Wine Tasting in France

  Beaune, Burgundy, France
Sunday, January 18, 2009

The staff member in charge of student services (Kerry) owns a house in the Burgundy region of France, and he has made a tradition of taking the Global groups there for a wine tasting trip. Thus, this weekend was spent drinking A LOT of wine (shucks;)

Kerrys house

Soooooo, Friday at noon we headed to France (PS France is a 5 minute drive from Versoix). We stopped at our first winery on the way to his house. This winery had enormous barrels of wine with a tap on it. To taste the wine, you just pour it from the huge barrel. The standard way of buying wine from this place is bringing your 5 liter jug (like what people in the US put gasoline in) and filling it at the barrels. Awesome!

Vineyards

Pouring some wine

Friday night we hung out at Kerry's house. He made us a great dinner, and we proceeded to play drinking games with wine. Somehow we managed to drink like 17 liters of wine ... yikes! This also allowed for a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday to my mom.
Saturday we got up at the crack of 10:00 and headed out for more drinking around noon. When we left the house (up in the mountains) it was sunny and beautiful. By the time we got into town, it was cloudy and freezing! People in France take the longest lunch breaks in the history of the world, so our wine tasting was pushed off until around 2:00 (thank God). We walked around the city of Beaune for a while and used any and every store we could get into to warm up.
Our first tasting was at a more modern facility than the night before. We tried a plethora of red wines and some liquors that you add to champagne. They totally twisted my arm into buying some wine, champagne, and liquor.

Tasting

Puchase number one

Then we went to a small, family owned winery. We tasted some wines, and then they took us into their cellar where they store the wine. It was really awesome. The cellar was sooooo humid that there was mold growing alllllllll over the wine. Not sure why I didn't get any wine from there ;)

Mold

Moldy bottles

Our last stop of the day was a wine super store. They were about to close, but they had the best prices of wine. This is where Kerry had gotten the wine we drank the previous night. It was a really good wine and it only cost 1.90 per bottle ... so I bought a case.
Then, we headed back to the house and repeated the previous night's activities (with a much less impressive amount of alcohol consumption).
Today we packed up, headed to a grocery store (food is like 5 times cheaper in France than in Switzerland), and made the trek home. After spending 48 straight hours together, we were definitely ready for a break from each other!