< Home

YFA’s Travels – Europe 2010 (Part 4/?) by YFA

December 28, 2010
Today marks the first “big day” of our European trip, as we focus on what our primary goal of this trip is – to wine and dine! We have reservations at Paul Jaboulet Aîné in the morning, and a reservation at Pic at night, which I’ll go into great detail later – but first the wine.

Paul Jaboulet Aîné is one of the bigger brands of the Rhone Valley but unfortunately their vineyard is closed (for renovations or for holidays, don’t remember) but their wine cellar is open for free tasting – most of the wineries and tasting rooms actually offer free tasting around France, just to entice you to buy their wine. Paul Jaboulet Aîné’s wine cellar is called Vineum (vin is wine in French, in case that wasn’t obvious) and is located in Chateauneuf-sur-Isere near their winery at the famous Tain l’Hermitage region. The cellar is in a large cave like structure with giant wooden doors paired with automatic sliding glass doors, as seen in the photos.

Paul Jaboulet Aîné's Vineum

Each of us got to try two reds and two whites (out of the 8 available on the dispenser for tasting), and all my friends pulled out their wine tasting notebooks and starting taking wine testing notes… me, I just drink… what a noob… haha. Their most famous red wine is “La petite chapelle” which was pretty good. Also tried some of their whites as well, which I’m not a big fan of in general. We couldn’t get a (paid) tour of the cellar because we only have a group of 4, and they need reservations of groups of 5 minimum.

Wine and spitter

The Vineum is located approximately 1 hour south of Lyon, and the girl driver drove this stretch as she notified me ahead of time I’ll have to do the drive tonight back home after dinner since she’ll be in heels :P. Despite not having to drive, I didn’t really want to get tipsy at 10:30am in the morning, so I ended up spitting out most of the wine into their spit bucket after tasting it.

After Paul Jaboulet Aîné, we wanted to taste more local wines, and pretty much “randomly drove around” following signs to local wineries. We ended up at a local winery by the name of Domaine des 7 Chamins. The gate was opened but all the doors were closed, but we drove in anyway. An old lady came out to see what we were doing (4 Chinese people! Good thing we were nicely dressed and not bum-looking), and with our broken French we explained we wanted to do wine tasting, upon which she fetched another lady to open up the tasting room for us. A this point, the experience is so local, everything is conducted in French with no expectation anyone can understand English.

Domaine des 7 Chamins
Domaine des 7 Chamins's Vineyard. Hey I'm looking at the camera!

After this ad-hoc wine tasting (and more spitting), we proceeded to the local town of Tain l’Hermitage, where all the major Rhône Valley wineries are located. The backdrop of the town are hills of vineyards with signs like “Paul Jaboulet Aîné” on them. We stopped by the HQ store of Valhrona, which is apparently a world famous chocolate manufacturer (claims the girl that spent 10 weeks studying at le Cordon Bleu baking in Paris). According to wikipedia, “Valrhona focuses mainly on high-grade luxury chocolate marketed for professional as well as for private consumption. Though considered one of the foremost chocolate makers in the world, Valrhona is in roughly the same price range as Godiva and Neuhaus.” so I guess my friend knows her stuff :). Like the Theo chocolate factory in Fremont, Seattle which I’m sure t.ha is familiar with, there’s free samples around the store. Maybe I’m biased, but I did find Theo chocolate to be slightly better than Valhrona – maybe just my personal preference.

Inside Valhrona
Tain L'Hermitage. Photo seems a little darker than I thought, need some more PP!
Little church with the bridge as a backdrop
On the bridge at Tain L'Hermitage

After Valhrona, we walked around the small town of Tain l’Hermitage, posed for a lot of photo ops around town, and then went to another local restaurant for lunch across the street from Valhrona. It was a very local restaurant that looks like a house converted to a dining hall, and as we walked in, everyone in the ground floor dining hall stopped eating and stared at us 😐 – I guess a recurring theme of this trip is that the places we go to A) do not have a lot of Asians, let alone Chinese; and B) don’t have a lot of young people, so we definitely stand out. For whatever reason, the server led us to the dining room upstairs, where we had the entire room by ourselves, which is fine by us. The food was not bad – surprisingly good actually for a small town local restaurant, (just don’t get beef…) and it was another typical slow French meal where a 3 course lunch lasted us from noon to 3pm. Maybe it was the wine, (we ordered a cheap bottle of table wine) but we definitely loosened up and had a lot of fun in what we called “the upper room” by ourselves.


Dessert for lunch - forgot the name already - something float - but it was good!

After lunch we walked to another big Rhône Valley winery’s tasting room – Chapoutier. The wine tasting guide we had spoke proper English (with a small French accent, makes the experience all the more authentic) and we were able to try and experiment with a number of wines (again, for free), including Hermitage, Crozes Hermitage, Cote Rotie, etc. We even had the luxury of doing a cross-year tasting, where we tasted their Hermitage (I think) across a few different years, from 1990 (I think, this is where taking notes would have helped) to 2007 (selected years, not every year). There was definitely a noticeable difference in the bouquet and the taste of the wine – I definitely come to appreciate what it means for wines that are “not yet ready” for drinking. And while we’re at it, we tried some whites as well, and here I think I’ve found my favourite white (so far) – a 2006 Chapoutier Chante Alouette – (yes, specifically the 2006, we did cross-year tasting as well) – the bouquet was SO GOOD I just kept smelling the glass again and again.

Tain L'Hermitage - the town itself. Note the funny looking trees that you fon'dt find in N.A. Also Chapoutier is to the left.

After tasting a lot of wine (I was definitely tipsy at this point despite spitting a lot of the wine out), we left Tain l’Hermitage and left for our final destination of the day – Valence. Valence is the capital of the department (province) capital of Drôme, and is formerly known as the “Duchy of Valentinois” (for you Dominion players). We were pondering why Valence is so famous, so the cooking girl emailed one of her professors (who grew up in Valence) and asked – apparently Napoleon stopped over here for a night on his way back from exile or something, and that is a huge deal -.-!.

Valence at night
Frozen Fountain at Valence. Goes to show how cold it is.
Downtown Valence
Church in Valence. The church was closing and the lights were pretty much out, friend's Nikon shot this at... ISO 22500 or something ridix. So grainy!

After some regular sightseeing (every European town has a palace and a church, we concluded) we headed to Maison Pic for our dinner reservation where the girls went in to change while I napped in the car. This is the night where we reserved a Michelin 3 star restaurant (Michelin stars only go up to 3) and is the fine dining highlight of the trip! We decked out for this dinner – as we should since we ordered the multi-course sampler meal, which along with tips and champagne (which we started off with, so classy) and NO WINE, came out to EUR €231.25 per person. The other guy friend in the group ordered the classic multi-course sampler which contains traditional favourites (and more exotic ingredients in general) and his bill came to EUR €356.25!

Fancy dinnerware. How do you use a plate shaped like a UFO? Apparently you don't - they take it away from you before you get your food, decor only!
Would you like some champagne to start? Yes please!

A little history on Maison Pic – the grandfather of the current chef opened the restaurant, received 3 Michelin stars but ended up losing it, and the restaurant was picked up by his son, who regained the 3 Michelin stars but ended up losing them some years later, and now the 3rd generation chef, Anne-Sophie Pic, regained the 3 Michelin stars again in 2007. She is apparently the female cook to garner this award for the first time in 50 years!

The display of Michelin books at the entrance to Maison Pic
Madame Pic herself!

I’ll let the photos of this super expensive meal (hopefully the most expensive meal I’ll have in my life) speak for themselves. My overall thoughts were the dishes were very unique and “challenges your palette” as my foodie friend put it. It definitely worked on very unique and distinct combination of tastes in each course (though we found it was a bit “heavy-handed” in that regard) and… a lot of resemblance to Chinese food taste -.-!. In fact, when Anne-Sophie Pic came out from the kitchen to make rounds and chat with all her guests in this exquisite restaurant, my friend actually asked her if her cuisine has any Chinese influence 😛 (the answer was no). As she was going around the tables, I made the joke (to my friends only) that maybe we can ask her if we can get a photo of us… with her taking the photo, haha :P.

Dinner - courses from both menus
Pre-pre-dessert, the cheese cart
The dessert they light on fire in front of you

The dinner, being French, was insanely long, and clocked out to 5 hours, with lots of waiting in between courses. Dreading the 1h drive back to Lyon, I was prepared to leave past midnight, and when they took away our main course, and started to serve dessert, I was thinking “finally” only to find out there is pre-dessert and a cheese cart before the final dessert -.-!. Being true to our Chinese roots, we paid the entire meal – which came to over €1000 Euros – in cash :P. Someone in our group made the observation that this has been a day where our meals total value were exponentially increasing – we started off with €10 McDonald’s breakfast, and then €100ish for lunch (total bill amount), and ended our day with a €1000ish bill :P.

Decked out and checking out from Pic

The drive back to Lyon was tough (you know me and food coma, which is why I typically drive in the mornings and pass the keys on to the other driver in the afternoon), but no stalling, and safe parking :P. We got back pretty late (at least 2am) and we’ve an early start tomorrow as we leave Lyon to continue in our wine and dine adventure!

1 comment