Les Dentelles de Montmirail, Rhône and the vineyards below

The vineyards of Beaujolais

Walking in the Rhone

A tasting in the Rhone

Northern Rhone & Beaujolais Crus Vineyard Walk

4 - 10 September 2011

There is something iconic about a walking tour through the whole of the Beaujolais Cru; Brouilly, Côte de Brouilly, Régnié, Morgon, Chiroubles, Fleurie, Moulin-à-Vent, Chénas, Juliénas and St Amour, and tasting each of these delighful wines in turn! But this superb wine tour also takes in the great wines of the Northern Rhone, tasting Condrieu, Cote Rotie and Hermitage. This walking holiday combines two very beautiful, but very different wine regions.

This wine tour is not being repeated in 2012, if you would like to walk the vineyards of the Northern Rhone and Beaujolais, please book this year!

The vineyard walk starts in the most northerly Cru, St Amour and from here we walk to Juliénas, where we taste achitypical wines. We continue through the vineyards and woods of Chénas, stopping for a picnic. We’ll see the famous windmill of Moulin-à-Vent then finish the day with a great tasting of Fleurie and Moulin-à-Vent. The Fleurie here is delightful, and a little weightier than some as it comes from warm vineyards at the bottom of the hill.

Next day, from the woods at the top of the vineyards, we work our way down through the high slopes of Chiroubles. We will have a quick tasting here of these light and highly aromatic wines then continue down to Morgon. We enjoy tasting spicy, meaty and rich Morgon, the second largest of the Crus with decomposing slate soils. In the afternoon we continue on to Régnié. We complete the Beaujolais crus by our walk over the top of Mont Brouilly and tasting Brouilly and Côte de Brouilly. We enjoy lunch here too.

It is surprising quite how different the villages are one from another, the ethereal Chiroubles from the mighty Morgon below, the delightful Fleurie from the inky challenging Moulin a Vent, and Brouilly, the epitome of easy drinking from the serious mineral, ‘terroir-driven’ Cote de Brouilly. What makes this extraordinary is that these are all expressions of a single grape variety, the Gamay, that is not generally considered to be ‘a great’. Great it may not be, but interesting and multifaceted it certainly is.

We then transfer from the vineyards of the Beaujolais, which are just north of Lyons, to the great vineyards of the Northern Rhône which are just south of the city. Tain l’Hermitage is our base for the next three nights, for the Rhone wine tour part of this walking holiday. Tain is situated on the banks of the Rhône River and lies below the mighty hill of Hermitage. We walk (and at times scrabble!) up the Hermitage hill to see the view at the top. There is a way round or you can opt out, as we have a Hermitage tasting after this back in the village. In the afternoon we walk through the low undulating hills of Crozes-Hermitage.

We continue our Rhone wine tasting and walking tour with St Joseph and Cornas wines too during our stay. We have a full day to explore the Côte-Rôtie and Condrieu appellation vineyards with a lovely walk through the woods and valleys that separate them. There will be visits to leading growers in both Condrieu and Ampuis.

Some believe that the Syrah (a.k.a. Shriraz) finds its greatest expression in Côte-Rôtie rather than Heritage, or for that matter Barossa, Adelaide Hills or Stellenbosch. In Côte-Rôtie where Syrah is often co-fermented with Viognier, it is on the cool margins of its climatic range. Here it takes on an elegant, intensity without the overpowering character it can have in warmer sites. The highly aromatic Viognier, the milder Rousanne and the Marsanne, with its interesting ‘mouthfeel’ are the three highly rated white varieties and these may be the great surprise for you in our tastings.

This is a superb vineyard walk with interest, varied tastings, and moderately challenging walking through some of France’s most beautiful and atmospheric vineyards. (Unbelivably there is a firm that claims in its website headers to be the Rhone wine tours specialist but actually has no tours featured there!)