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Destination Information for France



Review : France

A fine wine list crowns valley of the kings
From the Mail on Sunday
The caves are dank and dark. They smell of old wines and new sweat. Into them, cyclists, garbed like spacemen, suddenly whizz or wobble. Four thousand of them - more Dad's Army than Tour de France with Darby and Joan on tandems, too - are out on the Loire Valley's autumnal ride.
'Sixty kilometres this morning,' gasps one old codger, white hair ballooning out of his ludicrously dazzling blue space helmet. 'This our second stop. The first was, of course, for mushrooms in the caves of the troglodytes.' This bizarre scene feels somewhat further away than the five-hour smooth Eurostar and TGV run from Waterloo.
Wine is the top product of the lovely Loire; cave-grown mushrooms are the next. The caves where I had stopped were in Saumur, beneath the most beautiful of all the area's 500 chateaux. These are 'caves' the labyrinthine chalk-hewn cellars of Bouvet Laduby, producers of fizzy wines, white, rose and red. They are entertaining the cyclist hordes who totter off, bearing dozens of wines they've bought at the subsequent tastings.
I love the Loire. It's so handy and there is so much to see. And I know its wines from Nantes up to Sancerre, from Gros Plant and Muscadet-sur-Lie (always better than plain Muscadet) past the gentle reds of Chinon and Saumur, on past delicious Pouilly and the mixed blessings of Sancerre.
For too long I had dismissed Tours as too large a block across the Loire en route to vineyards, villages and forests. But this time it yielded up pretty secrets. Plus a top-class restaurant. Of its 280,000 citizens, one in 10 is a student. These bring a buzz. The locals speak, they claim, the purest French in the world. So foreign youth flocks in to study and to lark about.
Opposite a stark new university block spreads a warren of medieval streets around the charming Place Plumereau; cobbled lanes, half-timbered, lurching houses of tiny red bricks with outside stairwells encased in rosy, tottering towers.
Round the 16th-century square are classy shops behind Dickensian windows, an 18th Century building with a galleried Italianate top floor and a pub called Au Bureau so persons therein downing the Touraine wines can truthfully tell their partners that they are 'still at the office'.
Nearby stand the ruins of the colossal cathedral. Its two towers are beautifully lit by the man who does the Eiffel Tower. Here are the stumps of the old Roman city. The remaining cathedral is a fine building, with 300 years in construction from the 13th to the 16th Centuries. It illustrates all three styles; Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance. Its two western towers are not exact twins. Its eastern windows are glorious.
Hither in the Fourth Century rode Saint Martin, then a Roman Legionary, who, giving half his cloak to a freezing beggar, learned in a dream that night that the beggar was Christ. Martin busily Christianised the area, 700 years before the Normans started to civilise England.
For the inner man there lurks in the city the double-Michelin-Rosetted Jean Bardet, a grand merchant's mansion lavishly done up and commanded by a stern Madame with her two scuttling spaniels. A fabulous five-course dinner was here consumed over four leisurely hours for some £40 a head. Good meals need pauses. Bardet is mad about old-fashioned vegetables, has a splendid kitchen garden and his vegetarian menu looked delicious.
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