Cycling the Vineyards in the South of France

Outside Magazine October 2004

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A Jug of Wine (More Jugs of Wine) et Moi (cont.)


	La Belle Vie: left: Château de Massillan; right: St.-Rémy chocolatier Joel Durand (Elizabeth Zeschin)

WE TOOK TAXIS through the countryside to a bistro called Chez Bru, in Eygalières, a village built on the site of a neolithic settlement. Dinner was mostly à la carte, a three-hour affair of several courses, including a perfect thimble of foie gras, suckling pig in a translucent caramel sauce, an aromatic goat cheese called picadou, and a

Dinner was a three-hour affair, including foie gras, suckling pig, and a chocolate mousse, all escorted by the red wine Les Baux-de-provence.

chocolate mousse, everything escorted by a fruity red wine called Les Baux-de-Provence and other bottles from the nearby Domaine de Vallongue winery. Everyone sated, it was back through the herb-scented night to St.-Rémy.

The next morning, after prosciutto, goat-cheese omelettes, and croissants, the Dalmatian found his bike lined up with the others in a courtyard. The guides had left a foil-wrapped wedge of dark chocolate on our seats, and our squeeze bottles were filled with water and slices of lemon. As it turned out, the Dalmatian would need every calorie and every drop to tackle the afternoon's ride, which was short in distance but vast in punishment.

We pedaled a leisurely couple miles to St.-Paul-de-Mausolée, a mental asylum where Vincent van Gogh committed himself in 1889 for the most productive year of his suicide-shortened life. While we waited in the shade of a wisteria trellis for Mathilde, who would be our guide to St.-Paul, Wonderful World and the Dalmatian discussed how to smuggle home the seeds of this vine, considering then abandoning the idea of swallowing them before reaching customs. Mathilde led us around the public areas of the hospital, showing us the unchanged subjects van Gogh painted—the walled field, the hospital buildings, and the olive grove, where the mistral was beginning to toss around the limbs.

The Dalmatian was thinking about lunch when he heard the strains of some acoustic jazz that bore the flavor and cadence of Stefan Grapelli. This turned out to be a five-piece band led by the guitarist Coco Briaval and his brothers, who had shown up to entertain Group while we hunkered down on blocks of quarried granite and feasted on cheeses, breads, and salamis washed down with red Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

And then it was time to conquer Les Baux.



	Left: dallying at Lacoste's Café de Sade; right: Abbaye de Senanque (Elizabeth Zeschin)

Les Baux was once a fortress atop an outcrop in the Alpilles Range. It became the headquarters of medieval lords who made life hell for everyone else in Provence. After leading a trusting foursome of bikers around the circular main drag of St.-Rémy, looking for the right road, the Dalmatian stopped to ask directions. These turned out to be accurate but not true; they led to the shortest route instead of the scenic one plotted by the guides. Off we went, the blindest leading the blind. However, as if the Dalmatian were wearing a radio collar, J-Lo in his inevitable white van found us in time to prevent a tragic loss of scenery. He turned over the wheel to Libby so he could pedal with us to the summit.

The grade increased from acceptable to unfriendly as we wound upward through the hills. We stopped to buy cherries at a roadside stand from women whose faces lit up at J-Lo's apparently pleasing French-Canadian accent and his general brooding good looks. Pushing on, we had to slow down for a mini-parade bearing the Olympic torch and making its way toward St.-Rémy. The Dalmatian decided to practice Libby's advice about steep hills: "Don't think about what you're doing," she said. "Concentrate on something else. I think about the boys I've kissed."

The Dalmatian tried thinking about girls. But besides his wife's kiss, the other good ones were so long ago that the details of those lip locks had blurred. He decided instead to figure out how many teeth he had (27). And finally he stood on top, happy to be alive. The fast coast back down the hill to the hotel was almost worth the effort of climbing it, although the Dalmatian missed a turn and had to stop for directions, which were true but not accurate.

That night, the Dalmatian lay in bed lulled by the sighs of a sultry breeze as it slipped through the shutters. His pulse slowed, and his mind cleared. A long-forgotten state of consciousness began to take hold, something intimate and tangible, a certain serenity it took a while to identify.

One uniform by day, another by night, nicknames, hanging by the pool, a goofy je ne sais quoi, and a constant appetite triggered by open air and sport—just enough of a challenge to persuade even the most stoic of Puritans to embrace the pleasures of the table. Suddenly the Dalmatian remembered why it all seemed so familiar. This was summer camp!

As a Boy Scout, the Dalmatian reported to Montana's Camp Na'pi (named for the Blackfeet creator), next to Glacier National Park. Although his French safari was an adult affair concentrating on wine as much as sport, the banishment of pedestrian goals and life's ordinary hassles was very Na'pi-like in the sensibility it fostered.

The summer-camp state of mind seized the Dalmatian completely as the week meandered from one flawless day to the next. Boy camp always ended with awards. Grown-up camp in Provence was no different. Before our final dinner at the Château de Massillan, a 16th-century castle used as a hunting lodge by King Henry II and his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, Wonderful World was presented with a tiny white thong in recognition of her 60-mile ride—along with Working It Off and Le Choiseul—to the summit of Mont Ventoux. (This feat occurred when the Dalmatian was taking a day off in Mazan, feasting on daube, a beef stew served with spaghetti, at a local restaurant called St.-Germain, and afterwards failing to get some euros from a device he thought was an ATM but was actually a dispenser of DVDs.)

The Dalmatian's name was announced and his achievement lauded. This was his act of getting lost five minutes after the start of the trip, a new B&R record. The award was a small wheel of Camembert on a ribbon the Dalmatian proudly wore around his neck the rest of the evening.

The last supper moved from an asparagus salad to a luscious rack of lamb, then strawberries from the hotel garden marinated in olive oil, and wines from Gigondas and Rasteau, towns we biked through. The Dalmatian sat with Burgundy or Bust, the intense polylingual owner of an ad agency in Puerto Rico, and his wife, the Dante Piccante, an erudite psychologist who explained, over peach sorbet, the clinical definition of sadism.

When the Dalmatian woke up later between his lavender-scented sheets, he knew camp was over. But he wanted to extract the last possible taste of France. Padding across his room, he looked down three stories onto the château's courtyard and the pool and the Renaissance ghosts moving to and fro in the light of a full moon. Then he went to the minibar and got out his cheese.

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