We’ve been in Paris for a few days and have visited some lovely restaurants, where all the staff have been delightful. It seems rather poor behaviour, when a restaurant has put together their carefully thought out menu, to ask for chips instead of the potato. Suggesting McDonalds sounds quite mild to me, when met with such rudeness. If people want chips they should probably go to a fast food joint in the first place.
The French do have a reputation for being a little surly on occasion, but if you speak to them in French and show respect, everything will be hunky dory. Or so I’ve found anyway.
We’ve been Paris a few times and I’ve never been treated poorly by anyone anywhere, restaurants we’ve been to have been polite and easy to deal with considering we don’t speak French. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t get great service here if you couldn’t speak English.
Think sometimes people go expecting poor service and inevitably get it.
I’m not going to try to give you an itinerary, but here are some places I remember visiting and enjoying:
Alain Bergère champagne is great and you can stay at the chateau. Alain is a lovely chap.
Monial champagne is a small place off the beaten track, but friendly and good quality.
As for towns, we’ve really enjoyed visiting Beaune, Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Chablis and Cognac - you can easily spend a day in each, depending on how deep your pockets are and how much tasting you can manage. Just have a wander and go for any place that offers degustations and looks interesting. If your French is un peu de merde, you’re much more likely to find English spoken by producers in towns.
Yes, Epernay is set up for tourists, but the OP is a tourist, as would most of us be. A tour of Moët & Chandon (and Remy Martin in Cognac) is not a bad way to spend an hour or so, as long as you don’t think all champagne houses are like that!
Thanks. I am making an effort to recover my high school French. I have already learned, "S’il vous plait. pourriez-vous parlez un peu plus lentement. (accents omitted).
As a relatively seasoned traveller to France, I would definitely recommend taking the TGV where possible - it is fast, efficient and reasonably priced. Charles De Gaulle Airport has a dedicated TGV station with direct services to Bordeaux. I’d recommend booking first class, as it is usually not much more expensive but significantly more comfortable. Also, if given the option, request a seat on the upper deck of the TGV for a much better view.
I’d also recommend considering Strasbourg and the Alsace region as part of your itinerary - I used Strasbourg as a base last summer for exploring the Alsace region - it was a very enjoyable week. I took in parts of the Route des Vins Alsace, which passed through a number of beautiful villages - Molsheim was especially beautiful. The Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg is also worth visiting, and is close to Colmar and other wine villages.
My final bit of advice would be to keep a relatively flexible itinerary, as you often stumble upon places where you end up wanting to spend a little more time - Molsheim is the perfect example of this - it was originally going to be a short stop off while taking the train through the Vosges mountains, however I ended up spending several hours there enjoying a long lunch in the town square.
No matter what your plans turn out to be I’m sure you’ll have an excellent time - France is a varied and beautiful country.
Let me thank everyone for their suggestions. Bordeaux is my favorite wine; My friend loves Burgundies. And we both want to end with champagne, so we are pretty much fixed on our regions. I have taken the advice given here. We will do the entire trip by rail.
Our one big extravagance, and it is big, is the decision to have personal guides in all three regions. If anyone knows of a good guide, please post or message me. I figure that should reduce the issues in trying to do the trip in September.
To offset that in part we will stay mostly/entirely? in AirBnBs. And I may have to put off the Naim Classics for a year.
Just seen your last post @jegreenwood
If you don’t get a guide for each area, you may like to check out the dorling kindersley travel guides - imho excellent
train travel - check out a rail pass - for europeans incl uk its an Interail, if from US then its Eurail- likely much cheaper than buying a ticket for each journey - various options x days travel in a month etc. you will have to book a reso for tgv trains, but likely not for other intercity routes and certainly not local trains; trains requiring reso should be booked early since some services have a limited number of “pass” seats available. paris to barcelona likely would be a good example of limited seats; one option is to break your journey within the day, eg use two trains to get “pass” seats bon voyage
@Antz
I am planning a Burgundy trip in May and my mate who is organising most of it, as he works in the trade, has asked if I can try and organise something at Domaine Chanson as I mentioned you had suggested it may be possible. If that’s still the case and you are able to help or provide a contact that would be amazing. I’ll ask @Richard.Dane (please) to share my email with you, in case you are still in a position to help. Thanks, either way!
I’m typing this at CDG Airport waiting for my flight home.
Last February I started a thread about my September wine-tasting trip. The results - wonderful. We had private guides in each of Bordeaux, Bourgogne, and Champagne. In addition to several well-know wineries in Champagne (Pommery and Moët) where we joined group tours, it was just the two of us, our guides (different in each region), and a representative of the winery, often the owner.
Harvest time turned out to be the best time, as we watched the harvesters early in the trip and observed the early stages of fermentation and aging in many of the wineries. On the last day we watched the champagne degorgement process and tasted a 1981 vintage champagne. We tasted a lot of other wines as well - and bought a quite a few, mostly wines unavailable in the U.S.
The only hiccup was the cold I had on our Paris break, which kept me in bed for most of our stay there (but not for dinner).
We were very happy with all of our guides. It’s not inexpensive, but it’s a great way to gain insight and to meet and speak with the people who actually make (or supervise the making of) the wine with whose they are friendly.
I will now go on a weeklong cleanse - not so much for the wines as for all the irresistible sauces on the.French food.
The other day a friend of mine mentioned he had 2,500 bottles of wine and champagne in storage, predominantly French. None of this will be cheap stuff.
I was taken aback. As a result of our last trip to France we stocked up but have a mere fraction of that number, yet I’m still unsure whether we’ll ever finish them.
Unless investing in the stuff or running a restaurant is there an ideal number to have? I suppose it depends on your consumption rate.
That’s not really true. Top Burgundies and Bordeaux are unacceptably expensive, but there are countless other areas where you will find excellent quality wines for less than 10 euros.
We found some very nice wines in all the regions we visited at 20-30 Euros. Many are Premier Cru; at least one is Grand Cru.
But once you add the shipping (to the USA at least), the savings are lost. That didn’t keep us from going on a buying binge - this was a once in a lifetime trip.
