And here is the last stage of our journey in Burgundy. If you missed the first stage, you can find it here, and the second one here.
Dijon, the last visit to classic Burgundy: a wonderful place to live. It gives you the feeling of being unchanged in time and space. It's a shame to have to leave, to have to exit from this magic.
But if Dijon is a wonderful place to live, on the road that would take us to Chablis, we visited the perfect place to die: the Abbey of Fontenay, I repeat:
Man cannot live by wine alone, nor his spirit.
Fontenay gives you the material proof.
You find yourself catapulted into a nearly cinematic reality that takes your breath away. Everything is absolutely in order, in its place. The lawns are perfect, the walls intact and clean, the ponds, the fountains, the church with its earthen and stone floor, just as it was in the past, but perfect, not a pebble out of place.
Even here I have seen them pass by, fleetingly, the Unicorns. Who knows if they rest at night in those beautiful stables…
A brief stop to recharge the spirit, a lunch in the camper in front of the Abbey and then we arrive in Chablis, another destination full of great expectations.
We are almost at the end of our journey, after Chablis there is only the Côte des Bar, because having come this far, it seemed wrong not to make a detour to Champagne!
But Chablis was not supposed to be and has not been just a stopover. Chablis is Chablis.
Here perhaps, in the clearest way, I truly realized the substantial difference between the various Crus. It may be because the territory is smaller, it may be because it is spatially more understandable.
We have the village, we have the river, we have the Serein river. Then you cross it and magically find yourself in front of the Grand Cru hill!
An exciting show
It's all there, within reach. The Grand Crus are all right in front of you. Everything else around is divided among Premier Cru, Chablis, and Petit Chablis, but the Grand Crus are just there, on the same hill, with the exact same southern exposure, facing the Serein. It's all so easy and understandable when you visit the places and observe them with your own eyes.
Chablis was like a bolt from the blue for me, much more than Beaune and all those wonderful little towns that are all the same around Côte-d'Or, all at the foot of the same hills with the little woods on top. In Chablis, I believe I truly understood.
And then, moreover, it finally happened in Chablis.
In Chablis, we caught the Unicorns.
We went out for our evening, without great expectations, I must say. At least I did. But not because I didn't know I would have a great time! More because we were coming out of a problem with the camper that we fortunately resolved at the last minute, so I went out with a light and happy spirit, especially light, without expectations, indeed.
On the advice of our usual 'know-it-all consultant' from Burgundy, we visited a few wine shops in search of a couple of specific bottles. Generally, I don't name producers, but this time I believe I will make an exception: Francois Raveneau and Vincent Dauvissat.
Every time we enter a place and ask, we're looked at like we're crazy and told, 'no, it's impossible to find these two wines, perhaps at the restaurant.'
Well, what can you do, there were many names on this trip that we couldn't find, for one reason or another, and we always made our peace with it. It was the same this time.
So we sit down for an aperitif, they hand us an amazing wine list and we notice a particular note at the beginning of the menu that said: “All bottles are available for order in any quantity and can also be purchased to take away, except for those marked in blue. In that case, only one can be ordered per table among all the bottles marked in blue and it cannot be taken away.”
What kind of nonsense is this, we think. Well, it doesn't matter.
We browse the menu and notice two producers in blue: Francois Raveneau and Vincent Dauvissat!!!
Here are our rare unicorns! There, right in front of us!
But we could only take one, since both were blue. We choose Dauvissat, Premier Cru La Foret: I won't even mention the journey. A wine of incredible complexity, in the Côte-d'Or style, but with incredible minerality, verticality, and length, typical characteristics of Chablis! The perfect combination. I don't even remember what we ate, maybe cheese, but it doesn't matter, everything would have disappeared in front of that wine.
Once the bottle was finished, we pretend nothing happened, Italian style, we try to order the other one from Raveneau. Oh no folks, impossible, they are two blue, you can only have one. A rare commodity to be distributed sparingly.
After all, Unicorns don’t give themselves easily.
But we are still extremely happy. We go to dinner, at a restaurant we had booked a long time ago, one of the few that had accepted reservations. They present us with the wine list, as big as a medieval Bible. We open it, scroll through. Raveneau, Grand Cru Blanchot. We order it.
Unicorns exist.
The escape to Côte des Bar, in Aube, was more out of whim than anything else. Our hearts were already full of wonder. Yet it was beautiful to touch the beginning of another mythical territory, the beginning of a completely different mindset, the Champagne mindset, made of professionalism and expertise, more than madness. Imaginative rather than magical.
An incredible day that brought me back down to earth, on grounds that perhaps my mind was more capable of controlling, I don't know.
That also served to understand that Unicorns exist.
