – Angelwing
https://www.freemusicpublicdomain.com/royalty-free-new-age-music/

Eric La Garenne au Zèbre de Belleville

It’s nice to have that freedom isn’t it it’s nice but sometimes it’s scary yes yes yes too much freedom Thank you So as it turns out our host is a singer of sorts Eric there he is out there he’s a very friendly guy he got his reservations last night to an excellent to an excellent restaurant I had the Canard and it was magnificent and Juliana had a pizza with a smoked duck

And mozzarella and shiver of cheese and honey and oregano yeah it was incredible it was magnificent yeah first up at the boulangerie was that it no it’s right up here good morning good morning or good afternoon how y’all doing out there we are in the Bordeaux region I’d say officially very

Pretty woke up to a gray morning it’s nice and cool and pleasant and Lush had a great room with a great host a shun tour kitty cat all right never mind okay we can try this again good morning or good afternoon good morning great place to stay last night yeah points

Very clean nice nice people the guy there who is a shunt tour and gave us a CD I love it and found us in town after we had checked out and we stopped through the garage and found us outside the lingerie and gave us a CD said How nice of him to just leave his home with CD in hand in search of us to give that to us as a souvenir and it’s a gray morning and a beautiful landscape we’re in the Bordeaux Country Now the wine is very we’re loving life oh and uh this morning uh well last

Night Juliana’s derailleur uh front deraille I’ve got a little Jack so this morning we did a little youtubing and figured out how to fix it and together we did something we thought we couldn’t do and we’re very scared to do but um successfully solved the problem so her bike is now all systems

Go we’re on our way to Bordeaux we won’t make it tonight but yeah it’s all good you know it’s all good all good all right here we go happy trails So we set off to explore the Bordeaux Countryside with croissants in our bellies and a song in our heart our favorite riding temperatures well it must be like 65 overcast no wind gorgeous hey fellas no no Here we go we stumbled upon the Le Canal desmir abelo to believe is the route that’s going to take us all the way to the Mediterranean along the canal do midi and along the canal de girls for sure kind of odd wasn’t it so maybe that guy was like a Fisher like

This guy possibly yeah look at that oh I wonder if these canals are all fresh water or if they’re partly salt since that area is all an estuary yeah we’re close enough to the oceans where these cookies they rise and fall so that suggests hide

So I would think it’s salt water or it could be for breakfast brackish I’m thinking yeah we were now heading Southeast across the narrowest part of France from the Garand Estuary of the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea along the canal de dumere or the canal of the two Seas

There are actually two canals that connect the bodies of water the canal dugaron and the more famous canal dumidi a world heritage site and while we are now following the Estuary not a canal the bike route of the same name started back in royan and stretches some 380

Miles to set on the Mediterranean Coast Hello a little cold quality a little single track going here a little single track to keep us kind of guessing I’m starting to pull out of these open planes get Inland a little bit both are feeling a little tired probably from yesterday it’s a long day yesterday a lot of climbing today’s not that long hoping to get to a bike shop 10 15 miles away it’s farther than that isn’t it no

I think it’s about uh 12 or 15 more despite our best intentions this morning at a simple repair Juliana’s front derailleur on her new bike was again acting up we chalked it up to it being a new bike and needing an adjustment to accommodate the stretching cables

We located a bike shop in the village of Bly and we headed in that direction don’t he suppose all this is over here yeah Rosemary great picker I don’t know let’s check it out we are harvesting grapes Back end up whatever’s there was some damage to lines here fascinating it’s harvest time these have all been harvested it looks like these are all kind of stripped clean and these probably have not heading into blade which is where the bike shop is possibly where we’ll spend

The night we’ll see a nice little bike path kind of out here in the middle of nowhere Grapes grapes everywhere we’re definitely in the Bordeaux region now Foreign looked to be in blay now blay or Bligh or not sure how you’d pronounce it but probably blay let’s hope for the best with the bike shop hopefully they can get Juliana’s derailleur fixed we fixed it pretty well this morning but it seemed to slip out of place again still

Feels like it really needs a a good bike repair a good expert to take a look at it all right it’s a really good sized little town here Bly we found the bike shop fixed Juliana’s bike and then met a fellow traveler at a nearby cafe Olivia

My name is Juliana and this is Roland nice to meet you we just happened upon this lovely lady and he’s got this big backpack and Hiking pool I’m doing pilgrimage yes yes nice Spain yeah and uh it’s a beautiful experience sometimes hard oh I bet I

Grew From the loneliness and I ate with a lot of people yeah very good people French people yeah it’s very I didn’t have to explain that it’s very intense yes real very real and people take they bear their soul yeah really yes they open up yes and that’s why it’s

Very intense so you’re so friendly they’re very easy to talk to I think so I could see people doing that with me okay how long how long have you been on the road I think 20 days in no time yeah it runs together huh yeah so when you hike how like when you

Leave tomorrow will you be living with other people or just yourself I meet other Hillary once you get on the trail there’s other people doing the same thing all right so yeah sometimes we meet up with them yeah where did you start yeah yes we were we were through there a week

Or two ago or something I live in Paris right I’m from right I see yes and the town that you’re going to in Spain is uh I don’t know if I really go to sanjack Santiago I’m sure I am going to uh but after I didn’t know

Right I will think it’s nice to have that freedom isn’t it it’s nice that sometimes it’s scary yes yes yes too much freedom congratulations I think thank you so much it’s so nice to meet you very nice meeting you Olivia Thank you safe travels thank you and as we say in America happy trails is that a room in this lovely little town it’s beautiful beautiful Parisian room so romantic so feminine after checking into our room we stumbled onto a wine tour led by the most entertaining host and a real connoisseur

So these have already been pressed yeah hahaha I agree okay so um and the weight of the grapes against one another causes the juice juice to slowly descend that’s the most gentle way of getting the juice out of the grapes and grapes don’t like rough treatment

So do people really crush it with their feet well there are few primitive regions in the world where they might still be doing that but it’s mostly not that anywhere anymore the horse is a copy of the original of our label you will see the original

In the next building we’re going to see it the only as young as the woman you feel yeah So this was the press that they do the um the skins in yeah okay yeah we’re not gonna oh you’re ready the real story is that in the old days um metal goblins so they would whack the one their metals of it against the host metal goblet so that some of their one

Went into the host class and he drank they knew they weren’t being poisoned break the glass you win yeah so what you did was you went is he poisoning me yeah look into the eyes because I asked give away everything okay that’s how they do that’s how it all started but the

Australians keep which is perfect an American that is uh they asked the temperature down here which is completely natural all year round it’s 60 degrees Fahrenheit right um so what we do is we buy the ones we put them in their Cellars they own the sellers so we don’t own them anymore

And when they’re ready to go we ship them anybody here support brexit yeah no we don’t talk about quality but it was a lose lose for for the UK and for and for and for Europe yeah there’s no politics [Laughter] to go away with maybe stuff to know about French one before

So we can’t one of the Vans it’s forbidden it’s not a lot of irrigation okay so what uh happens in France is every year is different from every other year because everything depends on nature and when Nature performs perfectly then we have an exceptional yoga and those

Are the ones to buy they’re bit more expensive those are the best then you get it when Nature’s okay but not perfect but classically good use which also okay and then you get difficult years what’s the difficult year well difficult year we call it a difficult

Year because every year we have a baby Our Vintage and you never call your child bad you might call your child difficult it’s a difficult you know it’s bad and don’t buy those okay um so this guy this one is typifies a bit of that because it’s the most

Expensive work one that you can buy which is 120 euros which is hardly in the scale of one a fortune but it’s magnificent so he makes three every year and he makes this only in an exceptional year and he picks the grapes by hand from 88 acres or 33 hectares

By hand he makes 1500 bottles only and he had 700 bottles left I bought all 700 that were left to cut a long story short it’s magnificent I will give you a taste um and the other thing that this bottle illustrates is a word called terroir t-e-r-r-o-i-r have

You heard of that it is that one word English translation it means the soil it means the climate it means um slope and the wine maker all rolled into one and this we say is the expression of the terroir the expression of all those things you find for example on the 45th

Parallel some of the greatest shatter in the world are on the 45th parallel um whether they know Argentina South Africa France California you very rarely get a great wine maker a good marketer with a sense of humor in the same man and uh so the bottle is quite risque you

Can see it’s a woman’s tools more strategically placed and underneath he says from the Earth’s Own erogenous Zone okay is there a right way of serving a red wine okay if the wine is Young if you leave it for an hour or even two hours it’s going to improve a lot okay because

It’ll oxygenate it’ll round out it still goes like a teenager when we get older and mature we should be more elegant we should be we should be I’m saying doesn’t always work but so a young one is gauche it’s not fully formed what would you consider Young from the date

Of present ah okay you see well in America they make wines to drink very early some uh sometimes like two two years for example it depends on the wine is the answer yeah so some wines are made to drink young someone’s a major drink uh um older you know Wine’s also a

Bit of magic okay there’s you can’t explain everything it’s a bit of magic um and essentially nature makes the one the one maker uh is simply Nature’s assistant I think the winemakers having with these are different flavor of the wines now with the different climate conditions um is that in Kent England or

Even making beautiful Reds yeah okay which would have been unheard of like 15 years ago yeah and well the challenges that are being met so what’s this you’ve graded all of the wines of classification and that’s something you’ve done personally yes well no French person was going to do it because

They would have they were afraid of the pushback um okay let’s go and taste the 218 guys [Applause] and I love that he’s a fan of the citrons Rubbish overseas and keep the best stuff for themselves which is nice every bottle is homogeneous yeah it was exactly the same it’s more of a labor of love yeah I mean I’m passionate about one and cause and one woman yeah in music and that was the view from the

Window and the and the reflections and she made that into um and then that’s the same guy that did that of course for the label and he did that as a bit of fun I mean his Works usually sell for about twenty thousand a pop at the least yeah you see when you’re

Married to an artist right she manages to capture you at your best someone described that to me as this looks like you’re just about to go in for an autopsy I think it’s the worst photo of me that I’ve ever seen some place Thank you for this wonderful tour yes you’re quite the uh quite the Entertainer as well in France they say con Levine when the wine is poured it must be drunk They wanted