Domaine de la Garreliere

Pascale Plouzeau in the tasting room of Domaine de la Garrelière.

Back in the summer London Bruno brought an interesting sparkling wine to one of the Claise Connexion apéro soirées. He'd got it from one of the sommelier Xavier Fortin's July wine festivals in Le Petit Pressigny, where wines up for selection in our local Michelin starred restaurant are showcased. It was a natural wine, made from a blend of cabernet franc and chenin blanc grapes. Not being a traditional wine for this area, by law it cannot be labelled with an appellation d'origine controlé, but can only be labelled as the lower status Vin de France. That seemed a shame, as it was an intriguing wine, and a very nice example of a winemaker just ploughing ahead and making the wine he thought was good rather than slavishly sticking to the traditions and rules of the appellation system. I was so impressed I made a note to go and visit the winery sometime.

Célestine outside the winery.

A few weeks later I got the perfect excuse to do so, as we received an enquiry for a tour from a chef and her wife. We asked them if they wanted to go somewhere a bit unusual, and off the beaten track, and help us by giving us some feedback on the experience. They were happy to oblige and of course we priced the tour accordingly.

The surrounding countryside (with some rather pongy melons middle distance).

I rang the winery and arranged a time. I strongly suspect Pascale, the owner, thought we would not turn up. When we arrived she was nowhere to be found, but eventually emerged from one of the barns. It took quite a while for her to warm to us, but finally we convinced her that we knew something about wine, the local area and liked much of what she was offering us. In the end, between us, we bought about 400 euros worth of wine.

These look like chenin blanc in the vineyard.

The sparkling wine I liked so much is called Milliard d'étoiles ('billion stars'). It's made from 40% chenin blanc, 40% cabernet franc from the current vintage and 20% of a still wine aged for a year in a barrel. It's bottled and left for a year to develop bubbles, then riddled by hand (which takes a month) before disgorging.

The bell adds a touch of gravitas I feel.

I also bought some reds: Les Rouge des Cornus, made from cabernet franc, 20 year old vines, fermented using natural yeasts and aged 6-8 months in concrete tanks; plus Gamay sans tra la la, from 40 year old vines, with quite a complicated fermentation process to produce something rounded and spicy.

Simon had severe truck envy when we discovered this in one of the outbuildings.

Vines have been grown at La Garrelière for three centuries. It's a low hill, not far from the historic town of Richelieu, in the Touraine AOC, surrounded by a mosaic of woods, truffle orchards, asparagus and melon fields, and cereal crops. The vineyard has been biodynamic since 1993. The very modern labels are designed by professional artists who are family members and friends.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

Brexit Interview

On the Wednesday before Brexit I got a call from a young journalist, Lisa Darrault. She was working for La Nouvelle République, our main local newspaper, and Xavier Roche-Bayard had given her my number. She wanted to talk to British nationals who resided permanently in France, to get their thoughts and feelings, now that Brexit was actually going to happen in just a couple of days.

I arranged with her to meet at Hotel de l'Esperance, opposite the Abbey in Preuilly. Then I emailed all my British contacts and asked if they would be available. I was very happy to get some positive responses and a few people who turned up unexpectedly. A couple of people, like Nicole, I particularly wanted to be there. Nicole is articulate and most importantly, has secondary and tertiary education aged children. I particularly wanted to get across to the journalist how the younger generation was going to be affected, and Nicole related her family's experience beautifully. Her family is typical in many ways, and I was very touched by her point that she and her husband are doing everything they can to mitigate the effect of Brexit on their children. Despite Brexit not even being a thing when they moved to France 15 years ago, they do not want their children to be disadvantaged by a decision their parents took years before. Nevertheless, time will tell how easy it will be for Nicole's children to study and work outside of France. The chances are that they will be passed over because, not being European, any application by them will involve more paperwork, because they no longer have the right to live and work anywhere in Europe -- only in France (and the UK, but they need to be careful about that too, as it could result in them no longer having the right to return to France if they are away too long).

I was also happy to see Alan present. He is one of the few Brexiteers that I know and I thought it was valuable that he was there to present the opposing view. In the end feelings ran very high and I asked him to leave, but personally I thought he was very brave to have turned up at all.

Kath, with her fluent French and background in European political studies; Jim, who wrote out several pages of useful notes; Pauline, who ensured the journalist knew that Britain was more than just England (and her homeland of Scotland is staunchly Remain); Dave, whose calm focus reined us in more than once and got us back on track; Simon, who has been a member of some of the more militant Remain Facebook groups over the past three years and had statistics at the ready; Richard, who spoke of his dream to live in France; and Alison, who has only been in France for a month. They all contributed to a lively couple of hours, rounding off the final day of the young journalist's contract with La Nouvelle République. Plus she spoke to London Bruno on the phone to get his views, as a Frenchman who has lived in the UK, on the issues. We all wondered how on earth she was going to whittle down what we said into an article.

In the end she did very well. She did choose to ignore the opposing views expressed by Alan, but I know she was interested to hear them, and it did give her some insight to the broader picture, I'm sure.

Thanks are due to Ginette, the landlady of l'Esperance, who allowed us, at short notice, to occupy her salon for two hours for nothing more than the price of a dozen or so coffees.

Here is a link to the article (in French), and another (in English) which is being hailed as the best overview from a Remainer to date.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

Creamy Cauliflower Soup

This is a simple soup, with few ingredients, that is much more delicious than you might think. Try it -- it is the very definition of unctuous. Forget all those ghastly cauliflower rice and cauliflower pizza base recipes you've been seeing on trendy recipe sites -- this is what you really want to be doing with cauliflower! Cauliflower, cream cheese, milk, smoked salt, spring onion, butter, parmesan -- mmmm savoury...

Cauliflower is a vegetable I often have to buy at the supermarket if I want one, rather than from my usual organic market garden. Cauliflowers just don't seem to thrive around Preuilly, but every now and then Les Jardins Vergers will give them a go so it's nice to have a delicious no fuss recipe to turn to once I've scored a local cauli.

Ingredients:
A cauliflower, cut into florets
A cup of water
2 tsp smoked salt
25 g butter
Olive oil
125 g cream cheese
1/2 cup milk
25 g parmesan cheese, grated
Chives, snipped

Method:

1. Put the cauliflower in a large heavy saucepan with a well fitting lid.
2. Add the water and bring to the boil.
3. Lower the heat and steam the cauliflower for 10 minutes.
4. Take the cauliflower off the heat and allow to cool for several minutes (do not drain).
5. Using an immersion blender puree the cauliflower.
6. Add the salt, butter, a drizzle of olive oil, cream cheese and milk. Continue to blend until everything is creamy and smooth.
7. Stir in the parmesan and chives. Serves 6.

Yum

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

White-throated Treecreeper

It's extraordinary to think that the White-throated Treecreeper Cormobates leucophaea, that lives in the eastern forests of Australia, is unrelated to the Northern Hemisphere treecreepers. Any birdwatcher spotting one of these, no matter where they were from, would immediately say 'treecreeper'!

These little brown birds like trees with rough bark, such as the River She-Oak Casuarina cunninghamiana we photographed them on at Uriarra Crossing, a popular picnic and wild swimming spot near Canberra. They have the most remarkable long toes which stick out at all angles and grip on to the tree. Up they hop, circling the trunk and poking into crevices, on the hunt for ants, their preferred food.

Young Germans at Play

On our wanderings in Navarre in September we came across a medieval ruin on top of a hill overlooking the Bahia de Hondarribiko. We were not alone. There was a couple of children with their grandparents, and a group of young Germans travelling in a VW campervan. They had a drone and were enjoying being young and virile and together on holiday.*

Susan

*What Susan means here is "being young, virile, antisocial, dangerous, illegal and annoying". IF you insist on taking your drone on holiday with you, learn the laws about not flying it 1 metre over people's heads in a public place, whilst standing on a historic monument with signs plastered all over it saying "do not climb".

As it was, we left what might have been an interesting visit after 3 minutes before I went into caped crusader mode and embarrassed Susan.

Simon

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

Silk Drapes for the Chapel

The Chapel of Saint Hubert at the Royal Chateau of Amboise.

Cloth of Gold, that fabled textile from the Middle Ages, has a long association with the city of Tours.

In 1495, twenty-five years before the royal camp that became known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the silk workers of Tours delivered to the King more than six aunes (nearly 7 metres) of Cloth of Gold embellished with fleurs de lys, for the new chapel constructed at the Chateau of Amboise.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

An Old House in Preuilly

The view you get from the neighbour's yard reveals that this house is older and less cohesively grand than its street side indicates. It follows the line of the old defensive town wall, and has very small simple window openings and signs of many alterations. The street side is smartly classical and 17th century.

No one except the neighbour who owns the garden I was standing in gets to see this view usually.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

Walking from Chambon

The Thursday 23 January walk was from Chambon. The weather was cold and frosty. I was the most bundled up of any walk recently. Along the way, French, English and Russian was to be heard spoken by the walkers.

Starting the walk in Chambon. I'm in the orange gloves on the left.

A village house in Chambon.

And its neighbour.

Chateau de Rouvray in the Creuse Valley.

A new terracotta tile roof on an old limestone barn. 

There are a lot of new roofs in Chambon, after a hail storm a few years ago. 

But one does wonder what the insurance assessor made of this particular arrangement.

A forest ride (track) in winter.

Two donkeys in a winter landscape, field beans the crop in the foreground.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

Wrangling Wood

This year has been difficult in terms of keeping up our supply of firewood. Our regular supplier has not had any available all winter, due to it being inaccessible to his heavy equipment in the wet weather. He dropped off half a stère early one morning, but subsequently, every time I rang, said he couldn't help. (A stère is more or less a cubic metre.)

Monsieur A delivers wood.

So then we turned to Le Bon Coin, where private individuals list stuff of all sorts that they have for sale. I contacted a young man from Lésigny and he brought over what he said was three stères, but looked to me more like two stères. But it was dry, so I paid up and said nothing.

5 cubic metres of firewood, a mixture of oak and hornbeam, and cut to 50 centimetres long.

Quickly the two stères was used up, so just before Christmas I rang Nicolas, the brother of a friend. He'd supplied us with wood once before, but I'd already spoken to him earlier in the winter and he'd said he couldn't take on another client. Nevertheless, with me pointing out it was coming up to Christmas, and any other pitiful tale I could think of to sway him, I finally succeeded in him agreeing to deliver three stères. I was very grateful, because we could genuinely have had a miserable Christmas if he hadn't been generous. I gave him some nice red. 

 I tackle the pile, which needs to be stacked neatly in the garage.

I mentioned our firewood struggles to my friend Alan, who I volunteer with at the local food bank. He suggested I phone Monsieur G as he had heard he had wood. I did that and Monsieur G said that he didn't have enough to supply me, but 'not to worry, I could rely on him, he would phone around and find someone'. And he did. He told me to phone Monsieur A and say I was referred by him.

 Stacking the wood in the garage.

Monsieur A said he could deliver a minimum of five stères and would come and have a look at our driveway to check that his tractor and trailor rig would get up it. He rang me while I was at the ophthalmologists, apologised profusely when he realised, then rang again the next evening to say he would deliver on Wednesday morning around 9am.

The pile when we went for lunch.

Wednesday was fine and frosty, perfect for a wood delivery. Monsieur A reversed carefully down the drive and tipped out his neatly stacked wood on to the ground into an untidy pile. It was a nice mix of oak and hornbeam, good and dry.

Simon and I were getting over a bout of bronchitis, so the thought of moving and stacking five stères of wood didn't sound like the ideal way to spend our day. But needs must. We worked in half hour bursts, with 10 minute breaks. There was a good deal of huffing and puffing, and nose blowing. Then we took a two hour lunch break. After lunch another round of hauling and stacking, for an hour. Then I had an appointment with my GP. Finally, at 4pm I was back, and we finished off the last little bit. Phew! Exhausting. 

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

Crepes

Every year in late February our walking club hosts a public subscription walk which finishes by serving the walkers crêpes. Members of the club are asked to contribute by making dozens of crêpes. French families spend 2 February together making crêpes for Candlemas (Fr. La Chandeleur) and they are a universally popular dessert or seasonal snack here.

If you live in rural France or have school aged children in France one of your required life skills is to be capable of making crêpes. They are one of the most popular devices for club or association fundraising. Once you volunteer to make crêpes you'll be issued with flour and milk, but no other instructions apart from how many to make (and maybe 'leave them plain -- don't sprinkle them with sugar!'). I used a scaled up version of Delia's recipe (as did at least one other British volunteer).

Ingredients (for 46 crêpes)

660 g flour
1/2 tsp salt
12 eggs
1200 ml milk
450 ml water
250 g melted butter (plus some extra for greasing the pan)

Method

1. Allow 3 hours to make this quantity of crêpes.
2. Put all the ingredients in a stand mixer bowl and whisk until you have a smooth batter. Start on a slow speed and work up to medium.
3. Put the batter in the fridge to chill for 30 minutes.
4. Set up a work station on the stove, with crêpe pan on the left and batter on the right if you are right handed.
5. Heat the crêpe pan on a medium flame and brush with a little butter.
6. Lift the pan and pour a scant soup ladle full of batter into the pan, turning the pan to swirl the batter thinly over the entire surface (I find turning clockwise works best). Stop pouring batter once you have enough to cover the pan. The idea is to get them as thin as is practical.
7. Cook until set and will shake loose.
8. Lift the pan and ease the crêpe over the edge of the pan opposite the handle. Quickly flip the crêpe by flicking your wrist forward and up, catching the crêpe on its way down.
9. Gently smooth out any folds and cook until the second side is starting to brown.
10. Slide the crêpe off the pan and on to a plate. The crêpes can be stacked directly on top of one another.
11. Repeat 45 times, or until you've used all the batter.
12. Serve, reheated in batches in the microwave, on a plate and under some paper towel. They can be sprinkled with sugar (with or without lemon) or spread with jam or chocolate and/or nut paste, folded into quarters.

My crêpe pan is a cheap 24 cm diameter non-stick version from the supermarket. It works very well.

The flour and UHT milk (this is France, so milk is a storecupboard ingredient, not a fresh product for consuming on its own) came from the village EpiService (corner store). The eggs came from a local farm. 

Yum

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

A Sad Australia Day

After bushfires have killed an estimated billion wild vertebrates in Australia I thought an appropriate Australia Day post would be to publish some of our photo archive of Australian native fauna.

Eastern Grey Kangaroos in a cattle paddock on the Darling Downs, Queensland.

Brush-tailed Possum in Brayshaw's Shepherd Hut, Namadgi National Park, 

Australian Capital Territory.

Crimson Rosella, on a verandah rail.

Emus on the roadside, west of Thallon, Queensland.

Koala in a Eucalyptus tree in a paddock on the Darling Downs, Queensland.

Koala mother and baby in a Melaleuca tree in my parents' garden, Darling Downs, Queensland.

Lace Monitor (known colloquially as goannas), up an Ironbark Eucalyptus tree, 

Darling Downs, Queensland. Australia is a land of reptiles.

Tawny Frogmouth sitting in a Eucalyptus tree, Canberra.

Eastern Water Dragon, at the Australian National Botanical Gardens, Canberra.

Common Wombat, on the side of the road in the Australian Capital Territory.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

Burg Gutenberg

Burg Gutenberg, in the town of Balzers in Liechtenstein, is one of only two surviving castles in the principality. These days it is a museum open to the public, rather than a princely private residence. It sits on a hill in the middle of town.

The hill has been occupied since prehistoric times, but the castle only appeared in the 13th century. The castle itself began life as a church with a cemetery, but over time the church became fortified and the cemetery disappeared. By the 14th century it was in the hands of the Habsburgs and used to guard their territory against the nearby Swiss independent cantons.

Maximilian I gave it an overhaul after the Swabian War in 1499, but by the middle of the 17th century it was just a princely residence with no military function. It suffered a number of fires and building materials were salvaged by the townsfolk and used throughout the town. Finally, in the 19th century it was purchased by Princess Franziska von Liechtenstein.

Early in the 20th century it was acquired by a well regarded local architect who restored and enhanced the complex. After his death the town used the castle as an events venue and eventually as a museum. 

We stopped off to photograph it on our way to Switzerland, when we deliberately drove out of our way to take in Liechtenstein on our route.

 

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

Girl Power at the Chateau of Candé

A little known fact about the Chateau of Candé is that it was briefly home to a girls' school.

The view from the terrace of the Chateau de Candé.

Charlotte Claire Spitz was the second wife of Santiago Drake del Castillo, the anglo-spanish planter who owned the Chateau de Candé from 1853 to 1871. He doubled the size of the chateau to what we see today, and she founded a girls' school, primarily for those who lived too far from the town.

The back of the chateau.

Situated in one wing of the chapel, Charlotte designed the curriculum herself. Girls could do a dressmaking apprenticeship, cooking and tasks associated with the natural resources around them on the land. It was an instant success, and local families were enthusiastic supporters, because the teaching reflected the reality of life on the land. The school gained professional accreditation from the education authorities and was able to offer well regarded qualifications.

Sixty students attended.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos.