Wine Tasting on Bikes

This summer has been hot. I mean really hot. By my count, we've had twenty days over 100 degrees since June. But it wasn't the kind of heat wave where the nights never cool down. Most nights eventually dropped into the 60s. You could open the windows. But it was too late. The stone had already warmed up. The sun hasn’t let up. Day after day, blazing, the stone can’t keep up.

Now the entire valley is worn out. I have watched storm after storm miraculously split and avoid our area time and time again. Even when the weather map says it is raining here, it isn’t. It is just too dry for the raindrops to make it all the way to the ground.

As we near the end of August, everything looks tired. The grass has been brown for weeks. The hydrangeas are hanging on out of spite. Even some of the big trees have that dusty, exhausted look they usually don't get until much later in the year. The rivers are low. The whole valley seems like it has spent the summer waiting for relief that never came.

The people, especially those without AC, look like they are done. I come out most mornings after a good night’s sleep in the AC and say “Howdy” to Pascal. He just mutters something indistinguishable. He doesn’t have air conditioning.

Except for the vineyards. That's the part I can't get over.

Drive up onto the hills and everything around them is cooked brown. The grass between the rows is dead. The roadsides are dusty. But the vines look like they didn't get the memo. They're still thick and bright green.

They don't irrigate the vineyards in this part of France. I wonder how far down those roots go, but they are obviously finding water somewhere.

I have no idea what the wine is going to taste like this year. But I have a feeling this year's wine is going to be killer.

Yesterday it finally felt like the Loire Valley again. Seventy-eight degrees was a godsend.

But last week, I was driving around with the dogs looking for somewhere new to throw a ball. It was already in the low 80s around 7:30 in the morning after getting up to 106 the day before.

They love to run through vineyards, and they are everywhere around here. The cool thing is that no one seems to care if we take the dogs in them. Maybe it is our contribution to terroir.

Not far from the house, I took a right onto a road I was fairly certain would take me to a vineyard I knew of. I passed a restaurant called Le Bousquet Grill, drove another hundred yards and suddenly found myself surrounded by vines.

I kept going.

The road got steeper and rockier until I decided this was a terrible place to turn two Golden Retrievers loose with a tennis ball.

Everything except the vines looked cooked. The grass along the road was brown and brittle after weeks of heat, but the vines climbing the hill were still ridiculously green. Nobody irrigates vineyards around here. Whatever water those vines were living on, they were finding it a hell of a lot farther down than the grass was.

I headed back down to the main road. I knew there was another road somewhere down a little bit more that would head up the hill to where tons more vineyards sat and would loop back toward our house. I found it a couple hundred yards ahead and banged another right.

Climbing up the hill on a road that seemed impossible for two cars to pass each other. So the climb was a little slower.

We got to the top and were surrounded by vineyards on either side of the road. At the top there was a sign for the little sub-commune.

La Bruyère.

I knew that name. It was on the label of one of my favorite local Sauvignons. I didn't know it was a place.

I turned right at the sign and drove another hundred yards. Then I recognized where I was. I was at the top of the road that led back down to our house.

Are you kidding me?

I'd been buying this wine without realizing the grapes were growing essentially behind my house.

I went home and told my Denise the news.

She rarely drinks white wine. She prefers red. Maybe a rosé if it is really hot. But not long ago she asked me what I was drinking. She poured herself a glass. Not long later we were eating and she looked over at me and said “man, this is really good. You know me, I don’t drink white that often.” Damn, I thought. Now you're drinking my wine too.

I crack myself up.

So I looked it up and told her that the wine was somewhere around here. Probably within 5 or 10 miles from the house.

We had two friends staying with us because the rental they have has no ac. We offered up the gite so they didn’t suffer for three days.

The husband, Monty, is a good guy. Ex-marine pilot who likes to exercise. So I walked over to him and asked him if he wanted to go for a bike ride tomorrow. There is a winery nearby that I want to check out. He was totally down with that.

I got up the next morning and an idea popped into my head. Maybe we do some more wine tasting than just the one today. Sure, I wanted to taste at the winery in La Bruyère, but maybe that would be a good starting place.

We own two e-bikes, and there are vineyards and wineries in almost every direction from our house. In my head, I could already see the day. We'd ride along quiet country roads, stop at a winery or two, try some wine, maybe find some stars and eventually wander into Montrichard for the Friday market.

It was becoming a pretty good plan.

We headed toward Le Bousquet, a little local grill up in the vineyards that's only open during the warmer half of the year. Both of us wanted to ride up and see what the menu posted out front was all about.

I'd driven that road plenty of times, but I guess I never paid attention to it. The road starts climbing almost as soon as you turn onto it. In a car, easy. On a bicycle, even an electric one, I suddenly had a much greater appreciation for the grade.

Most of my bike riding around here is along the Cher, where I can ride for miles without encountering much of anything that qualifies as a hill.

We looked at the menu. “We should check this place out,” I said to Monty. We headed back down to the main road.

The next turn led toward La Bruyère. It went almost straight up.

I had begun the morning with noble intentions about conserving the battery. There was an Eco setting. I would use that. We had all day.

Forget Eco. It was hot, the hill was kicking my butt and I was riding with an ex-Marine pilot. I quietly slapped the bike into high boost and tried not to let Monty know how hard I was working or how much assistance I was borrowing from the motor.

It wasn’t exactly a competition, mostly because I hadn’t told him we were having one.

We reached the top and rode over to wine the facility I noticed the last time I was up here. .

I've probably tasted wine at hundreds of wineries over the years between Sonoma, Napa, Paso, the yummy Santa Rita Hills and anywhere else they grow grapes in California. But not…Temecula.

The arrangement is usually pretty straightforward. You see vines, winery buildings, tanks and people? There’s wine nearby.

In our part of France, it's usually pretty informal. You wander in, the owner/winemaker or somebody appears, and before long you're standing around tasting wine with the people who have been making it for years. Sometimes generations.

This place had vines. It had tanks. It had tractors, pallets, agricultural equipment and several men working. Perfect. The tasting room had to be around here somewhere.

We walked in. I could practically hear the needle scratching. Every head in the place snapped around. Nobody had the friendly welcoming expression of someone looking to sell you some wine.

Their expressions were closer to: What are you two doing here? I tried to explain that we'd come to taste wine.

Someone found the guy in charge.

My French was insufficient to explain why two sweaty guys, obviously American, had wandered into his agricultural operation. His English wasn't much better, and the longer we talked, the more concerned he seemed about why we were there.

We stood there looking at each other, each of us apparently waiting for the other to explain what the hell was happening.

Eventually we got on the same page. Yes, there are grapes here. But the wine wasn’t. They bring the grapes into Amboise to make the wine. Some big French wine conglomerate had bought all these vineyards. Now they press, bottle and taste everything over there.

I told him I was sorry we had barged in on his team, gave one more look to see if I could spy any wine and headed out.

Butch Cassidy and the Sauvignon Kid were back on the road without having tasted any wine.

I pulled out my phone to see where the nearest winery was. It was about a mile away. We headed that way.

Like most back roads in this area, this one was narrow, somehow meant for two-way traffic, with a tractor liable to appear at any moment. The road curled around toward the west. More vineyards. But I couldn’t admire them too much, the roads weren’t in great shape.

They aren’t made to be scenic. This isn't a wine resort. It's farmland. Somehow these little roads pull it off anyway.

We rolled up to the winery and headed inside. We met Charlotte, the daughter of the winemaker. She asked us what we were up for.

“Everything,” Monty said.

Well, okay then, I thought. I guess it's going to be one of those days.

She started pouring.

By the third Sauvignon, I was hooked. It was delicious. Charlotte moved us on to their Gamay, a tasty red just begging to be chilled, and followed that with two different Côts.

“We should get rolling,” I told Charlotte. “But I would like five of that third Sauvignon, and one of the Gamay too please”.

She smiled and said, “of course.”

We said goodbye and wished her well.

Walking back outside, I was carrying the box of wine when I suddenly remembered something. We were on bikes. Balls.

Monty looked at me. “What are you going to do with that?” pointing at the case of wine.

Spying the backpack he brought with him for some reason, I nodded his way. “Dude, mind if I put these in there?”

He gave me a look I wasn't entirely comfortable with.

“Come on, man. No more uphill rides. Besides, these are electric bikes.”

He agreed. I pulled the bottles out of the box and carefully loaded them into his backpack. I assured him that if it got too heavy, I'd wear it for him.

We decided to head toward Montrichard before the Friday market closed. The easiest way would have been to drop back down toward the Cher and follow the river. It's about five miles and almost completely flat.

We didn't do that. We decided to stay up along the ridge and work our way toward Montrichard through the vineyards.

It was prettier up there. It was also almost entirely in the sun.

After a while I could tell Monty was getting uncomfortable. The backpack was sitting directly against his back, and six bottles of wine were beginning to feel considerably more substantial than they had when I was putting them in there.

Finally he said something.

“Dude, this thing's getting heavy. I'm sweating. My back's soaking wet.”

Fair enough. I could see some trees up ahead.

“Let's pull over there and take a look at it.”

We stopped in the shade and I opened the backpack. I had, after all, promised to carry it if it got too heavy.

Instead, I reached inside and pulled out the Gamay.

“I have a better idea. Let's lighten the load.”

Monty looked at the bottle.

“How are you going to open it?”

Good question.

I started rummaging through the saddlebag on the bike. Allen wrench. A couple of tools. Whatever else had accumulated in there.

And then I found it. A cheap little wine opener. Always a Boy Scout.

We opened the Gamay.

We sat down under the trees and looked out across the valley.

The Cher isn't much of a river, at least not to look at. It's narrow and quiet and from where we were sitting you could barely see it at all. But you could see what it had done.

The land dropped away below us into the trees and little villages along the river, then climbed all the way back up the other side. I could see Montrichard and Bourré below us, the hills rising beyond them toward Pontlevoy and Thésée, and vineyards scattered across the opposite ridge. It is one of those views that makes you stop talking for a minute.

I'd been looking at this landscape since we moved here, but sitting there I started thinking about when I first fell in love with wine country.

Our dear friends Randy and Maria used to let us stay at the house on their vineyard in Dry Creek. Those were magnificent times for us. The Goldens we had then were free to roam the vineyard.

Driving around the area back then, we never wanted to leave. We would always say to each other, “Wouldn't it be great to live somewhere like this?”

The truth is, there is something about living near vineyards that is just as calming as living near water to me.

Monty looked over.

“Hey, you done with that?”

I handed him back the Gamay.

Now, the wine was gone.

“You know, we still have to go to Montrichard.”

Monty looked at me.

“Yeah. And I still have five bottles of wine in my backpack.”

Good point.

We were already halfway there, but we were still up on the ridge, it was getting hotter, and everything we bought at the market would have to come back with us on the bikes. There was also the minor issue that we'd just been sitting under a tree drinking a bottle of Gamay.

Suddenly riding home, dropping off the bikes and driving to the market seemed like an exceptionally responsible decision. So that's what we did.

We came rolling back up driveway feeling pretty pleased with ourselves. We'd ridden through the vineyards, found a winery, tasted six wines, bought six bottles and, through careful planning, reduced the weight of our cargo by one.

The girls were outside. They did not appear equally pleased.

“What happened to the market?”

I explained that we'd decided to come home, drop off the wine and take the car over to Montrichard to get everything for dinner.

They looked at us. Then they looked at the bikes. Then at the wine.

“No. We'll go to the market.”

Okay then.